Want Good Rankings? Then Convince Google - Part 1

Our previous posts have covered the issue about what SEO is all about. Is it trickery, all done with smoke and mirrors? Well the answer is that it should not be, and if it is, beware as Google have an army of engineers just looking for sites on the 'fiddle' and another army developing software to spot sites automatically. This should be enough to put the 'black hat' (those that practise SEO on the 'dark side') brigade off for life, but there are those who still stick to the creed, and good luck to them. But I for one am sticking to the white side of the line and am quite proud of my white hat (OK so it goes slightly grey at times).

So, having decided to stick to using only proper SEO techniques what do you have to do? For a starter, can I suggest that you look at our previous article on SEO, as this gives details of using the parts of the site in the right way. This however just tells you how to use the areas of a page, it does not give you knowledge of how to write the text in the right way, the right way of course being one that both engages the visitor and also speaks in a way that the Search Engine Spiders can understand.

When I say 'understand' I am not talking about not using javascript the wrong way or of not having all the text of a site in images (yes I have seen this done !) , but about how the words on a page are set out and used.

So How Do Search Engine Spiders Read Differently to Humans Then?

What a good question (glad I asked it) as it forms the basis of many of the 'tricks' that will be revealed over the next few days. When humans read a page, they will naturally take into account the punctuation and the layout, so when they see a line of text with a comma in it, or when a line of text is split by a line break, they will read this in the correct way, it making sense to the human brain. However, our friends the Spiders, just read the text as one long time, ignoring most if not all punctuation and line breaks.

This means you can write copy in a way that includes the keywords in the way that you want and still make it look good to human visitors (here by the way we take it that you know what keywords you are after, if not see our info on keyword research). Here is an example:-

Internet Marketing Services Hereford
SEO firms in the Midlands are much cheaper than London ones

This phrase tells the user that the page is about SEO in Hereford and that they can save money too, good for humans, but what about the spiders? They see the text as:-

Internet Marketing Services Hereford SEO firms in the Midlands are much cheaper than London ones

Which gives us the phrases:-

Internet Marketing Services Hereford
Hereford SEO firms
SEO firms in the Midlands

As you can see we get an extra phrase here 'Hereford SEO firms' being split onto to two lines as far as the human reader is concerned.

There are more ways that you can use this idea, so watch out for tomorrows tip.