Is g00gle human ? - responding to Terry and Tony's comment on my last post on g00gle

Yesterday in my post I mentioned how I was afraid of the power of g00gle. Tony and Terry have posted an interesting comment.
"Google has indexed my blog posts has been about 3 hours and I thought that was already impressive. It is a pity that some sites aren't found so easily, but does that not come down to better site SEO being needed for those sites? I know Google is raking in some enemies, but I like them, and hope they continue to be good to me."
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I think the point I was making was not really a criticism of g00gle, I just wanted to point out that if g00gle can find out within three minutes that I as one of 100 million sites, has been updated, this is more than impressive, it is frightening simply in terms of the sophisticated technology it has at its disposal. Yes, of course it is super efficient and I agree with you that better site SEO provides better g00gle results. Quality content, frequent updating and good seo work are the basic pillars today of getting found on an search engine. I also believe that is just and fair. I just wonder in another 10 years what will be the technological power of G00GlE?
However, when you consider that g00gle's evaluation of websites has to be automated on account of the sheer quantity of sites, will automated assessment of the relevancy, quality and usefulness of information ever compare to human judgement? Or is this automated assessment already accepted as human judgement?

My perception of the strongest search engine - how I see it

The more I think about the evolution of g00gle in the ten something years of its existence, the more sceptical I get. I actually greet the news that Microsoft and Yahoo are going to team up in search engine technology development and try and take on g00gle. Firstly a monopoly position which g00gle is gradually getting in the market is unhealthy for all of us. The g00gle monster has spread from being a search engine to groups to email to blogs, slowly buying up anything which will refine its position on the market.
What frightened me a couple of days ago and what I discovered by pure coincidence - I wrote a post for one of my blogs and it was indexed by g00gle within four minutes. Think about that - it may be partly coincidental but I am not the most important blog in the world where g00gle is waiting for every precious update that comes from my Greel keyboard and there are over 100 million sites which need indexing - but four minutes - not bad.
This shows me that their currently technological state is so far ahead of anything I have ever seen before on the net. Or how would you explain it?

Keywords and g00gle - who knows?

Currently there seems to be a lot of debate amond webmasters about the significance of keyword density, i.e. the ratio of a keyword to the number of times it appear in the text of a page. Of course, those selling software tracking keyword density etc remain obviously convinced that keyword density still matters while others are saying that g00gle could no longer care less about keyword density. Who does one believe?
Good question, I believe. Personally I think that while still being careful with the whole issue, g00gle has adopted more sophisticated means of trying to trick it and that keyword density has today little or nothing to do with your g00gle ranking. Why do I think so? Simply from my own experience with my own websites. I have a blog which ranks number two in g00gle for the keywords I wanted, yet I did not give a hoot about keyword density on any single page of the website. At least this shows me that it is not a life or death issue for search engines and that other factors must play a more important role. Which? This I cannot even hazard a guess at. One thing I am convinced of, though, is the fact that high quality content and constant updating does catch the eye of search engines. How? No idea!

A word of warning on keywords

Now that we have learned that keywords - the words you choose for search engines to find your site - are fundamental to getting web traffic, I have to issue a word of caution.
Some bright sparks might come up with the clever idea of putting every conceivable keyword which is relevant to the topic on that particular web page. THIS IS AN EXTREMELY BAD IDEA and google and all search engines will punish you. This practice is know as keyword stuffing and when a google bot discovers this on your pages it will get rather angry.
Just like years ago when people used to put keywords in white print on a white page. Those days of fooling the search engines are long past. Below you will see an example of what is known as keyword stuffing.
Take a careful look at this long list and you will see what I mean. Doing this is a total disaster. For a start the search engine also checks the text ont he page to see if these terms appear and if they don't, boy are you in trouble.

Lesson number six Never stuff your pages with keywords

Looking for relevant quality link exchanges to other blogs

By the way, if anyone has a blog related in any way to this one and is interested in exchanging links, please leave your details in the comments box below and I will be right back to you.

Keywords - the mistakes for optimizing your site

Let us come back again for one post on the issue of keywords and how fundamentally important they are for getting visibility for your site. If you have forgotten, take a look back at the first posting here on keywords. So it is largely through the search engine indexing your keywords that you appear on thesearch engine and the skill with which you use these keywords also tells in deciding your ranking on the search engine. COming back again to Charlie's major mission to sell plastic cups on-line. We agreed that plastic cups is a great keyword for Charlie. But remember we also discovered on a particular search engine that there were just over 24 300 000 sites mentioning "plastic cups". So we need to be a little more creative with our keywords. Why reinvent the wheel - let's see which site is first on a search engine among the 24 million, then take a look at the page source and actually this is what you will find:
plastic drink cups, plastic tumblers, plastic wine glasses, plastic beer mugs
So this guy has several keywords related to plastic cups. And, Charlie, know what? we should do the same. Some examples: reusable plastic cups, plastic cups for hot drinks, real looking plastic cups, - OK not bad but you have to think of what the surfer could be looking for when looking for plastic cups. If you can't come up with so many ideas (And admittedly plastic cups is not the most inspiring) there are lots of free software around on the web which will give you synonyms for the keyword you are trying to optimize. Take a look here for keyword software and this site contains great free keyword tools to help you as well.

Lesson number five Get aware of the many free tools out there to help you optimize for keywords.

So if not link farms how do I get inbound links?

Come on, Charlie, we need a little imagination here. There are forums and directories all over the place which are related to your topic. And something I forgot to mention and is really important, the inbound link is valuable if it comes from a site dealing, in your case, with plastic cups. And if it is a really important site in the eyes of the search engine, then it is even more valuable.

So now we have to do a bit of research on the net, we start looking for forums on the beverage industry for example, then we sign up and start posting USEFUL not spam comments to these and we can add our url - Bingo you will have your first inbound link. So as you can see, this is going to take a bit of work. But Rome was not built in a day and finding two or three relevant forums to post a link per week is much more worthwhile than 30 irrelevant links which the search engines will just discount. That would be a complete waste of your time, Charlie. The image at the top shows hot popular forums have become over time on the net and people depend upon them heavily to exchaneg information, contacts, etc. You would be a fool not to use them.

Off-site optimization to get traffic to your website

So yesterday we set our goals to a plan - off-site optimization and on-site optimization and we are going to start with off-site optimization today. This neat little pic shows something I mentioned in the earlier post, Charlie - getting links into your site - you are the red one in the center, Charlie, from other websites. AH, you say, even I have heard about that so I will save myself the trouble and go to a link farm and pay my $19.99 for 135 links to my site.
Charlie that is a great idea if you want your website to disappear from the search engines - such tricks might have worked five years ago but not today. Google and other search engines are clever, very clever old beasts. They can trace if you have links from link-farms and if you do the search engines get very angry because they feel you are cheating. And yes, you are cheating. Secondly if you have no inbound links today and 135 tomorrow, the beasts will raise an eyebrow and think - that's strange, so many inbound links so quickly.

What the search engines really want to see is organic growth of inbound links. By that I mean 1 this week, two next week, 5 next month, 25 by the end of the year. This is assumes is a natural progression and rewards it accordingly.

Lesson number four Never ever buy inbound links to your site, you will regret it.

Our SEO plan has two columns to it

There are two fundamental things you have to understand about SEO and always bear this in mind. There is:

on-site optimization, and

off-site optimization.


All this means is that you can do things to your website to make it more search engine friendly (on-site) and you can do things on the web (off-site) to make your site more attractive. Yes, Charlie I understand your confusion, how can you do things on the web to make your site more visible.
Too complicated to go into now in detail, Charlie but let me give you a simple example. If other sites put a link to your site, that is good for you. If it comes from a site that is also selling or talking about plastic cups that is even better for you. Search engines see it this way, each site that links into your site - called an inbound link - the search engine sees as a vote for your site. The more votes you gather the more popular your site.
So Charlie enough for today, tomorrow we are going to make a list of all the things you can do on the web to help your site and when we have done that we will make a list of all the things you can do on your website to get serach engines to like it.
Oh, by the way, Charlie, that planned vacation is not on the SEO plan, you have work to do - a lot of work, Charlie.

Planning to optimize your site

So, we need a plan, Charlie. Ideas? OK, let's look at it this way. Search engines do not find your site, strictly speaking, they are actually more interested in something called 'keywords". For this site selling plastic cups, obviously a lot of our keywords would work on that variation. You see search engines have things called bots, these are just pieces of software that visit all the sites on the Internet and index data from this site. And there are many many things you can do on your site that will give search engines a very clear idea of what your site is all about. And don't forget, Charlie, search engines cannot read pictures or images, they can only read text. After all when you go to a search engine to look for a flight to New York from Buffalo you will probably type in "cheap flights Buffalo New York". You never type in a website, do you? These words you type in are keywords. So if you had them well placed on your site, there is a much better chance of the search engine showing your site to the surfer, get it? Anyway, Charlie, we are jumping the gun, a bit here. We want a plan and keywords will be a fundamentally important part of that plan.

Getting traffic to your site - let's start at the beginning

Yipe, Charlie, sorry but I understand you feel a little confused. That great website, that even better business idea with the plastic cups and now no visitors to that super website which sells them. Let's take this step by step, Charlie and see if we can work something out. You made the simple mistake of think when you have a website half the world will visit that. Well, charlie, if it is any consolation, you are not alone . About 500 000 other website owners did exactly the same. In brief we need a plan. And this plan, Charlie is going to look at how we can realistically and without spending your last dime, get some initial traffic to view those great plastic cups, OK?

Lesson number three Make a plan on how you are going to make your site visibel on the Internet

Getting traffic - it ain't easy

The point I am trying to make is that creating and publishing a website is only the start of a lot of long hard work if you want to succeed in selling plastic cups on the Internet. The sad fact for Charlie - and I just tried it on google - there are a total of 23 300 000 sites indexed for "plastic cups". Charlie has a problem would you nto agree? And hence again the title of my blog "SEO matters". Without doing the right things - and keep doing them constantly - you are never, never going to get visibility on the net because the largest percentage of Charlie's traffic will come from the search engines - where else?

Yikes, Charlie has got himself into something more than he bargained for, he just realises. So what can he do about it. Inspiration strikes. I'll look up SEO services on a search engine and see if they can help me. Wow, Chairlie you are a genius and just look what you came up with. "Guaranteed - your site on the first page of google in 48 hours" Just pay the $97 and that takes care of the problem. Charlie, think, hold on a minute, even you can figure out that if it only takes $97 dollars we would all be on the first page of google. Hmmm, good point.
Actually Charlie, can I give you a piece of advice. I have worked in SEO for 7 years and if you were to offer me $97 000 dollars I could never guarantee that your site would be on the first page of google in 48 hours, days, weeks or even months!

Lesson number 2 Do not throw your money out of the window at SEO quacks offering ridiculous google rankings for next to nothing.

Where do sites get their traffic from? Heaven?

Nope, money does not grow on trees and heaven is not goign to rain down upon your website thousands of visits eager to buy Charlie's plastic cups. Actually, going back to the site name the user would not have a clue that Charlie is into selling plastic cups big time.

So back to my original question. Where do site get their traffic from? Come on, where? Yipe you got it. Most healthy sites get their traffic from search engines. Google, for example, handles some 20 million searches per hour - and even soem of those could be for plastic cups. So Charlie, simple, off you go and let google know you exist on the website and submit your url. Great! Nope, sorry Charlie but by the time google gets around to indexing your pages, plastic cups could be a thing of the past so you will have to do better than that!

Now you have the website - but where's the traffic?

It would seem logical to me that anyone who has a website, has it for a reason - basically to be seen ont he Internet. But building and publishing a website is peanuts - the issue is who is going to find it. The honest answer is - unless you make certain efforts to get visibility - no one will find your website. Do not forget there are over 101 million(1) websites out there so what precisely makes you think they are going to find yours. Virtually impossible.


Next logical question - how do people find websites? Well if you are not amazon.com or a big name no one is going to know that charlie Bloggs has set up (what he considers to be) a fantastic site called www.charliebloggs.com and is going to corner eccommerce sales on "plastic cups". In fact dear Charlie has already made a first mistake and is totally unaware of it. The website name www.charliebloggs.com has absolutely no relevance to what he is going to sell - plastic cups. Now if charlie had been a little more clever he would have done a little research under sites where you can register a domain name and might have been lucky enough to get a domain name like www.plasticcups4u.com. That we will see later would have given him a distinct advantage.

Lesson number 1 Pick a website names that has some relevance to the topic of your site.

SEO matters - what is in a name?

Hi all, so what do I mean seo matters. First and foremost this blog is for site owners who wish to use every legitimiate means available to get their site seen among te other some 101 million websites out there on the web. SEO is an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. So why does it matter that we bother with this complicated stuff. Simply because it really does matter. Here you will learn how a search engine and not a human views your web pages, you will learn what search engines like to see and thus improves your ranking and ultimately your visibility on the web.

This blog is a spin off from another blog I am running on a similar but different topic. I have a blog on traffic exchanges and how useful or useless they are are bringing targeted traffic to your website. Over the past months I noticed I was getting off topic on traffic exchanges and focusing more on search engine optimization issues. Since it makes more sense to be focused on a blog, hence this new baby, seo matters.

So if you are interested and serious about getting more traffic, I tell you now be prepared to invest - not money, but time and patience in getting your website higher listed on Google, Yahoo etc. Be warned - this is work.