Search engine results - are they for real?

That’s because the ‘search’ process is fundamentally flawed. The results which follow from a keyword search should provide you with a list of websites whose content will be the answer to your prayers. Unfortunately, all your search does is display those sites which have used the best search engine optimization (SEO) and SEO copywriting techniques.

The quality and usefulness of the content is secondary to the emphasis placed on the relevance the content has to the keywords sought. The consequence of this may mean that the best site content for a particular search may appear on Page 10 of a search engine. In effect, this makes it invisible.

Yes, the webmasters concerned should have consulted an SEO professional - or learned the SEO ropes for themselves. Or could it be that the whole set of criteria for success in the SERPS (search engine results pages) is wrong? (And this in spite of the ever-changing methodologies and algorithms employed by search engines trying to achieve the ultimate answer to delivering the best search experience.)

In the meantime, billions of searches are being made and generating results that are based on the false premise of unearthing immaculately relevant content from innocent enquiries abroad. What surface instead are the seriously massaged results of the SEO-aware.

No-one can blame SEO types (and their clients) for cashing in on their know-how to achieve high ranking web pages. It’s just that the unsuspecting public has to make do with websites that are highly placed only because the site owner uses a major keyword in their URL, or because they optimize each page in the way search engines prefer (their robots - not real people). And then of course there are all those so-called ‘organic’ inbound links from other websites that are supposed to bestow ‘authority’ on the recipient site.

No-one thinks twice about the fact that these links are achieved by pure manipulation and 'off-page' SEO copywriting techniques. By sending out optimized articles and news releases on a regular basis, a website can acquire hundreds of inbound links by sheer stealth.

The more links a site has, the higher it will rank in the SERPS. What is overlooked, however, is the way links are achieved or created. It’s not a case of the sites that have fewer links being in any way inferior to their maxed-up counterparts. Nor is their content necessarily inferior.

The recognition they achieve via the search engines distorts their real value in the overall search ‘game’. For that’s what it is – and probably always will be. Before the Internet – and even today – the most successful products and services were those which were either advertised or talked about the most.

Companies looking to succeed online, therefore, should dig deep and recognise that SEO is now an essential tool in the online marketing war. In a world where achieving high ranking is the Holy Grail, the means of getting there are less relevant than the reality.

For the end user, the message hasn’t got through that the results of ‘search’ may not be the best. In a world where there are so many websites, we should (nevertheless) be grateful that search engines work so hard to filter the efforts of SEO professionals to deliver the undeliverable dream.

Author: Buzzwords Limited