Better than 'Search Engine Optimisation'

By Ashok Argent-Katwala

It's a depressing thought. There's a site you love, you have poured heart and soul and energy into it.

More and more frequently, I find myself fighting the corner of not doing "search engine optimisation".

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My annoyance with these scammers started in about 2000, well after meta keywords were being abused. Some chump came in on a site that was perfectly respectable, doing pretty well on search engines; their critique, was that we weren't using all the meta tags to push the site to bots.

Instead we were getting real words in front of human beings, and trying to put more and ever-fresher content in front of more eyeballs.

My long-learnt lesson is that if you want to win on Google for what you care about you could do a lot worse than to:

1. Make URLs that don't suck
2. Make URLs that live forever (so much easier, given point #1)
3. Have something to say
4. Write real, readable words, as often as you can
5. Put the readable words on readable Web pages – that means standards, baby
6. Encourage linking. This is far more about what you don't do, than what you do: in short, frames and flash-tasticness are going to kill you; self-modifying pages laden with Javascript all living at one Web address make a rod for your own back. Don't break the address bar, the back button and bookmarking and you'll automatically be link-friendly.

Now, when someone suggests "sorting that out when we optimize for search engines", I want to throw the book at them, to vote them off the island. If you've been on the receiving end of that lately – I'm sorry … ish. But fight back. Have that conversation about what we want for our users; between us we can make something better than any of us can imagine alone. But for goodness sake, let's take it as given that search engines are looking for what their users want, so let's do that, really well and the middle-men will take care of themselves.

(As a quick aside, for about six months a page I was responsible for was top for 'miss becky' on Google. It was a perfectly civilised page for my boss' dog, now sadly passed away. She was an honourary member of our research group, and rightly so. What I didn't know was that 'Miss Becky' is also some sort of porn star, and thus a popular search. Why were we winning, beating a commercial site? My money is on having real words, valid pages and a reasonable update frequency (back then).)