Want to Increase Your Google Rankings? Start by Ignoring Google
Published May 19, 2009 by Michelle Greer
Search Engine Optimization can seem daunting. After all, studies show that if you are not on the first page of Google for a certain keyword, most people will simply change their keyword search rather than go to the next page.
Some SEOs will tell you to pull up Google's Keyword Tool and scour through the most unused keywords and scatter them through your site. While including useful keywords is key, Google is simply a tool to connect you to the person who is looking for your website. It is key to write for the person on the other end of your message rather than writing for a search engine itself. Customer friendly copy is SEO friendly copy already.
Think I'm naive? Follow the logic...
1.) Stock descriptions aren't useful to people, so Google punishes them. Say, for example, that you are selling ski jackets. You may think that clean code is good enough for your site to get indexed, and that a stock description is okay. However, there is a big chance that another site is selling the same product and has the same stock description. So if a customer has a question about this jacket, they will go from site to site looking for their answer. This person will either not buy or will require your salespeople's time, and therefore your money, to make a decision. So not only have you used duplicate content, you're risking not closing a sale when you can as well.
Although Google does not always catch duplicate content, it's a no-no for this reason.
2.) Answer questions with your site to pick up keywords. Don't just use keywords from a tool. Think of your website as a salesperson that never sleeps. When your website answers any question a person would have about a product or service, the chance of closing the sale is higher. That person knows the who, the what, the where, the when, etc. Guess what? When you answer all of these questions with your product descriptions or website copy, you will have the keywords that someone is typing in to get to your site.
Keyword tools are great, but only lazy copywriters depend on them.
3.) People-friendly text gets linked to. Bot-friendly text does not. Off-page SEO is incredibly underrated, particularly because it has become more important in recent years. If you are pulling stock descriptions or merely plugging in keywords from a tool into a paragraph, you aren't thinking of the person on the receiving end. Blogs and other websites are always looking for useful information for their readers. They won't link to you if your website uses stock descriptions or bland copy.
Google's PageRank system doesn't acknowledge sites that aren't linked to, so just kiss your search engine results goodbye.
4.) Improve your copy now. The sooner you get rid of stock descriptions or bland copy that tells people nothing, the more useful your website is to people. Google rewards content that it can index over and over again. It means your website isn't just something fly-by-night.
So in essence, design and write for people instead of Google, and Google will connect the dots on its own. That's it's whole purpose. If it didn't do it well, people would start using something else and Google would lose ad revenue from AdWords.
A good rule of thumb is to listen to what people ask on the phone or in person about your business, and then include that information on your website. So not only will you have useful keywords on your site, you'll cut your phone time in half. You can then spend that time building your business, spending time with your friends, or doing nothing.
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