What Do Search Engines Want?

Something entirely different than what many site owners want or are wiling to put the knowledge acquisition and effort in to offer.

What is that I hear you say?

• A Web site that is well designed overall, thought out and grown over time.
• Unique quality content not to be found elsewhere that provides value to your site visitors.
• Accurate and unique title tags for each and every page.
• Accurate and unique description tags for each and every page.
• Content that caters to site visitors first and search engine crawlers by default. Default being well written focused content is naturally “SEO’d”.
• Links to other relevant content on and off your site when there is an opportunity to provide additional details/research for your site visitors.
• One-way inbound links to your site from “out there” because your stuff is so good and one-of-a-kind it is worth linking to.

You consider the above and your rankings will improve. There are no tricks, submission engines, software or work-a-rounds to negate the above.

Nor will long lists of keywords to be “added somewhere” provide great rankings. Only those keywords used one or two at a time in informative and relevant articles unique to your Web site will do.

I’ve lost count of the number of clients over the years who threw good money after bad to some “guru” or “solution” that only served to cater to what they didn’t want to embrace and then provide negligible results.

1. Quality Optimized Content
2. New Fresh Content
3. One-Way Inbound Links from Trusted Sites

SEO is what it is… Pretty black and white if you ask me! There are no silver bullets, magic pills, scripts or programs that negate these issues.

What do search engines want? They want to provide results that are the most accurate and relevant for the search queries presented to them. You can read exactly what Google and Yahoo! expect from your site:

Google Webmaster Guidelines

Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines

Yes, I know, sometimes they are better at this than other times, but hey, did you forget this whole gig is still a work in progress?

An example is Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine — quite impressive based on my initial tests. Visit Bing’s Webmater Center to find out what Bing wants.

Search engines want the good stuff — so give it to them!

At your service,
Judith

Tags: search engine optimization, search engine rankings, seo