Saturday, April 16, 2005
Back to the billable
True to my word of last night, I was back to the billable projects today. More SEO, this time on pages that for the most part hadn't made it into the top thirty for their keywords yet. Again, I found them not badly optimized, just not optimized enough to crack the top spots.
It's interesting, though, studying the pages that are on top. There's a profound shift going on the the search engine algorithms from what I remember when I first started, and I believe it's a shift that makes for better, more visitor-friendly pages.
Almost invariably, as I tweaked areas of the pages that I found slightly out of balance from an SEO standpoint, I found that changing them also made them better from a copywriting standpoint, too.
I know the algorithms don't recognize good writing, but they're getting pretty good at identifying the underlying structures that makes for good writing.
It's nice to see. I've always been a proponent of giving the search engines the kind of pages they're looking for—relevant content with an absence of what I call "stupid SEO tricks." It's gratifying to see that the more sophisticated the algorithms become in separating the spam from the genuine content, the more they encourage SEOs to give visitors better content.
Oh, sure, I still found some spammy pages in the top five positions, but it seems a lot better than I remember during the days when I first started out (back when I had to walk five miles every day, uphill both ways, through driving blizzards to optimize a webpage).
But I'm encouraged by what I see (even though I do have to work harder for good rankings than I used to).
Jeff
True to my word of last night, I was back to the billable projects today. More SEO, this time on pages that for the most part hadn't made it into the top thirty for their keywords yet. Again, I found them not badly optimized, just not optimized enough to crack the top spots.
It's interesting, though, studying the pages that are on top. There's a profound shift going on the the search engine algorithms from what I remember when I first started, and I believe it's a shift that makes for better, more visitor-friendly pages.
Almost invariably, as I tweaked areas of the pages that I found slightly out of balance from an SEO standpoint, I found that changing them also made them better from a copywriting standpoint, too.
I know the algorithms don't recognize good writing, but they're getting pretty good at identifying the underlying structures that makes for good writing.
It's nice to see. I've always been a proponent of giving the search engines the kind of pages they're looking for—relevant content with an absence of what I call "stupid SEO tricks." It's gratifying to see that the more sophisticated the algorithms become in separating the spam from the genuine content, the more they encourage SEOs to give visitors better content.
Oh, sure, I still found some spammy pages in the top five positions, but it seems a lot better than I remember during the days when I first started out (back when I had to walk five miles every day, uphill both ways, through driving blizzards to optimize a webpage).
But I'm encouraged by what I see (even though I do have to work harder for good rankings than I used to).
Jeff
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