Let’s talk about the game of search engine love!
There still seems to be a perception of SEO as the domain of smooth talking rogues, taking advantage of search engines with tricks and charm instead of substance. What is it about search engine optimisation that has so many online marketing practitioners defending their honour amongst all this talk of black hats and white hats? Will my website respect your search engine
in the morning?
Dress to Impress with Search Engine Optimisation
Cast your mind back to those days of hanging around bars trying to attract the opposite sex. For me, this means going back twenty odd years to when drainpipe trousers and a skinny leather tie didn’t make me a joke to women, but for some of you it could be as recent as last Saturday night. Most of us would make an effort to dress appropriately – the best shirt, the newest jeans, the smelliest aftershave – to enhance our chances of getting lucky. Is this any different to search engine optimisation? Was I not simply performing Girlfriend Optimisation, increasing my chances of ‘ranking’ well with the blonde stunner at the bar by adjusting my appearance to more closely resemble what she may be looking for?
“Girls Should Appreciate Me For Who I Am, Not What I Look Like.”
Most of us probably know someone who lived by the above statement and insisted on wearing the same t-shirt out on a Saturday night that they’d been wearing for the last three days. Although we can all understand the sentiment, reality also dictates that the cute girl with the rum and coke across the room will never experience those hidden qualities beneath the mouldy Black Sabbath t-shirt if there is nothing to entice her to approach our table in the first place.
Online marketing follows most of the same rules as the real world, but “opposites attract” only with magnets, no matter what you may have heard in the playground. Don’t be afraid to flaunt what you’ve got.
The Tricks of Attraction
The Google Guidelines for SEO contain the following phrase.
Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you.
But how do we define what constitutes a ‘trick’ and what constitutes a genuine online marketing strategy? The moment we discuss optimisation in terms of ‘strategy’ we are acknowledging that the technique we use is designed to manipulate search engine rankings. Does that make every strategy a trick?
Let’s go back to the bar, where everyone knows your name and mine’s a scotch on ice. I once had a friend who used a pick-up strategy of always writing his phone number for girls on the back of an old bank-teller receipt he would keep in his wallet. Of course, he would select a receipt with a healthy bank balance. This technique, he assured me, always guaranteed a call-back within a week.
This is definitely an optimisation strategy, and a sneaky one at that, but is there anything unethical or dishonest about it? It is definitely unorthodox and gave him an advantage against some of the competition who were still using the backs of beer mats, but should he feel uncomfortable in telling his ‘trick’ to his competition (namely – me)? Of course not.
Of course, there are online marketing techniques that should be avoided. Some search engine optimisation strategies, such as hidden text and robot-only landing pages, do nothing to enhance the customer experience and detract from the quality of a website. Just as getting a girl drunk is not an advisable dating technique, these forms of SEO can be called questionable, but this is not true of all of the strategies that Google likes to cast doubt upon.
“Will You Still Respect Me In the Morning?”
Search engines endeavour to provide the most relevant websites in response to a particular keyword or phrase. In manipulating how a search engine ranks a website, the easiest way is always going to be ensuring the website is as relevant as possible to that keyword or phrase.
Our job is to help a website display its best potential to the search engines — and hence the customers. A search engine optimisation technique should only be considered a trick, or black hat, if the substance of the website doesn’t live up to the promise of the technique used to attract the customers.
So don’t be concerned about black hat versus white hat arguments. If you have successfully increased traffic to your website and have been able to create happy customers with repeat business, wear whatever colour hat you like and always have a spare bank receipt in your wallet.