The Art of Website Promotion: What Users Want
How did we get to this point, and how did we get out, what is the art of site promotion, if not in understanding the principles of search engines? Ten years ago, there were over a trillion pages on the Internet. Now imagine how many times this figure has increased over the past eight years! How in this ocean to become that very drop that the World Wide Web will spit out on the first positions of search results? And how to make this particular drop of content valuable for the user?
The universe of the Internet is expanding indefinitely, so what was yesterday a vulnerability the size of an eye of a needle has now expanded into a donut hole. But for every vulnerability there is a solution. That's the beauty of technology – there's always a solution.
It happens regardless of your participation, desire or protest. For example, here is the crowd. Everyone is screaming. Some people have a naturally loud voice, some have a microphone. But most of the voices merge into a wave of noise. So you need a sound amplifier, and a quality one, if you need to get the message through, and not just noise.
SEO tools are the boosters that web resource owners need to become more visible to the user.
But only at this concert, even if you have the most expensive microphone in your hands, the crowd is always noisy. The Internet is a stage where you can “perform" non-stop if you have a resource. But where can you get it and how to replenish it so that you are not forgotten?
It all starts with a search
The main resource of the site owner is his site. Useful, adaptive, with interesting unique content. In second place is the task of the search engine to find this site. SEO-optimizers are engaged in helping the best sites to go to the top. Users see them, visit them and, if the site does not lose quality, they become sources of information without which many of its readers or subscribers can no longer imagine the beginning of the day.
Yes. Social media didn't kill anyone. This is another story and we will return to it later. But not in this article.
Note: Search engines didn't always perform well, and sites didn't always strive for quality.
How SEO specialists remembered people and stopped writing only for robots
A few years ago, "keyword spamming" dropped SEO as a ranking tool in the eyes of users. The reputation of this technology has suffered from the fact that SEOs have ceased to take into account the interests of people and focused only on tasks and money. Zakazniks, in turn, had little interest in people. They just wanted to be at the top of the search. Here is such an absurdity. People thought it wasn't about people. Of course, this mechanism did not last long.
The algorithm is lost, but something more important is found
In the pursuit of profit, we often forget about the logic of cause and effect. If you work only for the sake of money, or to give a result, but your methods are not of high quality, such work can be ironically referred to as “project”. But it's certainly not about working on projects. This is about the nature of the duration of the interaction. Often low-quality systems are of a very short-term nature and break down – this is their feature, at the most unexpected moment.
So, “spam” is bad. But it is no longer allowed. In the recent past, users thought that SEO was just this process of link-feeding web resource pages.
Of course SEO is harder
While users stopped loving SEO optimization, although they did not begin to understand it more, specialists in this field, as if waking up from a dream, suddenly began to look for ways to “fix” and “clean” search results from bad content. And we thought about how to make robots smarter so that they do it themselves.
SEO specialists have lost a convenient and simple algorithm due to their own aggressive SEO. This loss, like a hurricane, took all the workers of black and aggressive SEO to Magic Land, where it turned out that “key spamming” is just an illusory tool for winning. And if Goodwin from a well-known fairy tale fooled the inhabitants of the OZ country, passing off glass as emeralds, then it was not possible to pass off the content that some time ago "attacked" Runet as quality information.
real world magic
The user lives in the real world and he can distinguish the information on the site that is written for a person from the one that robots can read. And robots have not yet learned to buy from people … well, at that time they definitely did not know how to replace site owners – real readers, subscribers and customers.
Gone are the days when "spiders" read keys, and users began to read books and paper guides again, because the Internet was overflowing with content that only machines "saw".
While search bots are learning new algorithms to produce accurate results, SEOs put their "shamanic diamonds" aside and turn to the technical literature for answers. In this article, we are trying to understand what the user wants and how search engines learn to recognize these queries.
Is the universe of the Internet infinite?
The moment is no longer something elusive. Now – this is the period of time for which the user receives a multi-page list of answers to his request. Is he satisfied with the results, or does the work of search engines only create the appearance of efficiency? Maybe this is just a global scrolling of the same data that copywriters endlessly copy from each other, creating informational noise and moving the user away from his goal – to find what he is looking for? And are search engines able to distinguish “dummy” from useful sites?
Google knows it: Four years ago, a Google employee at the SMX Advanced conference reported on how many web pages are contained in the company's search engine index – about thirty thousand trillion pages!
Do you know how to spell this number correctly? We decided to find out how it would be in numbers and asked for help from an online calculator. So, he hung…
Tell me what you're looking for and I'll help you refine your request.
We are looking for something all our lives. People are so arranged. Search engine optimization technologies are designed to make it easier for us to find information. This is what we call – the art of website promotion.
Engines learn to understand what people want. While people themselves do not fully understand themselves. Can you imagine what a difficult task the developers face? Here psychology is intertwined with mathematics, our desires and the accuracy of their formulation. And a lot more. Which does not yet fit into the format of this essay.