Search Engines seem to treat the Web more like a social gathering than the Yellow Pages. It's pretty interesting to see how search engines like Google has developed over the years to help tame the commercial beast. No longer is your site relevant because it has the most keywords the most amount of times.
Naturally this early trend was overused and abused. Come to think of it, the newer trend of search engine indexing does make a little more sense when you look at the big picture of what the internet is (or what it was initially intended for), a web of information, simply one page of information linking to another.
"Nobody really likes infomercials. We all feel like we're being lied to, talked down to, and ripped off."
Think of it this way. What is your general first impression when you see an infomercial? Things like, "It doesn't work like that.", "It's a scam", "I'm paying too much for a lower quality item that is more of a novelty than it is a necessity as it is claiming to be", come to mind. Nobody really likes infomercials. We all feel like we're being lied to, talked down to, and ripped off.
Compare that to a friend explaining their latest great shopping adventure at the new local gift store. They'll start off telling you about the great feel and atmosphere of the store, the quick and knowledgeable help of the employees, the great products it offers and the fantastic pricing (in no specific order). These comments automatically build a trust in a store that you have never set your foot in. You inherit the positive image of that store as your own and all of the sudden that particular store is good until proven otherwise.
That is a great way to explain how search engines work. It's important to change our view of a search engine from an online dynamic Yellow Page listing to a relevancy middle man. Meaning a search engine like Google is more interested in maintaining the integrity of the internet as a whole than it is selling your product, no matter how great, cheap, and useful your product may be. Google won't trust you just because you're you. You need to prove yourself to it.
"Google doesn't want to know all the things you have to say about your website, it wants to know if anybody else is listening."
In a nutshell, it does this by inbound links (when another site links to you). Basically, and oversimplified, how many people talk about your website. Google thinks the more people that "talk" about (link to) your website, the more relevant and reliable it's information is.
- It gains credibility.
- The more credibility, the more it believes what you say.
- The more that it believes what you say, the more it trusts you with it's users.
Google doesn't want to know all the things you have to say about your website, it wants to know if anybody else is listening. The way it determines this is by measuring how often the internet as a whole links to your website (within the context of the subject being searched for). This is how it maintains it's informational integrity. Face it, anybody can write text on a page to make it appear as if it is talking about one thing when in actuality it is displaying totally different information. Remember hearing about porn sites using Disney as keywords to attract more visitors? Google instead looks at whether other people link to your site in the context of what you are attempting to get listed under (Does this page get links from other people talking about Disney?) It may sound harsh, but Google doesn't trust you. Google thinks you are trying to scam it and it is bent on maintaining it's integrity as a relevant search engine, not a gullible marketing tool.
The trick is playing by the rules while maintaining the intention of getting your product in front of as many eyes as possible and converting those eyes into sales.
Now, in closing, this doesn't mean you can go and sign up with link farms or link exchange spam sites. Google is getting smarter. Google can determine the quality of links these days. Google knows how relevant your link is and it attaches a certain value to a it, not all links are the same.
Although links are the foundation, they aren't everything. Your website must be search engine friendly and optimized for the best keywords that describe your site. The trick is playing by the rules while maintaining the intention of getting your product in front of as many eyes as possible and converting those eyes into sales.
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