Human Search Engine Optimization

Graywolf and Aaron Wall posted some great thoughts about the problems of building sites that rely on Google algorithmic stability and how in the end you'll just get “punched in the head” (as Aaron put it) when Google adjusts things. So here's my two cents on this topic. This is not specific at all to AdSense, but since search engine rankings do affect ad relevancy, I think it's worthy of discussion here.

Human-Centric or Search-Engine-Centric?

When it comes to building sites and designing pages, there are two general approaches you can take: a human-centric approach and a search-engine-centric approach. The former tailors content to the humans who are reading it. The latter tailors it for the search engines.

Human-centric things that you might do include:

• Using witty or irrelevant titles and headings
• Including pictures
• Styling different elements differently, i.e. headings in different fonts
• Using uncommon word combinations for effect
• Assuming or expecting a certain level of education or literacy

Search-engine-centric things could include:

• Extensive page interlinking
• Keyword emphasis in titles, headings and text
• Cloaking
• Writing generic titles and using a limited vocabulary set of words

If you were to group website and web page design and layout techniques together, this is the Venn diagram you'd end up with:

For simplicity, “human-centric” becomes “human optimization” (HO) and “search-engine-centric” becomes “search engine optimization” (SEO). As you can see, some of the techniques are in both the HO and the SEO camps.

Knowing Your Audience

The trick is knowing which audience you're catering to. Are you targeting humans, or are you targeting the search engines? There is a difference. (Yes, ultimately you always target a human, but we're talking about the direct “customer” here.)

Spammers know what their audience is, you can be sure of that. That's why they're on always hot on the latest SEO techniques and create search-engine-centric pages that really make no sense in a world where search engines don't exist.

Newbies to the Web use human-centric techniques, often without knowing it. Why? Because they do things like write their content in Microsoft Word and paste the converted HTML into a web page. The very thought of this may cause you to shiver (have you ever looked at a converted Microsoft Word page? it's very scary…) but to them there's nothing wrong because the page looks like any other page they see out there, even if the underlying HTML is completely hoary.

Problems arise when the people who've been using the human-centric approach suddenly realize that their pages are not being found in the search engines, and decide to do something about it. But what should they do?

Write For The Humans

What it boils down to is this: write for the humans, but don't be stupid about it.

There's a reason that there are heading tags in HTML, for example. You know, the tags like <h1>, <h2>, etc. These tags were not invented for search engines. They were invented to expose some of the underlying semantic structure of the document to a web browser so that it could make some intelligent decisions about how to draw the document on the screen. As in, “Hey, this is a heading, so I should probably draw it in a bigger, bolded font”. So newbies learn that instead of coding:

<font size="5">Understanding Rugrats<font><br>

They should be doing:

<h1>Understanding Rugrats</h1>

And letting the browser decide (perhaps with hints via style sheets) how best to present this information to the end user.

These semantic clues became natural targets for the search engines as well, which is why any treatise on search engine optimization will tell you to use keywords in titles and headings as often as possible. Of course, if you're writing good titles and headings you're doing this naturally, at least in a general sense. But you're probably assuming a certain level of literacy on the reader's part, as well as the ability to understand and link related concepts. And there's the root of the problem.

Because Search Engines are Illiterate!

Search engines are dumb. Writing for search engines is like writing for dumb readers. Let's face it, would you actually write something like this if you weren't concerned about SEO:

The yellow-headed swinger is a primate from tropical Africa. The yellow-headed swinger spends most of its life in the trees, where it congregates with other yellow-headed swingers to create a yellow-headed swinger pack. Even the yellow-headed swinger babies are born in the trees. The common cause of infant death in yellow-headed swingers is falling from the trees.

If you were writing an essay that was going to be graded by a human, you'd probably write:

The yellow-headed swinger is a a primate from tropical Africa. It spends most of its life in the trees, congregating in packs with others of its kind. Even the babies of this monkey-like mammal are are born in the trees, with falling being the most common cause of infant death.

It's saying the same thing, but without all the needless repetition. The first example is written for the search engines: “Hey, Google, this page is about yellow-headed swingers! Do you hear me? YELLOW-HEADED SWINGERS!” Writing for search engines is like writing your own Dick and Jane reader.

But search engines are getting better at understanding human-centric pages. Don't think that all that work Google's done to display relevant contextual ads isn't finding its way into its search engine algorithms. Call it artificial intelligence, call it sophisticated pattern matching, but over time search engines will become more literate. But we're not there yet…

The Sweet Spot: Human Search Engine Optimization

What you want to do, then, is to engage in human search engine optimization, which is the intersection of the HO and SEO sets. Use titles and headings appropriately. Use keywords, sure, but sparingly, and throw in some synonyms for variety. Make your content interesting and spongeworthy. Use lots of whitespace. Don't cluster links too much in a block of text. Link to other pages on your site, but only if they're relevant. Etc., etc., etc.

Write for the humans. Write stupid stuff if you want, just don't write it stupidly.

Sponsored Link: Aaron Wall's The SEO Book is a great resource for anything SEO. Highly recommended!

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense.

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