The Content of Things, and SEO

Michael Jensen | 03/30/2009 | Numérisation

SEO is the acronym for “Search Engine Optimization,” the technical term for “making your pages juicy for search engines.”

Search engines like Google are just programs that operate on sets of rules. These rulesets, and the program code that implement them, are generally called “algorithms”—and they determine the “relevance” of a document, in the eyes of the search results.

How does a search engine bring your book’s catalog page to the first page of its results?

If I could tell you with certainty, I’d be a jillionaire, but only for the next moment. Google’s algorithms are intentionally varied, week to week and day to day, in their constant struggle to do three things: improve the user experience, foil the cheaters, and make money for themselves and others with advertising.

Cheaters are the companies that build what’s been estimated to be more than a third of the volume of Web pages—pages that are produced just to promote other pages, or to just be magnets for pages with ads. Any joker with a bit of programming expertise can produce 10,000 pages in a weekend, each with 1000 words from the dictionary, and each with a bunch of advertising on them, or a bunch of links to a particular page to raise its “rank” in Google.

Google wants to ignore those pages—they have no value, irritate us, and make us try Yahoo instead. The challenge is that there are valuable pages that look kind of similar to the above.

Improving the user experience and foiling the cheaters are part and parcel: Google wants us to find the thing we want, the most truly relevant information, on the first page, ideally as the very first item, and not have a bunch of dreck returned that we end up going to. It’s in their interest to ensure this, to continue to make a ton of money from of a billion tiny transactions.

So how do we position our Web pages to be juicy to Google? By leveraging what we have: quality.

Google is unique in having Google Book Search to work with. What they have done is harvest the cream of the publishing crop, the stuff that was considered worthy of publishing risk, and considered worthy by libraries. That means they have millions of books’ worth of text they can process, to learn the language of substance and quality.

They know more than anyone about Web pages—their statistical analysis has a resource set unmatched anywhere else—and so they can learn a great deal about substance, quality, context, and purpose.

We, as generally small publishers, don’t have the resources to hire SEO experts, to hire Web specialists, to commission consultants. But we do have quality content, written by professional writers in one form or another.

Our quality comes in our use of language, in our titling of things, in our human involvement in the content of our books, our Web pages, our promotional material. And in our understanding of what constitutes significance, in the publishing world.

These elements are likely to be ever-more key, as Google refines its algorithms. It’s in their interest to locate our material when someone wants to find, well,  something like our material. It’s our job to be sure that we are “as much what we are” as possible.

This goes against traditional, mechanical “SEO,” I should note. It’s important to have key terms in your text, key terms in your HTML titles, links to other pages, links from other pages, more text than images, and the like….

But I’m trying to think two years down the road, when Google’s relevance systems are even more refined, and better informed than they even are now. In two years, they’ll have learned even better how to attend to grammar, and author intent, and user habits, and salesmanship, and mechanical SEO; they’ll have learned even better how quality material tends to structure itself, and point to each other; they’ll have learned even better what constitutes textual quality.

A catalog page isn’t just an advertisement for a book; it’s an invitation to humans—and importantly, to algorithms—to understand your intent. Humans want to know all you have to tell; algorithms are increasingly understanding what humans want to find, and how to avoid what’s been designed just for algorithms.

So try to use those elements of quality consciously, as you think about your Web pages. Try to include all the blurbs, reviews, and supplementary substantive text about your books, on the catalog page for that book. They were written by quality writers. Have a “sample” page that has much of the catalog page’s content on it, as well as a chapter from the book, to be sure you have substantive content for the algorithms to process. Give those algorithms what they will be increasingly be hungry for: quality prose.

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