Making your website easily accessible to users and search engines is a critical component of successful SEO. Over the years, search engines have grown very sophisticated. Yet for all of their advancements, they can’t interpret a web page as easily as a person. SEO is a process that assists search engines learn what a web page is all about and more importantly how it could be what a person is looking for. And humans help this process along.

SEO: A Unique Science

Some people have great difficulty understanding why SEO works the way it does. Engineers, for example, don’t get why a search engine requires websites to abide by certain rules and practices in order to receive a ranking or be indexed. They can’t quite perceive why SEO allows sites be optimized by unlicensed search marketing experts. To them, data is data, and data could be analyzed efficiently by machines without the human factor. Well, that’s not how it works.

Quite often, it’s that human factor that must guide the search engine in its duties. Imagine you were to post a picture of your family cat. A human may describe it as “a grey tabby cat, large-sized, playing with some red yarn in the living room.” A search engine, no matter how good it is, will have difficulty analyzing the same photo in the same detail as the human. It is up to people to help search engines understand the photo. They do this by providing clues that the search engines can understand and subsequently index. In a nutshell, that’s why SEO is so valuable—and so necessary.

Understanding the Limitations of Search Engines

Remember that without good SEO, search engines will never find your website.

Knowing what search engines can’t do helps in the process of building and optimizing your web site:

Technical Issues

• Online Forms: Search engines aren’t well suited to completing online forms, such as a login. Therefore, search engines often won’t see content located behind them.
• Duplicate Pages: a Content Management System, or CMS, will frequently create duplicate versions of a page. That’s a problem because search engines are looking for original content. Google may penalize you for having these duplicate pages.
• Bad Link Structure: If the link structure of a website can’t be comprehended by the search engine, it won’t be aware of a website’s entire content. Even if the site is partially crawled by the engine, it may be deemed irrelevant by the search engine’s index because it’s not seeing the whole website.
• Coding Errors: Errors in a website’s crawling directives can, in some cases, result in the site being blocked or at the very least compromised in its ranking. When Dreamscape Marketing takes over an existing client website to upgrade its SEO value, it’s not uncommon for us to discover multiple coding errors.
• Non-Text Content: Non-HTML text can be problematic. This includes any text in Flash files, photos, videos, audio or plug-in content.

Content Issues

• Unusual word choices: This includes language that isn’t typical for how people search. For example, writing about “modalities” when people are searching for “treatment methods.”
• Incorrect target audience: For instance, writing for a youth market when a good amount of your business comes from seniors. Casual language may work for one target audience while a more elevated tone may work better for the other.

Search Engine Marketing Is Ever Changing

Ten years ago, you could use link bombing with anchor text. You could buy tons of links from blog comment spam injectors. You could construct inter-linking groups of websites to successfully leverage traffic. But search engines like Google have learned how to detect these practices and they will punish websites still trying to use them.

To get a handle on the constantly evolving nature of search engine marketing, you need a digital marketing company that knows the territory. Dreamscape Marketing, a Google Partner, stays on top of the SEO landscape. We have an unprecedented 15 staff members with Google certifications, and we know what it takes to keep your website optimized in the midst of Google’s changing requirements. Call us today at 877-958-9180 and let’s discuss how our leading-edge digital strategies can take your website to the next level.