SEO: 3 Letters that Have Driven The Internet So Far
How much time have you spent learning about Search Engine Optimization? In my earliest web development days, I actually convinced my boss to pay for a course so I could help our site rank better.
If you knew my boss, you’d know how unlikely that was. But it had a clear payoff: get your sites to rank better on Google.
There have been a number of iterations of what it means to do SEO. Starting out, there were a number of hacks you could do to rank higher:
Keyword stuffing: Website owners would stuff their pages with as many keywords as possible, even if they were irrelevant to the content. This was a way to trick the search engines into showing their pages in the search results.
Hidden Text: Website owners would hide text on their pages by making it the same color as the background or using tiny font sizes. This text would be stuffed with keywords and again, was a way to trick the search engines.
Link exchanges: Website owners would exchange links with other websites, even if they were unrelated. This was a way to build up backlinks and improve their website's authority in the eyes of search engines.
Meta tags: Website owners would stuff their meta tags with keywords, even if they weren't relevant to the content on the page. This was a way to tell the search engines what the page was about and improve its ranking.
Buying links: Website owners would buy links from other websites to improve their own website's authority. This was seen as a way to manipulate search engine rankings and is now considered a black hat SEO technique.
As Google’s ranking engine evolved, so too have the tricks. But let’s think about what Google is trying to do: surface the information that is most relevant to what the user is looking for.
What are the sites looking for? Traffic that aligns with the outcomes they want. Maybe it’s buying a product, maybe it’s viewing ads, maybe it’s something else entirely.
The biggest issue here is the misalignment between Google and the sites listed. If someone wants to rank higher than other sites for given searches, they have to compete with the world. This means, in a competitive market, they need to have someone who is knowledgeable of the latest tricks and techniques.
Or now, you need an AI tool that can write SEO content way better and way faster than the average person. That conceivably turns every possible search term into a ridiculously competitive landscape.
Here’s the biggest problem with that: it ruins the authority that Google has, because anybody can create content about a topic that ranks highly. So how can you tell the most authoritative sources?
Here’s the biggest issue: as the competitive landscape grows, it makes it harder for smaller players to compete. My hypothesis is that this will lead to lower and lower trust in search results as we start to see content flooding search engines and that content turns out to have serious issues.
And this brings us to the idea of trust.
Who Can You Trust?
There’s been a weird shift that those of us who have grown up with the internet have seen: it’s gone from “don’t trust anything you read on the internet” to “believe everything you see on the internet”. Except people end up seeing a lot of conflicting information. And people aren’t built to process as much information as we push into our brains each day, which means we put filtering mechanism into place. If we didn’t, we would have to validate every single thing we read online. And a quick glance at Twitter tells us that people don’t do that. In fact, a lot of times, they’ll take headlines as fact and not even bother to read the article itself.
So people pick sources they trust based on how well it reflects their worldview. That lets them assume that some subset of content is true and everything else is false. Turns out, this might not be the best way to do things, because sites understand that and use it against their audiences. And when you start trying to factor in shareability, because clicks and impressions are what matter, all the incentives start to shift out of whack. This leads to clickbait, outrage-bait, and clout chasing.
What if you don’t want to be part of that world? It’s tough to avoid. But one thing I’ve found that works: find a set of people that I see doing things the right way over some decent amount of time and then focus more of my time on their content than I do on the rest of it.
Except, sometimes, what they are releasing now isn’t quite what I need. Maybe it exists in their backlog of content, but when I search, there’s no guarantee that their content will surface.
But why is that? If I’ve spent time figuring out a bunch of sources I can trust, why is that not factored in? In a nutshell, because that was hard to do. But it’s not, anymore. In fact, it can be done pretty easily.
And that’s what I’m working on. Use the trust you’ve already invested and boost specific sites you already like.
Only fall back to Google or Bing if you don’t have anyone in that area you already trust.
Product Updates
I’ve been working on the user dashboard over the past few days. Now, users are able to create a search engine, add links, and search. This part is fairly limited, because it only searches the title and description that are added. Soon, there will actually be a web crawler that will search through a site and highlight the most relevant pieces.
If you want to see a demo video, check out the link (apparently tweets aren’t embedded anymore and I can’t embed videos directly).
https://twitter.com/leo_guinan/status/1649901709685141513?s=20
I’m working with a couple of creators right now to set up some really cool experiences to show off the power of custom search engines. If you’re interested in signing up and trying it out, let me know and I’ll get you set up!
Bonus: Podcast Recommendation
I listened to a podcast episode this week that really spoke to me on a number of levels. But one piece in particular really stood out: building an independent cloud for storage, contacts, etc.
This isn’t something I’m doing at the moment, but I can definitely see the appeal. Big tech companies have way too much of a hold on me. Makes it difficult to switch. In fact, I was considering moving to iPhone from Android for my last phone, but ended up sticking with Samsung, even though I couldn’t get the model I wanted, because it seemed easier than switching. That’s something that occurs over and over again.
We need to break away from this, and there are some pretty easy, actionable steps in this episode, along with all sorts of excellent wisdom, thoughts, and humor. Highly recommend this episode.
Bonus Bonus Podcast Recommendation
If you liked that recommendation, I also recommend you listen to Derek talking with Paul Millerd. This is where I really started to fall in love with some of Derek’s ideas and exploring how they could apply to my own life.
The Pathless Path: Paul Millerd + Derek Sivers
This actually isn’t the first time I’ve written about SEO. If you want to see what was in my brain early on in my startup journey, you can read an earlier blog I wrote here (2 years ago).