A simple Search Engine Optimisation technique

Google ergo sum. If Google can’t find you don’t exist.

Considering that most of web searches comes from Google, wouldn’t be unfair to say that if Google can not find you then you have little chances to be noticed.
As a result, communications in the digital world have changed to a new format that complies with search engines requirements, specially Google.

The process of refining the visibility of a website or specific pages is called “Search Engine Optimisation”.

After spending some time trying to understand the overwhelming amount of information on the topic, I decided to create my own hypotheses with a strong pragmatic orientation. The intention is to simplify the technique by following few easy steps.

Introduction to the Method

Before going into the method itself we need to understand few basic key concepts.
I will use the example of Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin.

Every time we do a search on Google we type a set of words on the search field. Those words are called “Focus Keyword”  which search engines uses to match 2 more components called “Title” and “Description”. See example on image below.

The core trick on SEO consist in creating a correct match between Keywords, Title and Description.

But it is not that simple. A quick and easy way to match the 3 components would be copy-paste keywords into tile and description. That probably produce green lights that would result in an apparent correct SEO setup. See example below:

By satisfying the SEO algorithm does not mean we are satisfying user’s searches. As a result, the user might find information that do not correlate to its interests and then never click on the item, or click and find the information on the page irrelevant. The user will leave the page quickly (or press the back button) and this will produce something called “bounce” which has negative impact as well.
Google penalises pages with lot of the bounces moving them down in the list. Almost as bad as not doing any SEO setup.

The Spiral Method

I call my technique The Spiral Method, which consist in finding the very core/fundamental keywords and messages to describe them in circles of incremental complexity. Each time we do a loop in the spiral we get deeper in terms of details and complexity. I call each of the loops “level”.

Let’s see an example:

Let’s pretend that no many people knows about Shakespeare or his Romeo and Juliet.

You would like people to be able to find the play categorising it using key words that would be useful for encyclopaedias like wikipedia. Example:

Key Words:

Romeo and Juliet: a play by William Shakespeare

• Star-crossed lovers
• Incremental tension
• Tragedy

Key Message/s:

Story about two young star-crossed lovers whose deaths ultimately reconcile their feuding families (*).

But these keywords and descriptions would be irrelevant if now you are William Shakespeare’s manager (Sorry William, this is just an intellectual exercise) and you are trying to convince theatres to buy the rights to represent Romeo and Juliet’s play.

You would probably use something like this:

Key Words:

Romeo and Juliet: a play by William Shakespeare

• William Shakespeare
• Romeo and Juliet
• Popular plays

Key Message/s:

William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is one of the most frequently performed plays in history (*).

Applying the Spiral Method

Once you find the keywords and message for the correct audience, the rest is quite simple: You need to describe your message going in loops of increasing complexity, from general to details.

Defining Levels:

To provide detail information about a topic, you probably need to satisfy the needs of different audiences.

Following the example of Shakespeare’s manager, you would need to align each of the levels in something like this.

1. What is it? (General Introduction)
2. Commercial Information (Popular play)
3. KPIs (Return on investment information)
4. Tech details (List of required actors, sound, lights, set details, etc…)

This way we keep in one single page a message for all potential audiences.

Testing:

To test if our key message has the correct density on our document, I recommend the use word-clouds tools which produce a visual representation of the most relevant words used on the text.

Final Step: Visual representation

Remember: a picture is worth a thousand words. Minimise the use of words when images can be more effective. If you do, make sure you add meta information to the images as well so Google can interpret them.

References:

• Rome and Juliet description from Wikipedia.
• Bits a pieces from Google Documentation on Webmaster tools and Google Analytics.
• SEO Yoast plug in for WordPress.
• Wordle, word density visualisation.
• Perhaps some invisible influence of Heraclitus. Taking my own interpretation of the “Logos”.