Google defines Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as “SEO — short for Search Engine Optimization — is about helping Search Engines understand your content, and helping users find your site.”
It means that when a user searches for something on the Internet with keywords or a phrase through a Search Engine (like Google Search, DuckDuckGo, or Bing, etc.) that your website preferably shows on the first page of the Search Engine Result Pages (called SERPs as an acronym). If it shows, users may click or tap on the link and hence visit your website (which could lead to sales if you sell something, such as the eBooks and videos we offer).
It implies that you publish articles or videos with titles and content that would match the user’s search criteria. So, when somebody enters “What to Expect of Abdominal Massage?” or “What is Body De-Armoring?” it would be great if our website ranks on the first page of the SERPs. That would make it more likely a user clicks or taps on it and comes to our website.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work precisely like that. Search Engines often put paid advertising ahead of the search results, or incomprehensibly show out-of-date or totally irrelevant results first. Moreover, Search Engines still don’t really understand the content of an article or video, but mainly look at the titles of articles or videos. What’s worse, they often look at the literal phrasing.
Let me give you an example. If I would write an excellent, in-depth article (the best in the world) about Abdominal Massage with the title “The ultimate, complete ins and outs of Abdominal Massage” which has everything in it — from treatment modalities, health benefits, techniques, and so on, it would still not rank well (or not at all) when users type “Health Benefits Abdominal Massage” in a Search Engine.
But why so?
Well, because as said … Search Engines unfortunately mostly look at titles that match very closely with the user’s request. So, if I would write an article with the title “Health Benefits of Abdominal Massage” it would more likely rank in the SERPs for users who type those keywords or phrases. It also means that slim or crappy content that have those titles (or mention “health benefits of Abdominal Massage” five times in their article) would rank above our in-depth, excellent article with the title “The ultimate, complete ins and outs of Abdominal Massage.”
Now, you can imagine how frustrating that is. You always need to write for Search Engines … and not for people, even if Search Engine companies claim that they want you to write for people and not for them. And AI (Artificial Intelligence), which is such a hype now, didn’t improve anything at all on that level.
We fly to the moon, and soon to Mars. We have self-driving cars … and whatnot … but these billion-dollar companies like Google (Alphabet) or Microsoft … just don’t understand the meaning of content. That is, they don’t understand semantics (the meaning or logic in language), and hence cannot discern the quality of the content of an article, not even with AI. They basically simply look at words (keywords), the number of words in an article, and the exact matches with words user’s type in as a request.
In addition, they don’t understand synonyms. Typing “De-Armoring,” or “De-Armouring” (American and British English) in a Search Engine gives different results. Absurd! It’s the same thing, just another English version. Hence, it means we need to write articles that use both versions of the word to rank in SERPs.
And after you have gone through the above, you need to deal with so-called Search Engine Algorithm Updates. This is about what Search Engines find important to rank first on a search request. Thus, one month you rank well, and six month later they decide that now Reddit, Quora, or paid advertising, or big companies like Healthline or whatever “deserve” to rank better.
It’s a drag, it’s horrible, it’s frustrating. In the end it doesn’t matter what you do as a small independent publisher. You are at the mercy of the big Search Engine companies. After six years in the business we’ve learned not to pay too much attention any longer to their so-called “SEO guidelines.” We do what we want and write how we want, just marginally paying heed to those guidelines. We’ve adopted the slogan: “We post an article, and pray (that we might rank).”
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