The Human Side to SEO

How Humanity Permeates the Vital Aspects of Optimisation

The early days of SEO have done the practice a huge disservice. Early on, SEO was all about getting the right keyword in the right place, connecting the right link to the right page.

There was a mechanical aspect to it. Everything obeyed logic and order.

Then search engines adapted their algorithms.

As search algorithms got more sophisticated, so necessarily did SEO. Somehow, though, the early mechanical aspects of SEO hung on.

No more!

It's time SEO shook off its past and focused on what search is really about: humans making connections. Let's look at some areas of SEO that are, and have to be, about humanity.

Content has to have the Personal Touch

"Once upon a time, if you wanted to use SEO to increase your rankings, you simply crammed your website as full of keywords as possible", write optimisers TechKnowSys.

"Some less scrupulous web designers crammed their sites full of popular, but irrelevant, keywords. Of course, that only worked for websites who only wanted to display ads and were not concerned with getting visitors to come back."

It's that last point that really changed content for everyone. Searchers are search engine customers, and sending your customers to a spammy site just didn't work.

Today, content is hailed as king – and all content has to live up to that majestic image.

Links Have to be Helpful

Links were another area that suffered from the mechanical doldrums early on. SEOs have long since realised that just grabbing every link you can doesn't work.

The main reason this is so is because of the way Google and other search engines (but mainly Google) value links.

Links that have a contextual relevance are the ones providing value to your site – and they're the ones you have to engage with personally to get.

Another reason to give your link building the human touch is that they're becoming less valuable.

Google has admitted that as its algorithm gets more sophisticated, links are likely to be weaned out as a quality indicator. When that happens, the value of links will solely be the traffic they generate.

If you've spent hundreds of hours amassing spammy links, your site's going to suffer.

Top Places in the Rankings aren't the Be-all

With the rise of social media as news and information sources and the use of more devices, search is also changing.

A study on industry site Moz investigated changes in search page behaviour, and found that search result listings at position 10 and beyond are getting a surprising amount of traffic.

What the study revealed was that people are frequently exploring the second and third page of search results to get what they're looking for.

What does this mean for the average web site?

It seems to indicate that it doesn't matter so much where you are in the rankings as long as you provide what the search engine user wants.

In short, if you – a human being, not a machine – build it, they will come.