Search Engines Are Like Your College Professor

How treating a web page like a research paper can help you in search listings

You should always keep your audience in mind when you’re writing landing page text. But what do you when you’re optimizing pages for search engines and your audience isn’t even human?

According to search engine optimization expert Jessica Bowman of SEM Inhouse, it may help to think of search engines as your college professor. Jessica recently gave a workshop at Yahoo! on search engine optimization, and she pointed out that search engines read your web pages an awful lot like professors read a college research paper.  Although you might normally read us for search advertising tips, we thought we’d pass along something that can help your performance in natural searches, too.

They’re alike? Really?
Before the comparison brings sweaty visions of the worst part of college to your head, it doesn’t mean your web copy should be 20 pages long. In fact, it shouldn’t be anywhere near that. But, Jessica says, professors are like search engines in that they have to read a lot of papers, which means they have to make some of their judgment calls by scanning. These are some of the elements that both look for:

• Title: Both of them need to know at a glance what the document is about.
• Headlines, emphasized words and lists: Anything called out with headlines, bold or italicized words, or bullets is likely to be important. Call headlines in your web copy out with tags like <H1>, <H2> and <H3>.
• Conclusion: A good conclusion restates the theme of the opening paragraph, which drives the argument home for your professor and confirms what your page is about for the search engine.
• Sources cited: Professors like to know that you researched the paper, and search engines like to see that you’re linked to other websites.

How to get on the bad sides of professors and search engines
There are a few of the things that both of them hate:

• Plagiarism: You know that little research paper-buying incident that got your frat brother thrown out junior  year? Turns out that search engines don’t like it when you steal other sites’ content either. And given that they’re searching the web, they might notice when 15 copies of something show up.
• Too many quotes: Original thinking is important. Just as you wouldn’t devote most of your research paper to huge quotation blocks, you don’t want to rely too heavily on syndicated content.
• Bad writing: Search engines are more liable to penalize your page in results when you stuff your copy with unrelated keywords, strand important content at the bottom of your page, and rely too much on headlines and lists.

Search engines and professors love…

• Verbosity: You probably realized this about your professor when you had to analyze three paragraphs in Dante’s Inferno for 15 pages.  In the search engine world, verbosity means substantial, relevant, wordy, full-length, original content.
• Reinforcing your stance: Just as professors like it when you repeat and back up your claims, you want your main concepts and keywords to be repeated throughout the page.
• Good writing: For a search engine that means variations on your keywords, including different endings. If only your professor’s definition had been that flexible.

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Nic McPhee