No one really knows how many individual web pages there are on the net, but references in Wikipedia show that as of 2009 there was at least 25.21 billion of them. Dropping your web pages into that mix and hoping they would be found is a lot like dropping a grain of sand on a beach; differentiation is the only way it could possibly be found.
How would that be determined in the search engine algorithms? The glib answer of course is content, but more specifically how would relevance be defined by the content? In a word: words. The ‘big secret’ to SEO and internet marketing in general is the quality of the content. In other words, there is no big secret, and anyone that tells you that there is a big secret should be avoided: what is important is not knowing some mythical secret but instead having the knowledge of how to use content, how to use the keywords to form an advantage. Content needs to be planned, researched, development, shaped for conversion, optimized and published.
How Does Content Convert Buyers?
This is not a secret it is simply knowledge, and expertise in this area comes from experience. If your SEO provider can show a history of success then that is all the proof you need.
Words then are how we gain advantage over other sites because words are ‘food’ to hungry bots. Keywords and key phrases are critical to the indexing that the spider bots and web crawling devices that will find your site, and while the secret to how these indices are formed (the algorithms that are proprietary to each search engine company) are unknown, the basic building blocks that they have to work with are simply words.
In the early days questionable SEO practitioners tried to ‘beat the bots’ by stuffing key words into the pages of a site, with the belief that simply having more key words would attract more bots and more potential search traffic via variables. This is analogous to having 50 worms on the end of a hook to attract more fish; it is a ridiculous premise and it does not work, in fact it has quite the opposite effect. Search engine actively look for sites that do these and other methods to try to fool the engines and they either downgrade them or worse they ban them from being found.
The real answer is simple, it is simply to create natural copy relative to the searcher; copy that will be valued by those finding it; copy that is of interest; just honest content.
In this way the value of the skill of seo copywriting has become a critical element to SEO design and to Internet marketing in general. As the search engine algorithms become more and more adept at creating inference from the use of content and its use by the finders of those searchers, the value of good copy will become a currency in and of itself.
