3. The "Tree Falls in a Forest"
SEO isn't just about getting the technical details of search-engine friendly web development
correct. It's also about marketing. This is perhaps the most important concept to grasp about
the functionality of search engines. You can build a perfect website, but its content can remain
invisible to search engines unless you promote it. This is due to the nature of search technology,
which relies on the metrics of relevance and importance to display results.
The "tree falls in a forest" adage postulates that if no one is around to hear the sound, it may not
exist at all - and this translates perfectly to search engines and web content. Put another way - if no
one links to your content, the search engines may choose to ignore it.
The engines by themselves have no inherent gauge of quality and no potential way to discover
fantastic pieces of content on the web. Only humans have this power - to discover, react, comment
and link to. Thus, great content cannot simply be created - it must be shared and talked about.
Search engines already do a great job of promoting high quality content on websites that have
become popular, but they cannot generate this popularity - this is a task that demands talented
Internet marketers.
1. Spidering and Indexing Problems
Search engines aren't good at completing online forms (such as a
login), and thus any content contained behind them may remain
hidden.
Websites using a CMS (Content Management System) often
create duplicate versions of the same page - a major problem for
search engines looking for completely original content.
Errors in a website's crawling directives (robots.txt) may lead to
blocking search engines entirely.
Poor link structures lead to search engines failing to reach all of
a website's content. In other cases, poor link structures allow
search engines to spider content, but leave it so minimally
exposed that it's deemed "unimportant" by the engine's index.
Interpreting Non-Text Content
Although the engines are getting better at reading non-HTML
text, content in rich media format is traditionally difficult for
search engines to parse.
This includes text in Flash files, images, photos, video, audio &
plug-in content.
2. Content to Query Matching
Text that is not written in common terms that people use to
search. For example, writing about "food cooling units" when
people actually search for "refrigerators".
Language and internationalization subtleties. For example, color
vs colour. When in doubt, check what people are searching
for and use exact matches in your content.
Location targeting, such as targeting content in Polish when the
majority of the people who would visit your website are from
Japan.
Mixed contextual signals. For example, the title of your blog post
is "Mexico's Best Coffee" but the post itself is about a vacation
resort in Canada which happens to serve great coffee. These
mixed messages send confusing signals to search engines.