CatalogueFound and reachable06 of 36
What is done so a search engine can read you
Pages built the way a search engine expects to read them, announced as they are published, and written in the words your customers use rather than the ones your trade uses.
What arrives
- Pages built
- the way a search engine expects to read them
- A new page
- announced as it is published, rather than left to be come across
- What each page is
- stated plainly underneath, for the machines that read it
- Your customers' words
- for what you do, rather than the ones your trade uses
- The reports
- a search engine publishes about your site, set up and coming to me
- No position
- claimed on this page or on any other
Read before found#
Before anything is found it has to be read. A search engine arrives as a machine rather than as a customer, and it has to work out what each page is for. So each one carries a clear title, an honest description, headings in a sensible order, and a plain list of which pages exist.
Underneath sits a plain description a visitor does not see, saying what a page is - a service, a place, an answer to a question. It gives a search engine your details in a form it can use rather than infer. Whether it shows them, and how, is theirs to decide.
Your customers' words, not your trade's#
Businesses describe themselves in the language of their industry, and customers search in the language of their problem. Those are rarely the same sentence. The pages are written around the second one, which sometimes reads as too plain to the person who owns the business, and that is the point rather than an accident.
What I will not promise about where you appear#
Anybody promising you a position is promising something that is not theirs to give. Where you appear is decided by a company they do not work for, against competitors who are trying at the same time, and it moves without notice. I would treat an offer of a position as a warning about the person making it.
What is honest is this. The pages are built so they can be read, the words are the ones your customers actually use, and what a machine needs in order to understand you is there rather than missing. The rest is time, and it is measured in months rather than weeks.
The same goes for the assistants people now ask instead of searching. Giving them a page they can quote is build work and it is done; whether they quote it, and whether they quote it accurately, is not something anybody on this side can promise.