Climbing Google’s hit-list
Since the inception of the World Wide Web, web-page creators have tried to elevate their web pages on the hit lists of the search engines: search engine optimization (SEO). In turn, the search engines have tried to identify manipulative practices.
Google (by far the predominant search engine) is designed to give the best results possible to the searcher (not necessarily the web-page creator) and the algorithms it uses to calculate its hit list are strongly focused on that requirement. Attempts to manipulate web pages in order to bias Google’s assessments can result in Google taking drastic action. For example, in 2006, BMW Germany was delisted by Google for some time!
BMW has a high profile so that most people who might have been interested in their products already knew about BMW and could find the company without Google (the URL is obvious). Accordingly, the bottom-line implications for BMW were slight.
However, if a company relied on attracting customers via Google, the impact would be severe.
My project used entirely legitimate methods to optimize web pages for Google.
I used machine methods to analyze the written content so that the materials would be optimized for Google as well as human readers. In all cases the methods were very effective, moving the pages to the first page of Google’s hit list.
There were no ‘tricks’ involved. Although software can assist the process, it depends principally on better business strategies and staff development.