How Search Engines Work (or How Non-SEOs Think They Do)

I read a great article from SEOMoz that contained an interview with Rob Toledo’s mom centered around what Rob does for a living.  He asked her a series of questions about search engines and how they work and the answers are really interesting.  The key to this conversation?

The bottom line? Write your content for your customer, not your industry.  SEOs speak in gobbledegook, so do car dealers, banks, insurance agents, and other niche specialists.  Your customers don’t know the lingo….so don’t speak it on your website.

The takeaways at the bottom of the article are great tips – check them out.  Here are a few of our own ideas:

1. Use your customer to test your website – ask them questions about your website and the content.
2. Make a list of industry buzzwords or acronyms and then search each page for those buzzwords or acronyms.  If you find them, rewrite the sentence for non-industry-gobbledegook-speakers.
3. Use the list you made in #2 and create a “no fly zone” for your website.  These terms should not be used or should be used sparingly.  You need to weight the buzzwords against the keywords that work for your site.

Source: How Non-SEOs Think They Do