Snake Oil is a generic term for medicines of no real value that are touted as miracle cure-alls. This description applies well to the claims made by certain alleged SEO (search engine optimisation) specialists who all promise they’ll get you onto page 1 of Google.

So what exactly is SEO?

Ever since the birth of the internet there have been search engines – software that tries to find all the sites relevant to a given search term a user types. And ever since there have been search engines, there have been people who try and manipulate them, wanting to be ahead of all the other results.

As for the search engines, all they want to do is ensure their users see the most relevant results as possible. And they generally don’t like it if you try and game the system.

The Death of the Keyword Field

In the early days, SEO was a simple matter. A web designer simply had to list about 10 “keywords” in a hidden field called the meta keyword field which Google used to assess the site. As long as these words also featured in the main content of the site, websites would appear in search results for those terms.

And this led to website owners start finding ways to cheat. If these keywords had to appear in the content, then it made sense to put them all over the place. And so the concept of “keyword stuffing” came about. This was the practise of including repeated lists of these keywords in places where search engines could read them, but that didnt show up for people. Things like putting black text on a black background, or settng your font colour to transparent, or hiding these lists behind images. It worked – for a while anyway. But Google & co inevitably got more sophisticated.

So how do they do it now?

One of the first things search engines stopped doing was looking at the meta keyword field altogether. Nowadays, there are two elements that affect a website’s ranking:

1) The site’s content

Google looks at: your site’s title, its headings, its images, its links and its text to determine what you are offering. They’ve gotten very clever at this, and any attempt to try the old key stuffing trick can result in your website being harshly penalised.

The simple answer is, as Google itself recommends, to build the site with the end user in mind. Ask ‘what would someone type when looking for a business like mine’, or ‘what would a logical title for this page be’? Google likes content that reads like actual sentences. Whole paragraphs stuffed with the the same word you want your site to rank for are tiresome and offputtting to read.

2) The site’s popularity

Google has several ways it tries to work out a site’s popularity. An obvious first one is how many visitors it gets. Next is how many other websites out there link to the site (these are called backlinks) – and, crucially, how popular those sites are themselves. The logic is simple but sound: if a thousand popular, well-ranked sites all independently have backlinks to your site, yours must be a decent one.

The Snake Oil Solution

Unfortunately, just as Google evolved, so did the snake oil salesmen. If you have a website yourself, I bet you get several unsolicited emails a week from companies offering SEO miracles: pure snake oil in a jar. Just as you wouldn’t give your bank details to someone promising it is to transfer you £1,000,000, you should not trust anyone who emails out of the blue and promises you an instant jump to page 1 of Google. This cannot be achieved without cheating, and Google loves to punish cheaters.

Say you did reply to one of these unsolicited SEO emails. You pay over a wodge of cash and, lo and behold, two weeks later, your site is suddenly on page 1 just as promised. Result! But how did they achieve that? They haven’t touched your site’s content, so they must somehow have made it appear more popular. What this company has done is bombard the web with links to your site. They targeted news sites, blogs and directories and slapped in a backlink wherever they could. All of a sudden your site, which originally had 10 backlinks on the web, has thousands.

However, this is an artificial bump. The owners of the spammed sites will ultimately remove the backlinks and your ranking will eventually return to where was… if you’re lucky. Because Google checks to see where these backlinks are and how they came about. They also know how quickly these links appeared. Any site jumping from 10 to 10000 backlinks in the space of a week is clearly trying to cheat the system. Sites caught doing this suffer severe penalties and may even be removed totally from search results. So, can your snake oil spammer get you onto page 1? Yea, sure – briefly…

The Ethical Solution

Port 80 Services offers SEO as part of our web design service, but our approach is to focus uniquely on your site’s content. And not to blow our own trumpet too much, but we’re pretty good at it. The vast majority of the websites we build are easy to locate on the first page of Google for the search terms the owners wanted. We can’t guarantee your site will be on page 1, because there’s no way to do so without cheating, but we do guarantee your site will be made as Google-friendly as is ethically possible.