What Does A Search Engine See In Your Blog Post?

I have always asserted that there are two audiences for any given piece of content on the Internet.

The first audience is human beings such as you and I.  As humans, we can read content and then use other non-written elements (pictures, video) that are presented to further deduce meaning and tone from content online.  We can also “read between the lines”, which allows us to pick up subtle humor and context inferred by an author.

The second audience is small computer programs referred to as “bots” (short for robots) or crawlers that try to mathematically dissect online content so that it can be reported back to a search engine.  A search engine’s robot has a completely different view than that of a human being.

One time while fishing a seasoned fisherman explained to me that very large freshwater catfish have poor visibility but are highly accurate at finding bait in the water.   They use their whiskers and other senses to compensate.  Humans, on the other hand, are enticed by clues such as smell but are also highly influenced by presentation and other visual elements of food.  This is a decent analogy to the differences between human readers and search engines.

Let’s take the following:

“Big talkers often try to compensate for their short comings”

As a human, what do you see?   We quickly figure out that the word “big” doesn’t refer to the physical stature of the person talking.  We also associate the large typeset of the word “Big” and the small typeset of the word “short”.  Then, we understand that this phrase is a “saying” that has deeper meaning versus a more direct statement like “The ball is blue.” Lastly, an astute human might pick up on the grammatical error that “short comings” should actually be one word “shortcomings”.

Now, let’s switch gears and look at this phrase through the eyes of the deep water catfish. . . .a search engine robot.

A search engine robot will see the following:

<a style=”font-size: 300%;”>”Big talkers</a> <a style=”font-size: 150%;”>often try to compensate for their</a> <a style=”font-size: 100%;”>short comings”</a>

A search engine robot traverses this web page in its native HTML format, separating actual words from parts of the web page that might mean something.

For example, a search engine might perceive that the word “Big” is more important than other words in the sentence since it is in a font size that is 300% larger than other words on the page.  A search engine will calculate out the number of characters and try to figure out if there are any “keywords” that are relevant in the copy.  A search engine will definitely pick out the fact that “short comings” is likely “shortcomings”.

If there were a picture of a fortune cookie next to this copy, the search engine wouldn’t know the difference between this image and a photograph of a dairy farm in Wisconsin. However, a human being could piece together the fact that the phrase might have come from a piece of paper in a fortune cookie.

The bottom line is that, as a blogger, you need to be cognizant of your two audiences.

An optimized blog post will balance engaging with the human reader and providing a robot with content that can produce results in major search engines.  In order to understand how a search engine views your content, you have to use an external analyzer that can provide you with search engine insight on your content.

One that we like to use is the free online content analyzer from SubmitExpress.  This online site allows you to submit a URL and it will provide an analysis report.

The following screenshot shows analysis from SubmitExpress on Jerod’s post on tips for optimizing blog posts for search engines.

Can you read through this list of 1, 2, and 3 keyword groupings and begin to derive meaning?  Well, Jerod nailed this post from an SEO perspective.  But then again, he is a professional blogger and this is what he does.

The challenge for bloggers with most free online analyzers is that your post has to be public before you can analyze it. Once you hit “publish” on a blog is the point when the search engines get pinged and it is really too late to go back and optimize content.

Thus, you really have to copy your content onto a static HTML page, run and analyzer against this page, and repeat the process until you are satisfied.  And even if you have the time and the patience to take this approach, you will not be able to capture keywords in your tags or balance your content’s density against content in the sidebar, etc.

So what is a blogger to do?

All I can say is that Jerod had help with this blog post from a new solution coming for WordPress and we have the inside scoop on it.  Stay tuned for more on this topic in the coming week!

Tagged as: robots, Search Engine Optimization, search engines, SEO