Internet Flow/Search Mechanism
The world is moving at such a fast pace it’s hard to keep up with the organization of and distillation of information. It’s coming in at light speed and with incredible access to knowledge about anything from the reaches of the past to the future to what’s happening NOW; you are no longer in a peaceful un-bombarded atmosphere in modern times. Information is rampant and needs to be tamed, filtered, distilled down to just what you need. Or to what the end reader needs if you’re a content creator.
Enter Books…
The problem comes in when the information you want is buried under a lot of other information (early internet searches come to mind). Enter books to organize concepts into concentrated bytes within a niche concept. This is going back to before the internet.
Books are great but sometimes you need information now to solve a problem before it gets worse. Thumbing through books takes time and often leads to a long research session that may expire your ability to solve the problem in time.
Enter Internet Search Capabilities…
In comes the internet to bring you not only the power of books but the power of search within them. Search has culminated into a powerful way to access the data you need when you need it. Google and other search engines force the masses to comply with guidelines that allow the data to become organized locally for the reader, but also through synergy with other data through common themes.
Enter Keywords…
Now that we can scan over a book using keywords (kindle for example) to find the data we need as we would on Google, we can empower our library of books digitized, and synergize that with the power of the web.
With the algorithms and cooperation of all things involved from the blog owner to the company selling a service or product, to the casual or hardcore news sites; they all employ the E-A-T guidelines Google recommends (I mean we’re still in a democracy right?).
If We All Do Our Part… Synergy is Magical…
When everyone does their part to create their sites (internet real estate joining a network of literally the world) following those guidelines on and with any off-site content marketing efforts) we all win. We can partake in Google’s world, or we can do what we want, but most of the world is getting traffic from search engines so if you want to be in the game, get that traffic, then you need to play ball.
The rules are about formatting the product (content/information), and formatting the site delivering it (shipping container?) are there to make the whole wheel and all spokes connected to it work and synergize to both help the researcher/reader and the people who want to get their content in front of eyeballs (or ears for the blind using PC’s that read your content to them).
Evolution of Search to Precedence
Google has created a system so efficient, so useful, so get through the crap and right to the information you need, kind of thing, that all can participate in (and extract power from) it. Everything from how your content/context is formulated to formatting of the article to how detailed it is to how many words are used are variables you need to consider.
When a lot of people agree to participate in a system, and Google agrees to make that process efficient, the power of organization becomes new precedence. To join in on that precedence, you need to help the group and yourself out- learn how it all works and build your format accordingly. The rewards outweigh the inconvenience this may cause.
Google is the Machine; Your Content is the “Ghost in the Machine”
Your site needs to essentially be formatted to plug effortlessly into the search engine machine’s algorithm and that requires attention to details and even surrender to formatting standards.
The algorithm is trying to make sure all is compatible both with the search engine’s ability to quickly assess the value of your site (the content itself is the value the site is the mechanism to deliver the content) to the customer.
Once received, the customer will get value out of it both from the context (content), and the ease of being able to navigate your article to see if it’s going to be what they need before they read everything to discover it’s not). They may only need one piece of your article, which they will find under a quickly found subtitle explaining the paragraph below it has a particular answer.
There is no need to read all they already know so you save them time this way (making subheadings, bullet points, and titles that inform potently what the paragraph will contain in the form of information they need.
Many online marketers get upset when Google’s guidelines don’t fit neatly into their designs or concepts. They feel like Google is being unfair, but in reality- you don’t have to use or comply with anything- You just have to if you want to get on the search engine technologies’ ride.
What if Books Weren’t Filtered and Anyone Could Publish Without Attention to Formatting, Details, and Accuracy?
A system is the chaos to order Engine. It’s the way to sort the waste of time to efficiency of time concept. You want to find a book and know basically that others found it useful, especially other authors! The system is in place to assure you don’t have to rummage to find information. Remember trying to find information in the 90’s? Even the search engines hadn’t figured out how to properly sort data- because it couldn’t read it yet!
Think about it. What would happen if books were not edited, there weren’t organizations like the New York Times Best Seller List to filter out all but the most useful, backed by facts that are checked within the books and bibliography, and over all what if there wasn’t a filter?
You’d be bombarded with books that were hard to read, overzealous, unchecked for accuracy, nobody reviewing or giving you information about the value you will get. You’d often find books too thick with scientific studies or others too simple (what you already know from common sense). You’d want a way to know this book is written for you- someone at a certain level of comprehension. You’d want to be able to search a few books on a topic, only worrying about what your questions are, not how are you going to dig through this random data?
You’d be stuck rummaging through books like you look for clothes at a thrift store.
Keep hands inside the car at all times, fascen seat belts and enjoy the ride, but follow the rules. Like a roller coaster ride, the precautions (keep all your valuables off the ride so you don’t drop it, then inevitably someone doesn’t listen and lose their cell phone etc when the ride does a loop de loop).
In this case, it means leave bad content, formatting that is incompatible, or shoddy work off the search engine ride (don’t post it!), because on this ride, that cell phone that falls out, hits you in the head when the coaster circles back out of the loop (or hits someone else).
Breaking that rule wasn’t just inconvenient- it affects things after the ride is over. If Google doesn’t like your content, it deindexes your page/site, and the ride is over- by omission to the search results.
Guidelines, Well… Guide You To What Works
You may not realize why but the guidelines are there for a reason, in fact, they’ve been evolved substantially over the years.
Google even at one time did a mass operation to scan all old and new (offline/physical to digitized) books into the search (which caused controversy with copyright) but the resulting changes to the algorithm due to the data scanned, actually made the internet search engine smarter, more efficient, more articulate.
They scanned entire BIG Libraries of books to teach the AI/algorithm to read and comprehend to some degree, through books, search and many other things including what YOU and others do in the process of getting your site up and asking Google to “index” or look my page over and put it into the search machine (search results).
In Conclusion…
Get in the game. Learn the guidelines. Apply them. Keep them up to date. Make your peice of the Search Engine Puzzle fit into the overall scheme, and benefit from the power that is today’s internet marketing nexus- Search engine marketing/content marketing.
Good Luck!
