The trouble with search engine optimisation techniques is that human people try to “guess” what a search engine wants.

Meanwhile search engines have to fight a war to stop people trying to fool them in to showing results which don’t best serve their users, the searchers.

In an ideal world. nothing would be needed. People would just create content, Search engines would just index it and drive visitors to it, and the cheaters and grey and black hat cheaters would go play poker or Mario instead.

But it isn’t an ideal world, and in order to get a look-in, let alone an edge against your actual competitors (and not some school kid playing fool that engine for pocket money), we need to think about presenting our sites to the end users AND the search engines.

Immediately there’s a huge dichotomy with graphics (and Flash). Users like to see it and it helps them (a picture says a thousand words) while search engines don;t really care and see it as blank space, or non content.

Naturally some search engines are tying to find ways to “see” visual content using a robot, but it naturally isn’t easy or straight forward.

The ALT image tag, was designed to help that, but then of course the cheats spam those with keywords which aren’t relevant, while many good guys forget. Ditto with the image filename as it is with the ALT image tag.

In the next installment in SERP optimisation, we’ll look at how the search engines WANT us to still give them clues as to what the content is. It’s what META TAGS started to do, but then got sidestepped, probably because they were inaccurate, due to either being ignored by the good guys, or spammed by the bad guys.

No doubt there will be a HEAVY penalty for being caught lieing, but perhaps it is more manageable and efficient to let the publishers and creators describe it, and just let the search engines “verify” it is true. A bit like marking written exam papers, vs doing 1:1 aural exams perhaps?

Stay tuned for the next installment on the latest search optimisation techniques.