When we use search engines to carry out searches on the web, most of us are amazed by the speed at which the results come back to us. What we don’t realise is that these web pages may not be the best to answer our questions or solve our problems.

That’s because the ‘search’ process is fundamentally flawed. It’s based on a false premise. The results which follow from a keyword search should provide you with a list of websites whose content will be the answer to your prayers. Unfortunately, all your search does is display those sites which have used the best SEO and SEO copywriting techniques.

The quality and usefulness of the content is secondary to the emphasis placed on the relevance the content has to the keywords sought. The consequence of this may mean that the best site content for a particular search may appear on Page 10 of a search engine. In effect, this makes it invisible.

Yes, the webmasters concerned should have consulted a professional SEO or SEO copywriter, but maybe the whole set of criteria for success in the SERPS (search engine results pages) is wrong. There are of course ever-changing methodologies and algorithms trying to achieve the ultimate answer to delivering the best search experience.

In the meantime, billions of searches are being made and generating results that are based on the false premise of unearthing immaculately relevant content from innocent enquiries abroad. What surface instead are the seriously massaged results of the SEO-aware.

No-one can blame SEO types for cashing in on their know-how to achieve high ranking web pages. It’s just that the unsuspecting public has to make do with websites that are highly placed only because the site owner uses a major keyword in their URL, or because they optimise each page in the way search engines prefer (not real people). And then of course there are all those so-called ‘organic’ inbound links that are supposed to bestow ‘authority’ on a site.

No-one thinks twice about the fact that these links are achieved by pure manipulation and off-page SEO copywriting techniques. By sending out optimised articles and news releases on a regular basis, a website can acquire hundreds of inbound links by sheer stealth.

The more links a site has, the higher it will rank in the SERPS. What is overlooked, however, is the way links are achieved or created. It’s not a case of the sites that have fewer links being in any way inferior to their maxed-up counterparts. Nor is their content necessarily inferior.

The recognition they achieve via the search engines distorts their real value in the overall search ‘game’. For that is what it is – and probably always will be. Before the Internet – and even today – the most successful products and services were those either advertised or talked about the most.

Companies looking to succeed online, therefore, should dig deep and recognise that SEO and SEO copywriting are essential tools in the marketing war. In a world where achieving high ranking is the Holy Grail, the means of getting there are less relevant than the reality.

For the end user, the message hasn’t got through that the results of ‘search’ may not be the best. In a world where there are billions of websites, we should (at the very least) be grateful that search engines work so hard to deliver the undeliverable dream.

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