Understanding the internet; stepping into digital ecosystems - search engines
Basics in understanding search engines: Campaigning for truth: Growth hacking for success
No this is not a chapter that teaches you what the internet is or where and when it was invented. That information is nice but it is freely available on any decent Google search on the subject and is not the reason you are here right now reading this. And well if I have to explain how you got here then……! You want to know how to get your site, argument, charity or cause noticed, maybe making you money, gain you subscribers or supporters, and so on. You don’t need a history lesson for that.
So back to the question, how do you do this? How do you get your “thing” noticed in a busy, noisy digital world?
First off let's say that I am considering a bit of a digital experiment in the world of digital marketing. And I am thinking of using my site to do it. The reason being is that over the last few years on SleeplessDystopian.com I have done very little in the way of promoting and marketing the site. Mainly because I have been doing other things, and had different interests and life events. But that seems a bit of a waste. I mean this is a great potential platform for me and others to promote views, bring about change, and even potentially earn some income in the process.
The thought process is that while I talk to you here about digital marketing, digital ecosystems, and using behavioural and psychological insights to get attention, attract and convert your visitors into potential paying supporters, I intend to show as I go. Showing you what works and what does not, for me, what gets attention, what gets results. In the spirit of open source, I am aiming to have a free information source that you could use to your advantage for your digital project.
Well, first a basic understanding of how a search engine works will help you no end. I am not talking about the highly technical garble that will leave you confused and bang your head against the wall in boredom instead, I am talking about how searches work and why they work, and why one website comes up above another. Together with the role of social media and other digital platforms at your disposal.
As I have stated a few times previously my background before internet marketing was as a manufacturing & design technician. As an engineer, you develop the skills and ability to take products apart and rebuild them. You develop the capability for doing this mentally by just looking at something and breaking down its component parts and then almost always later physically breaking it down as well. It becomes part of your nature to take apart everything, most of the time just mentally, to visualise how it works. From computers to car engines, to the internet and how people think; you want to know how something works and ultimately improve it. You want to hack it. Now I had never had an interest in the hardware side of things and whilst I am ok with hand tools, I preferred figuring out how to reverse engineer the way people think as a Behavioural Hacker, never an official job title but a cool one I would have liked.
So, when I came across the internet, around about 1998 just as it was getting started, I wanted to understand how it worked or at least why out of 800million web pages one came up above the other. Mainly at the time because I wanted to make some cash selling tools on the internet. Now, this might sound like a big job, and to a degree, it was not so much just a big job, and it was, but it was also a job that required understanding a range of basic principles. From how computers, databases, programming, and software work and the way these elements of the internet “think” and react to each other. As well as how the people that use it think. It is debatable how much of the Ai in search engines or anywhere else think for themselves truly, but they do “think” or look for an answer to questions and tasks we set them. If you understand why a database or computer will do what you ask it to one minute but not the next you are on the way to understanding the internet and how it works.
It’s not me, it’s you!
In the case of computers, databases, and software nine times out of ten that statement is true. It's not the equipment, database, or software that’s at fault it's you. It’s us the human beings. Yes, like it or not it’s true. If your search engine is bringing back results for something, you were not looking for. Or if your computer screen is freezing more often than not it is something you have done, it's not the software, system, or equipment you are using, most of the time, sometimes it is, and you just need a new laptop. And if it is not you then it is something some other human has done, like the guys in the IT department that have gone overboard on antivirus software or web monitoring tools locking everything down or watching you! Are they watching you now? They are always watching gathering data but nine times out of ten that data only becomes valuable in retrospect. I digress.
The computers and the software will do what we ask them to within the confines and boundaries of their programs and the data stored within them. Search engines and social media sites are no different.
Your computer doesn’t just sit there sulking and refusing to do anything because you shout at it; it doesn’t do what you want because you haven’t asked it in the right way. No, it's not just a stubborn child, it is confined to what it can do in relation to the data stored in it or in the locations it has access to. When you understand this, you know the basic principle of technology. Computers and the internet are not intelligent in the same way humans are (yet), they hold and have the knowledge, they are very quick and very smart but they are not able, for the most part, to understand the ambiguities, the metaphors and the deeper meanings of things as we are. They cannot make smart decisions outside the boundaries of logic or even the biases of their programmers. They are getting scarcely better each day and where previously they could not discern when you had made a mistake or asked an incorrect question in a search now, based on the billions of bits of data they hold about you and people like you (we will come to that later in more detail), you get back a lot of options of “did you mean…”. Again something that is helpful to the user but also to the SEO and digital marketer (again we will come back to this later in more detail).
With artificial intelligence and machine learning, which search engines like Google now employ, they are starting to learn without the need for programmers to program them. These AI’s, and machines are learning from the positive and negative reactions or actions the users take in relation to the results that they receive back from the specific enquiry entered. But for the sake of this guide let us keep things simple. Computer programs, operating systems, and so forth work as designed, as programmed, and are limited only by their programmer’s ability, the technology which includes processing speeds, and the data held within them or to they have access.
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Authors side note: I think it is interesting that I use ‘they’ to describe computers and AI. I am doing it on a subconscious level and have now realised it as I write. Not that I intend to stop doing it, but it says something about the way I see search engines, AI, and computers. At a time when Google engineers are starting to come out and say they believe the AI they are working with is sentient, it is interesting to see or realise, in me how this cognitive leap could be made and bias could lead to filtering, distorting, or deleting information that comes to me based on them. We all need to constantly assess our programming after all.
Now back to the chapter.
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Search engines are the same, what you put into them is what you get back. The primary focus of internet marketing used to be getting to the top of search engines, that is where I came in as an SEO guy. Because as you are no doubt well aware when you enter the words of your search into the box, you can get back hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of results. If you have not had an experience with search engines, then I suggest before you even think about starting an online business, becoming a self-published author, or digital activist, or tackling negative social norms through digital warfare that you spend a few weeks searching the internet for products, services or its endless stream of useful and useless information. Oh, and porn, there is lots of porn.
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Authors side note (again): Or you do the wise thing that people like me don’t seem to be able to do, you put the smartphone, tablet, or laptop away and you go offline, and ignore the murky world of digital marketing or living in digital ecosystems. You will be a lot happier and big tech and corporate capitalism, let alone government agencies will have far less data on your than they do on me.
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I intend now to explain the basics (and I mean basics) of how search engines work because these need to be understood and used at a later date when thinking about marketing and promoting your site and vision. As I have hinted at before, though, gaining an understanding of how people think and interact with these digital ecosystems will be just as key to your success. We will delve into that further at a later date.
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A search engine works by you the user/searcher typing in what is known as keywords or key phrases into a search box with the aim of finding a website that may hold information, products, or services you are after. The search engine then scours sites indexed in its, or other search engines, servers to find the places that use these words, or those most related to the subject matter search, by using a range of semantic and linguistic indexing rules for relevance, they combine this together with a closely guarded quality scoring system and something which has the tacky name link juice. Link juice is the quality and quantity, the former being more important than the latter, of links from external sites pointing to the one you are after.
To be seen the website owners need to make their sites as focused as possible on their relevant subject matter to make sure that the search engine spiders can find them when crawling their sites in relation to these searches. They also need a good understanding of the rules or algorithms, that search engines use for deciding as ranking factors. For example, if you were after a plumber in Devon you might type in Plumbers in Devon if you were after information on the Russian Revolution you might type in “info on the Russian Revolution”, and hopefully a load of sites will pop up on a list, and they will be sorted by relevance, quality, and link juice. The more competitive the industry or market is, the harder it is to get ranked high enough to get noticed. We will cover how you tackle this in more detail in the future but one quick question to think about is “what makes what I am offering (argument, product, service, book) different from all the other websites out there?”, what are my niche? Again, as you read so often from me here, we will look into the importance of niches in future chapters. But they are very important for a raft of reasons.
What happens here is that a search engine spider will search all the websites in its database to find the ones that most relate to the search terms or keywords you have typed in, and then they will sort them by what they feel has the most relevance, best quality and best social signals of being approved content. This is again important later on.
Together with the organic results, you may also have a range of paid-for ads on the search engine page that will be for companies offering a service or product that relates to the service or product you are after.
That’s the very basics of how search engines work. And I mean basics. I have left so many items out, but I am considering that the reader has discernment and is more interested in getting to the heart of the matter and learning how to get their website at the top of those search engine rankings in the first place. Patience though as we are not quite there yet.
My experience in internet marketing soon became that of an SEO engineer, although I preferred the term SEO hacker, which wasn’t very client-friendly. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. As an SEO Engineer/Hacker I would reverse engineer competitive websites from those of my clients to find out how they worked and what made them perform better than others on the search engines. I would then take that information and run a full technical review of the client's site to code it and refine it to outperform the competition taking many different factors into the equation.
Search engines have with their programs algorithms that help define the worthiness of a site, as mentioned after the spiders search the site to then decide whether it is relevant to the search. These algorithms will decide how the site will be ranked, or not, within the search engine results page, whether higher, or lower than the others in relation to the search in question. Some sites break the rules (rules that are set out in the secret algorithms and all but impossible to find out), this was/is called Black Hat SEO and I will put my hand up I have played my part in that for my personal sites in the past. It can be a fool’s errand though because as smart as the Black Hat SEO Hackers like me might be this can end up with the site you are working on not being listed or indexed at all. Or even worse, have their sites blacklisted.
The reason I like the phrase SEO Hacker or Black Hat SEO Hacker is, apart from the fact it sounds cool, because to me, back then and even now to some degree, I saw this as a game. As such, I focused more on getting to the top of the search engines than on the content and user experience of the sites I was working on, a massive mistake. But you will soon learn that as technology does not sit still neither does search engine optimisation or digital marketing. You have to adapt.
These days I have learned from the hard lessons of the past. And you have to learn fast. Now I focus on data-driven digital marketing optimisation and behavioural communication, why? Because to hack the modern digital ecosystems and get not only your site to the top of Google but visitors from social media and elsewhere you need to do more than just focus on search engines. However, it is a mistake, in my humble opinion, to forget about it altogether as many have turned to social media and paid advertising as something that they feel they have more control of. But here is the thing. Search engines still drive, or can, a vast about of visitors to your website. Visitors are not just responding to push marketing but are being pulled to your site because they are looking for a product, book, service, or cause like yours.
Combined with social and all other digital channels in today’s world you need to look at optimising your entire digital marketing toolkit and you need to gain a deep insight into how your potential visitors think, what they are after and how you can persuade them to take an action you need them to take. This is where data-driven digital marketing and behavioural communication can give you that leap forward.
This is a live book writing project. Copyright is protected. It is a first rough draft so I would love to hear any feedback from readers. When the book is launched all that are signed up for this substack project will be sent a free Kindle copy of the book as a thank you for subscribing.
This project is part of the SleeplessDystopian.com writing projects.
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