Can You Train The Search Engines?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Search engines crawl the web reading pages, indexing them then following links to the next page where it goes through the same process. Along the way it tries to assess the appropriate connections between the search phrases entered by users and the content – it does this using what we call keywords and keyword phrases. Can you train the search engines to read and index your pages in certain ways?

The best way to answer this question is to look at the on page search engine optimization processes to see what, if any, effect they have on a search engine and your ability to ‘train’ them.

Content: writing good quality keyword optimized content is important when it comes to any relationship with a search engine. If you publish fresh content every day, or once per week, current theories suggest that search engines do ‘learn’ your publishing routine if it is regular. If they ‘learn’, you can ‘train’.

Keywords: using keywords in your titles, descriptions and throughout your content is the only way that a search engine can associate your pages with any given query. Is that training? It is one way of putting it.

Links – outbound: linking out to pages of authority is said to be good for your readers. If your content is relevant, well written and links to authority sites you are certainly telling your readers that you move in the right circles. Search engines like these links as well. You are telling them what other pages are relevant to your own.

Links – internal: internal links help visitors find content that is associated with the current page. They also help search engines find pages that are relevant.

Can you train a search engine? Search engine optimization is doing exactly that, training the search engine. You are training them in how often you publish content, what the content is about and how it should be associated to search terms, and what other pages are relevant to the content.

Whilst you may not have control over what the search engines do with this information, if users are finding your pages for the wrong reasons then perhaps you haven’t trained the search engines effectively.