by Amedeo Guffanti - New Media Strategist in 77Agency Ltd.
Ok, let's take this approach.... if you are the most experienced French Chees producer, likely there would be many other producers interested in sharing knowledge and ideas with you.
Perfect, Internet gives you the posibility to develop a Blog in 5 minutes and to start discussing how to age an outstanding Camembert. There we go!
The other producers will surf to your blog thanks to word of mouth in order to add their opinions to your description of the Camembert aging process, the more you are able to foster the discussion, the higher will be the number of interested producers reading your pages. Then, some of them will start to send through e-mail the link to your pages and may be, to write post in other web-sites adding links to your pages.
This effect is also known as "word of mouse"... it works exactly like the original one! This mechanism increase the visibility of your websites among the Camembert producers and you become more famous.
Well, if you come back to the real purpose of a search engine: "Allowing people to find the most interesting online page related to what they are looking for" you will undserstand why undoubtedly the best search engines should notice that your pages are the ones more cited online for "the aging process of Camembert". Therefore, if somebody types in Google the words: "how to age Camembert", the search engines will put your pages among the first results!
Easy?
Yes ... and .... No ...
Yes, if you are one of the most famous Camemebrt producer and thus, the other producers are really interested in reading your opinions. In this case, your pages are the most entitle to be the first result in the search engines for this content.
Ok, we spoke a bit about contents, now try to understand contents using the free Tools you can find in the Net!
SPYFU: www.spyfu.com
HITTAIL: www.hittail.com
ANALYTICS: analytics.google.com
Follow the first video above to have a glance at these great tools, most of them are for free!
Using tools wisely can help you in defining how people reach the pages of your website and what contents they were looking for in the search engines. Obviously, it doesn't exist any technology more intelligent of Google... they spend 1 bln in R&D per year... do you think any firm can afford the same? I don't.
Therefore, it is quite unlikly anyone has developed something better then the engines that can substitute the hard work you need to do in order to optimize your pages, but you can always rely on the cutting hedge technologies the SEO experts are using.