The way we instinctively think web pages might impress the search engines now, might have been the case ten years ago.
Over the years, search engines have steadily learned how to get an overall impression of the subject and usefulness of a web page, without just using a prescribed ‘marking scheme’. Elements such as the page title, the headings, the appearance of search terms in the copy etc are of course still important, but they’re no longer boxes to be ticked. Miss some out, or approach them unconventionally, and it probably won’t be an issue.
Take as an example headings. In HTML, these are the “H1”, “H2” etc tagged items. Now, we might predict that a page describing an experiment with blue widgets would perform well in SEO if the main heading was “An experiment with blue widgets”, and the secondary headings were things like “How blue widgets work”, “Why experiment on blue widgets?”, etc.
But cast your mind back to school. It’s quite possible that the ideal page about the experiment for real people might be a scientific report whose secondary headings were “Method”, “Results” and “Conclusion”. Would the search engines be helping users if they favoured the web page with keywords in the headings? They would not. And it’s real people’s needs that the search engines are trying to meet.
Years ahead
The first time I met someone from Google and realised that these people were years ahead of the rest of us in their thinking was about 20 years ago. It’s still the same. The way we instinctively think web pages might impress the search engines now, might have been the case ten years ago. Today it’s something that most of us can’t imagine. But that doesn’t mean we can’t create web pages that will rank strongly in the search results. We just need to listen to what the search engines are saying.
And what they’re saying is follow good web design practice, but create websites that are clear, authoritative and helpful. The rest will follow.