Hello Reptile Entrepreneurs! We don’t think about it this way, but search algorithms run the world. Whether it is plucking out the best and most relevant information from the two billion websites out there or deciding if your Instagram post will be shown to non-followers, search algorithms make or break your success. If we want to make a living into this digital jungle we need to understand and make friends with these beasts. Today we are going to look at how search engines came to be in the first place (which will be a trip down memory lane for some of you!) and end up with how we can write blogs, construct our website, and write our social media posts so search engines can better use our content to serve their customers. Which, not to put too fine of a point on it, then become our customers.

This is the first episode in a series about internet search engines. This first episode will lay the groundwork to understand what search engines are and how they work. The second episode will be about the all important SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, which is how your website, or even your social media posts, are discovered and ranked. And, yes, these are the skills that will help you with your website, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, or anyplace that has a search function.

How about we start out with a challenge? I hope you have had your coffee!

If you were tasked with designing a search engine, how would you do it? Take away the engineering aspect of that. Not only is that way beyond the scope of this episode, but just the phrase “eigenvector of a weighted link matrix” brings me back to my linear algebra classes and I don’t think anyone wants to see me sobbing in the corner. But we don’t have to understand advanced math. All of that advanced math is doing is trying to replicate the human brain in a tireless software program. The decisions we make without a second thought take geniuses lifetimes to figure out how to replicate in a computer. And designing a search engine is no different.

So, math and computer programming aside, just conceptually, your challenge is – not only how do you find the right information in that sea of a couple billion websites, but how do you find the best information? If someone asks for information on Turkey do you send them recipes or geography or slang or bird natural history? How good is the information from something written in 2001 vs. 2019?

When you start thinking about the problem as scouring through the website code to extract information it may be mind-blowing to grasp even where to start, but, like I said, it is only doing what you already do a million times better in your head. How about we word this in a different way. Many of my listeners come from the reptile community. And, don’t worry if you are from another niche community. This all applies 100% so the talk about reptiles is just a wrapper for the conversation. You won’t have trouble understanding.

But when you decide you would like to learn about a new species of reptile that you would like to keep as a pet, what do you do? Let’s say you are in a bookstore or library and are faced with shelves and shelves of books. Say we want to find information that talks about, say, chameleons as pets. The first thing you may do is search through the inventory of books that have the word Chameleon in the title. I would say that is a good start. It does a great job of filtering out all the books on iguanas, sailboats, and coffee…well, except the books that have creative titles, like the psychology book entitled “being a chameleon in the workplace”. And, dang it, you know there is an amazing chameleon book called “Mountain Dragons by Jan Stipala” which shouldn’t have been tossed out, but was because having the word chameleon in the title is a great start, but is not enough. And, yes that is a real book, and yes, it is the chameleon community’s most gorgeous book.

Now, if you were around in the 90s my little metaphor here brought up some memories. Because the first search engines did things like scour the webpage code to look for keywords in the titles and on the page. Keywords is a term we will get very familiar with. “How do I keep a chameleon as a pet”. The main keywords in that search term are Chameleon and Pet. Keywords are the important subjects and adjectives and adverbs in the search that are extracted to differentiate the website. Obviously, search for all the websites that have the words “How do I” will be a much more scenic trip around the digital world than finding websites that have the words “chameleon” and “pet”. But, getting back to our book challenge. We just filtered through our bookstore for all the books with the keyword “chameleon” in the title and found that we don’t want that to be the only thing we search for because we lost a good book and included some irrelevant books. So, how can we dig a little deeper? Well, how about we analyze the actual words in the book. If I look at the words in the psychology book I am disappointed to find that the word chameleon is used twice in all 500 pages. So that lets me know that that book should be pushed to the bottom of the list. While this Mountain Dragons book says chameleon over a 1000 times in just over 100 pages. Hmmm, okay, searching the title is good, but looking through the content is better! And, yes, that is exactly what the early search engines did. Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos…anyone remember these names? Google actually came pretty late in the game. So, if there were all these search engines before Google, what was so special about Google? Well, because people try to game the system. Being in the first three search results was key to getting traffic to your website. So web designers would do things like putting high traffic keywords in their code. Because of this, we ended up with a website selling surfboard stuffing their code with words like bikini and babe. And this would see a spike of traffic come their way. Now, these people would generally not be looking for surfboards, but who cares if only 1 out of 100,000 stuck around?

Another trick was if you wanted to be the first listing for the search term “cage” it worked really well to put in the word “cage” 500 times on your web page. All you had to do is make them a small font and in white against a white background and only the search engine would see it. This is what is called “keyword stuffing” and people trying to game the system in methods like this were gumming up the works. Why use a search engine if the results were garbage?

This is why search engine companies are obsessively secret about their algorithms. Not only are they the company secrets as to how they do it, but it keeps people from messing up the system by designing a website that looks good to the search engine rather than to the reader.

The huge problem for early search engines was the quality of the results. Yes, you would get a bunch of search results that had the word you typed in, but sometimes they were outdated and you frequently had to wade through pages of results to find anything good. In the 90s we all were used to wading through pages of search results and picking through ones that might be what we were looking for.

This is what Google solved and why, even coming late to the game, it crushed all other search engines of the time.

One of the co-founders of Google, Larry Page, developed a system that ranked search results based on authority. Instead of just looking at the website itself, Larry looked at all the other websites that linked to the site. He grew up in a scientific household and, in that community, you knew which paper was authoritative by how many other papers referenced it. So he applied that to websites. If you ever heard the term “backlinks” that refers to websites that link to you. So, Google’s algorithm, or software program, mapped out the internet and ranked the webpages by their authority in a subject. And it worked. The difference was unmistakeable. The philosophy was to let the web tell them who and what was important. They continued that by adding in a bounce rate factor. That is the measure of what people do once the search result was served up to them. So Google would send you to a site and then watch what you did. Did you click away and go back to Google or did you dive into the site and explore there. If you searched for “Chameleon” and spent 10 seconds on the Chameleon Coffee website, but spent 45 minutes on the Chameleon Academy website then Google stored that information to better serve anyone who typed in “Chameleon” in the future. You can see how valuable this function is. Even with the Chameleon Academy, which is my website. My Chameleon Academy is the only one that is about chameleons. There is a chameleon Academy software coding school in South Korea, A Chameleon Academy on the US East Coast that teaches manners, and even a Chameleon Academy Hair dresser. So Google needed to know where to send someone who wanted to learn about chameleons as a pet or someone who wanted to get their hair styled. The reason why Google is as big as it is is because they figured out how to do this wickedly accurate and fast.

How they do this so fast will be of interest to anyone who is putting together a website. Google, Bing, and the other search engines actually make a copy of the Internet on their own servers. This is called an index. And so they have all the websites that they want to include in their search results in this index. To build this index they have software programs called bots which constantly crawl the web looking for new websites and updates. Upon finding a new website or update they report back and the index is updated. So, when you enter in a search into Google, Google is not searching the web. They are searching an optimized map of the web that they created to allow them to return your results in seconds. There are also ways for you to submit your website to Google or request they crawl updated pages. This is useful to be sure your site is indexed. Though, honestly, I have never had time to submit to Google before they had already found my site and included it. Their webcrawling coverage is frighteningly good.

Now, back to backlinks. Backlinks became a powerful rating tool for websites and so the race to figure out how the game the system went into full steam ahead. People would then create websites to link to their other websites. It became a practice for websites to collaborate – you link to mine and I will link to yours. Entire businesses were set-up to get articles with links to be placed on other websites. And that is still going on today. I constantly get people wanting to put a blog article on my chameleon website. They don’t care that their blog about spring cleaning or making chocolate pudding has nothing to do with chameleons. Their job is to get their client’s links on as many other websites as possible. Of course, Google got wise to all of this. They also ranked the authority of the websites that linked to your site. So if 100 websites with no ranking linked to your site Google assumed that your site wasn’t worth much. But if just National Geographic linked to your site then your ranking just took a jump up. And if I included blog articles on spring cleaning or chocolate pudding on my site, it wouldn’t do much for the recipe site because, even though my chameleon site has high rankings when you search for chameleons, it is abysmal when you are searching for desert recipes. So, even if I did litter my website with random topics it wouldn’t do those other sites much good and my article on their sites wouldn’t do me much good. And the reason why Google will always be ahead of the people looking to game the system is because this is life and death for Google. Website designers don’t care that you get the best results for your search. They just want to be in front of you. So, to maintain the integrity of their search algorithm that brings in hundreds of billions of dollars a year, Google maintains both secrecy and an army of the best minds in computer science to make it so you can’t game the system. So sorry, no shortcuts. You are forced to create a website that has value to the people visiting.

And this is the thing I really like about what Google has done is that they have rewarded us for creating a website that serves our audience. Your website will be ranked based on relevance, use of keywords, bounce rate, and even readability. It will be judged based on how other websites treat you. If other websites link to you then Google decides you hold some authority. Basically, Google has gotten so good at this that you could have a highly effective website without knowing SEO, or all the tricks to optimize your website for the search engine. If you create a website that is highly relevant and useful to your target audience Google will find you and be able to measure that. There is so much for us to learn and go over with respect to designing a website to make it easy for the search engine, but I do want to put your mind at ease. It is actually quite simple. Sure, SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is an art, and we will go into the basics of that art, but if you know your audience you already have most of what you need to be successful.

Now, search engines are not perfect. Website designers have gotten very good at putting on the trappings of being reputable. And this is why best websites aren’t always on top even now. And this is because, in addition to backlinks, Google measures reactions, not quality of content. If people think they have found what they want then the site will rank high to Google. Have you ever been frustrated as a reptile keeper at how the websites with the worst husbandry information come up first in the search results? This is because large companies and designers that professionally make ad based websites can draw the most traffic. It has become a career to exploit keywords and place ads and affiliate links on those websites. Do you notice how you can type in “chameleons as pets” and the first results are websites that have the worst husbandry advice? It is because it is their job to rank on Google to get traffic which can see ads. They do not keep chameleons. They have never kept chameleons. They just make websites that use the keywords. I have the most up to date and comprehensive website for keeping chameleons as pets. But I am not always on even the first page of search results. In fact, some websites that copy my information rank higher than I do! Why is this? Well, There is more to being successful than just knowing how the system works. You have to dedicate yourself to executing all the steps and building it up over time. I am well versed in how this works enough to explain it, but there are people who live this life. And they will be able to work the system better than I will. I have a long to-do list for my website that has been sitting there for a couple years. I admit I can get sloppy when I have to throw together a blog post to support a podcast episode that has to release right now. Let’s not fool ourselves. Every part of what we do as entrepreneurs is a balance between choosing what we will be great at and what we will be good enough at. And it is the same everywhere. If you want to excel at Instagram or TikTok it is more than just understanding the quirks of the search algorithm and the entertainment algorithm, you have to dedicate yourself to feeding those algorithms. And that is a huge expenditure of time. Oh, I know there are people who talk about the secrets of the Google algorithm or the secrets of instagram. The truth is that there are very few secrets. It is pretty well known how these algorithms work, at least on the high level. Of course, once we figure them out they change so we have to constantly be on top of it. The success lies in feeding the algorithms the food they like consistently and endlessly. And we have a whole lot of algorithms in our life.

Case in point, I just sprinkled in Instagram and TikTok without warning. Yes, our social media platforms are infested with algorithms. It was easy in the early days of Instagram when you could hope to see everything everyone you follow posted. And search was easy because people would put hashtags on their image to tell the search algorithm which pictures to serve up to which search term. But things got crazy as the number of active accounts went through the roof. With every account posting once a day and you following 3214 accounts, it was no longer advantageous to just fill your feed with 3214 posts. Some of those posts were more exciting than the others. There are some of those 3214 accounts you like more than the others and if you get a bunch of boring posts in your feed you will get bored of Instagram and go to another app. So Instagram started its own ranking system where the more interaction a certain post got the more it was shown around. The thinking was that if the best, most creative, most desirable posts floated to the surface you, the viewer, would be happier with your experience and would reward the app with spending more time on it. And so the algorithm got very good at showing you the types of posts you interacted with or even spent more time viewing. It got to be so good that some of us would have fun trying to train the algorithm to show us dogs in costumes for example. And then how long until we could get it to switch over to showing us the Eiffel Tower? It was eerie how well you could change your feed with your behavior! And those of us who understood what was going on all enjoyed listening to church youth pastors preach on the evils of Instagram because their feed was filled with scantily clad women. Well, mine just has dogs in costumes. Instagram became a digital mirror to what we desired. The one problem with the Instagram algorithm is that it depended on hashtags, which could be abused. Hashtags are descriptive words following the hash sign. They were suppose to be a text description of the picture so the algorithm knew what was in the picture. Hashtag selection became an art form. It turned from describing what was in the picture and into a selection of what people group we wanted to reach. This provided a dilemma for Instagram as you can’t trust content creators whose entire existence depended on getting in front of as many accounts as possible to accurately judge how worthy their posts were. And this is one of the reasons why Instagram is going away from the hashtag system. It is still there and can be used, but Instagram is implementing a much more robust search algorithm that looks at the keywords you use in your caption and image recognition identifies the image. But, lately, they have grown a wrench in the entire system in an attempt to TikTok themselves.

So, TikTok just burst onto the scene. They weren’t the first app to do short form video, but they did it so well. And, even though they are called a social media app, TikTok is not. It is an entertainment platform. TikTok exploded because their algorithms predicted what you would like and showed it to you. They did this so well the the algorithm sometimes knew more about people than they did themselves.

The point is that whenever you have a situation where a software program is deciding what to put in front of you you have an algorithm. And if you are on that platform you need to know what the algorithm is looking for so that you can make posts that the algorithm will recognize and get to the right people. If you ever have to figure out what kind of content to make to satisfy the algorithm then just ask yourself how the platform makes money. Website search algorithms judge whether the information you have makes people happy with their search results. Notice I didn’t say you have the most accurate information. It is whether the people who get that information think it is the best information. Google tries very hard to make sure those are the same, but you need to know that even if you have the best information you still have to present it in a form that makes the viewer happy with what they got. Instagram and TikTok make money when people stay on their platform scrolling away. So your success will be in producing dopamine hits.

I am going to focus on the search that is done on websites, but the concept of keywords will be important anytime there is a reason for an algorithm to know what your text or image is about.

Keywords are the important words in a sentence that indicate what you are talking about. The trick with content creators is that we need to know our audience well enough to know what they will enter into the search bar when they want to find our content. I am a serious chameleon keeper and I use scientific names when identifying chameleons. But you will notice that my website profile for the Jackson’s Chameleon does not use the proper name,Trioceros jacksonii xantholophus. This is because my target readers are beginning pet keepers and most of them do not know the scientific name. So my target audience will usually use the common name Jackson’s Chameleon. So you will see me use Jackson’s Chameleon in titles, in paragraphs, and in the alt-text of the images. If you remember, alt-text is the text description field of the image. You can fill this in when you post a picture to your website. Alt-text is for the vision impair reader, but is also a searchable field. Now, what happens if I change every single instance of “Jackson’s Chameleon” to “Trioceros jacksonii xantholophus”? Well, then Google would look at my page and present it to people that would type in Trioceros jacksonii xantholophus into the search bar. Those would be scientists and serious keepers and breeders. If I was talking about certain behaviors in the wild or survival strategies they employ in the dry season then the scientific name would be the correct keyword. Because that is what scientists would type in. But if my information was all about what cage to get or how to teach the chameleon to eat from my hand, my audience for that piece would use the common name. And so this is where you have to be aware of the difference between your writing and your audience’s reading. As an expert you talk differently than beginners do. So you have to keep in mind that you need to write in a way that the search algorithm knows what group out there should see what you have written. And this goes beyond just what your audience understands. Even though I can called chameleons, googley-eyed fly zappers, I would use that wording carefully. Once is fine as I am writing for humans, but that wording is a black hole for a search engine. No one is typing google-eyed fly zappers into a search bar. So everything revolves around what someone is typing into the search bar.

Now, our first knee-jerk response is to stuff keywords everywhere. Keep in mind that this content better be readable by humans or Google will take marks away from you. Reaching the right audience is just the first part. The most important part is if they can read it and get what they want. So stuffing your keyword in every sentence will have the opposite effect than you desired.

Keywords get a whole lot more fun when you are trying to create a podcast episode title that has to be short enough to fit on the podcast app user interface and still have keyword value. Keywords are important all over and, in some cases, are a true art to construct. Think YouTube video titles!

Keywords are a cornerstone of the entire discipline of talking to search engines called SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. SEO strategy needs an entire episode for its own and on the second part of this series will talk specifically about SEO strategy and tactics. That coverage will be next week on the sister podcast to this one, the Niche Content Creator episode 3. For those who haven’t heard, The Reptile Entrepreneur Podcast is going to focus on creating a business and the Niche Content Creator Podcast will focus on creating content that is effective.

For this episode I hope you got a feel for the lay of the land. Although we talked about how search engines function on the internet, what brings it home to someone starting a business is that search engines drive eCommerce. Understanding search engines is what will get your product sold. An inferior product with excellent SEO will outsell the better product with mediocre SEO. Let that sink in. 

But for now, start paying attention to the type of results you get when you type in different search terms. Pretend you are a beginner in your niche and type in terms that they would use. Then type in terms an expert would use. Compare the results. Play around with it and you will start to see how the terms, or keywords, you use get you in front of different audiences. So then you can start using this insight when you write blog posts, YouTube titles, or Instagram captions. This is the start of learning the language of the digital jungle.

Thank you very much for joining me here! In closing here I would like to ask a favor. If this podcast is bringing value to you, could you please leave a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or where every you are listening to this show? The reviews go a long way towards presenting this show to the podcast algorithms as a good use of time. This is Bill Strand signing off. Take care of yourself, take care of our reptile community, and lets see what we can build.