No, I’m not going to tell you that we’ve uncovered new magical secrets to make your website zoom up the Google search rankings. People who do tell you that, especially when they charge a hefty hourly fee to do it, are lying to you.

I’m just pointing to a terrific article by New York Times business writer Saul Hansell (”Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine“) where he was actually allowed inside Google’s Building 43, the closely-guarded facility where Google engineers tweak the mathmatical algorithm that drives Google’s search results. As the article points out,

“‘Expectations are higher now,’ said Udi Manber, who oversees Google’s entire search-quality group. ‘When search first started, if you searched for something and you found it, it was a miracle. Now, if you don’t get exactly what you want in the first three results, something is wrong.’”

Hard-core search enthusiasts are always looking for any gleaned insights into the latest tweaks to Google’s code. Those who claim to have more are, again, playing loose with reality. According to the article, here’s a synopsis of how a website becomes listed on Google:

“As Google compiles its index, it calculates a number it calls PageRank for each page it finds… PageRank tallies how many times other sites link to a given page. Sites that are more popular, especially with sites that have high PageRanks themselves, are considered likely to be of higher quality.

“Mr. Singhal has developed a far more elaborate system for ranking pages, which involves more than 200 types of information, or what Google calls ’signals.’ PageRank is but one signal. Some signals are on Web pages – like words, links, images and so on. Some are drawn from the history of how pages have changed over time. Some signals are data patterns uncovered in the trillions of searches that Google has handled over the years.

“Increasingly, Google is using signals that come from its history of what individual users have searched for in the past, in order to offer results that reflect each person’s interests.

“Once Google corrals its myriad signals, it feeds them into formulas it calls classifiers that try to infer useful information about the type of search, in order to send the user to the most helpful pages. Classifiers can tell, for example, whether someone is searching for a product to buy, or for information about a place, a company or a person.

“These signals and classifiers calculate several key measures of a page’s relevance, including one it calls ‘topicality’ – a measure of how the topic of a page relates to the broad category of the user’s query.

“The sites with the 10 highest scores win the coveted spots on the first search page, unless a final check shows that there is not enough ‘diversity’ in the results. ‘If you have a lot of different perspectives on one page, often that is more helpful than if the page is dominated by one perspective,’ Mr. Cutts says. ‘If someone types a product, for example, maybe you want a blog review of it, a manufacturer’s page, a place to buy it or a comparison shopping site.’”

We’ve learned a lot over the years on how to write, develop, and build websites so they are friendly to search engines. But looking at SEO is secondary to designing with the user in mind first. For professional firms, especially local and regional ones, a lot more traffic is going to come from your site directly via old fashioned referrals. Ease of navigation, compelling content, and client interaction are key points for your site design. If you let us do that — and we are very good at it — the search engine traffic will follow.

If you work in the world of services marketing, Seth Godin’s blog is a must-read. It’s full of the sort of everyday observations that many marketers overlook from their insider perspective. It is a collection of posts about the forest, so to speak, not the trees.

One of his latest posts, “The Blind Squirrel Problem” retells his observation in a local store recently when a shabby student walked in aimlessly looking for a summer job. The store’s owner politely turned him down and Seth watched as the young man “headed across the street to more rejection at the drug store.”

Presentation – be it an ad in Times Square, a business card, a website, or an interview suit — is crucial to success. In marketing we often say “perception is reality.” Without adequate preparation, the perception is never going to be what we want it to be. Without stopping to check our plan against reality, we risk perpetually being a blind squirrel.

Seth concludes his parable with a word to the wise:

“Even a summer job is 400 or more hours of work. I wonder why he didn’t bother to invest three hours in advance, looking for a job worth doing?”