Often times we hear from our clients: “What can you do to get me higher up in search results from Google?” This is often a tricky question because while some sentiments are spot on, we often need to be diplomatic in our approach.

The most straightforward answer we give is that the organic search results are always the “most relevant.” This is a loaded term, but needs to be understood. The engineers and folks at Google are a whole lot smarter than we can ever be, and so we always have to assume that the sites which appear in search results are those that are best suited – most relevant – to the user. If Google could not promise this relevancy, no one would bother to pay for ads. And we know Google’s getting plenty of people to pay for their services.

This system cannot be gamed or overcome through techniques that SEO marketers will try to sell you. There are no magic bullets or tricks you can use to make your site more “relevant.”

There are, however, plenty of  good design practices you can implement in your site, some of which even come from Google. We take these recommendations to heart and always build our sites to be findable.

And guess what? It works. One of our clients, Fleetwood RV, Inc., manufactures recreational vehicles. So what search term could be the most relevant? We found in our analytics that most people arriving from search engines didn’t even need to use it: they are searching for “fleetwood” and “fleetwood rv.” It’s easy and not much of a challenge for the site to appear in those search results, but what about more generic terms?

As of today, without any special voodoo or other questionable attempts to raise their site’s PageRank, fleetwoodrv.com is currently #3 for the oh-so-generic term of “rv.” We know that the products on http://fleetwoodrv.com are relevant to those searching for RVs, and based on our approach of building a site that provides the right information, our client is seeing substantial traffic from Google.