SEO, or search engine optimisation, has become almost a paradox of terminology. While SEO is aimed at websites that comply with search engine guidelines, these guidelines seem to be entirely against building websites with search engines in mind.

Search engines are in no way concerned with the contents of your websites, other than in the sense of what it can offer searchers.

This is why search engines like Google are constantly having their algorithms updated and upgraded to reflect something closer to a human opinion. Consider the search criteria around which SEO marketers try to base the physical elements of websites. Notice how these criteria are based around human response:

Keyword Density

The controversial subject of keyword density. How many keywords is enough? How many is too much? How many different keywords and phrases should I be using, and how do I position them?

Consider the way you might approach an article you’re considering reading. You’d likely start by reading the title, to see if the topic is something in which you are interested.

Next, you could scan the body of the text, certain phrases here and there might catch your eye, especially if those words have been italicized or typed in bold, and this would give a rough indication as to the nature of the article.

Essentially, this is what the search engines are programmed to do. Exhibit behaviour that is close to human as possible, thus more accurately representing the interests of the users.

Relevant Links

Once again, consider how you might approach a real-world situation.

You’re looking for advice on a particular subject and you need to find an expert. In order to find the most well-informed individual you approach a series of well-informed individuals.

In this way you can find someone they all turn to for support or advice on the particular subject you’re interested in and you can approach that authority as the most likely to be able to help.

This is the tactic the search engines are emulating when they check out the sites linking to yours. They’re trying to determine your reputation, how much of an authority you are within a particular field and therefore how much help you will be to their users.

Essentially they are, again, mimicking possible human behaviour.

Site Usability

Search engine crawlers, the programs that find and index websites for the search engine databases, navigate your site, checking where all your links lead as well as how your sites pages interconnect with one another. In this way they find out how usable your site is.

This lets the search engines ensure that all your links actually lead somewhere. The smoother the flow around your site, the better it is for the crawlers, therefore the better for your ranking.

Once again though, if you optimised your website for human visitors, it would already be optimised for the search engines.

The Point?

The moral of the story? Consider SEO techniques, regarding the layout of your site, to be simply optimisation for users. At the end of the day, the search engines are looking for websites that offer their users the most, and they’re getting better and better at it, the time will soon come when we won’t be able to fool them anymore.

The Injection Moulding Experiment

We know that the next few paragraphs don’t appear to belong to this article. At least, it’s relevance is not immediately obvious anyway. However, once you look at it as a kind of SEO experiment, it starts to make sense.

To cut a long story short, we wanted to prove to somebody that we could optimise this entirely unrelated page for injection moulding on Google, within one month. So, with that in mind, here’s everything you never wanted to know about injection moulding.

Injection Moulding

Injection moulding is a manufacturing process that is used for producing plastic parts for various products from thermoplastic and thermosetting plastic material. The materials are fed into a heated metal barrel of the injection moulding machine, where they are melted and mixed. Once the system has mixed the materials, the plastic injection is forced into the plastic injection mould, where it takes the shape of the moulded part. Injection moulding has an application in many industries, and can be used to create everything from the smallest part, to entire car body panels.

In order to create an injection moulded part, it’s necessary to first produce the custom mould for the part. This is usually done by an engineer or industrial designer, who designs the part, after which a mould maker fashions the actual mould, usually from stainless steel or aluminium that is precision machined.

A History of Injection Moulding

The first plastic injection moulding machines were patented by an American inventor, John Wesley Hyatt, and his brother Isiah. Hyatt had also invented Celluloid, improving on the first man-made plastic, Parkesine, created by British inventor Alexander Parkes.

The original plastic injection molding process was far simpler than the injection moulds we use today. With the relatively limited technology available to them in the 1860’s, their invention worked like a large syringe, injecting plastic through a heated cylinder into simple molds for products like collar stays, combs and buttons.

It was not until the end of the second world war, which saw a huge increase in demand for cheap, mass-produced products, that the plastic injection moulding process was improved by the invention of the first screw injection machine, which worked on almost the same principle as modern ones do. This was followed 25 years later by the gas assisted injection moulding system, allowing the industry to become automatic to a certain extent.

Today, injection moulding jobs have grown from their humble beginnings of combs and buttons to producing products for many fields, from car, medical, construction and aerospace industries to a variety of consumer products including toys, household goods, plumbing supplies and packaging.

The Injection Moulding Process

As we mentioned in the first paragraph, the injection moulding process effectively consists of the addition of granular plastic, (via gravity fed hopper), into a heated barrel. A screw-shaped plunger slowly forces the plastic granules into a heated chamber, where the granules melt.

As the plunger continues to move forward, the extrusion of the melted, liquid plastic through a nozzle is accomplished, injecting the liquid plastic into the mould through a tool known as a gate and runner system that controls the flow.

Because the mould remains cold, the plastic solidifies almost instantly, to form the shape, either open or closed, of the mould into which it is injected. In order to prevent shrinkage from the surface of the mould, the quantity of liquid plastic is carefully controlled to make sure that the walls of the product are kept thin.