Search ranking: three things count. The rest is folklore.
An audit lists dozens of “errors” for you. You fix them all. Six months later, nothing has changed — most of them were not errors.
Published on 4 August 2026 · 6 min read · by the SkyNet technical team
Three recipes
that move nothing.
The “keywords” tag
An invisible line, in the code, listing the words you want to rank for. Google publicly announced, in 2009, that it did not read it. It survives in many sites, as useless as on the first day.
Keyword density
Repeating “business telephony” a certain number of times per page. But a search engine looks for the page that answers best: repeating the same phrase fourteen times does not answer better, it just reads worse.
The ideal length
There isn’t one. Three hundred words that answer “will my lift stop when copper ends?” are worth more than two thousand words about everything. Length is a consequence, not a goal.
The sorting comes down to one sentence. Would the fix make the page more useful to a human being? If not, it is folklore.
Three levers.
None of them is a trick.
They have one awkward thing in common: they require work on the site itself, not a setting slipped into the code on a Friday evening.
One page,
one question.
Nobody types keywords. People type questions, in their own words.
“Do I keep my number if I change operator?” A page that answers that precise question — in its title, in its first sentence, the answer before the explanation — has a chance of being found. An “Our solutions” page that talks about everything has none: it answers nothing in particular.
The trap is always the same. The site is organised like the company’s org chart. It should be organised like the list of its customers’ questions.
And you already have that list. Open the last fifty incoming emails and the support tickets: those are the real questions, in the real words. No tool provides them.
Standing up, on a phone,
on whatever network there is.
Not at the office, not on a large screen, not on fibre. Those are the conditions in which a page has to be judged — and that is rarely where it gets tested.
Speed,
and stability.
Two things are at stake there, and they are confused all the time.
Speed : the time before anything readable appears. It is lost on images that are far too heavy — three thousand pixels wide displayed in a four-hundred-pixel frame — and on third-party scripts (programs loaded from other sites: banners, statistics, chat). Each one adds a round trip.
Stability : does the content jump while the page loads? A font arriving late, a banner slotting in, an image with no declared dimensions — and the button moves under the visitor’s finger.
None of this is fixed with a keyword. These are construction decisions: what you refuse to put in the page.
A fast site,
it is decided further down.
We operate that part ourselves. Our services rely on ISO 27001 and HDS certified data centres located in France.
The proof,
or nothing.
A site that does not say who it is reassures nobody — neither a human, nor a search engine.
In France this is not optional: the Act on confidence in the digital economy, known as the LCEN, passed in 2004, requires a legal notice identifying the site’s publisher. Yet many company sites have an empty page, or one copied from a template.
- The company name and the full postal address
- The registration number and the publication director
- A telephone that rings — and the same everywhere
Two different numbers on the same site, two addresses that do not match: that is a doubt for the reader and an inconsistency for the machine. It is not a trick. It is what makes it possible to check that you exist.
Being clicked,
or being cited.
Search engines answer more and more directly: they build a paragraph from several pages, and cite their sources. Nobody cites a rambling page. What gets cited is a precise sentence, dated, attributable.
“The technical closure of batch 3 is set for 31 January 2027” can be quoted. “We support you in meeting your challenges” cannot be quoted: it says nothing.
The side effect concerns us all. A page that invents a figure to look serious becomes a risk: it will be picked up, then checked.
Five questions
to ask before signing.
Which questions?
Which real question does each page answer? Ask for the list, in writing.
Who writes?
Who writes, and from what material: your tickets, or a generic template?
How heavy is the page?
The real weight, and the list of third-party scripts loaded. Each one has to justify itself.
Who owns the site?
If you leave tomorrow, do you take the content and the domain name with you?
What is guaranteed?
Be wary of any answer that contains a position and a date.
We promise neither a ranking position nor a deadline. No one honestly can: the ranking depends on pages we do not write. What we can write into a scope: pages built around your real questions, fast and stable on a phone, hosted in France. The rest goes by another name — advertising — and that has to be said.
What to remember
- The “keywords” meta tag, keyword density, ideal length: no effect.
- One page = one question actually asked. Your emails and your tickets contain the list, free of charge.
- Speed and stability on a phone are build decisions.
- The proofs — company name, address, registration, telephone — reassure the human as much as the machine. A figure that differs from one page to the next destroys them.
- Being quoted by a generated answer requires precise, verifiable sentences.
Does your site answer a question?
Send us its address. We tell you, page by page, which question each one answers — and what a visitor really sees on a phone. It is a written opinion, not a quote in disguise.