What is Search Engine Optimization? I've been working with this concept for a few years now.
Everyone has their own ideas about search engine optimization. I arrogate to myself the notion that my ideas about it are worth adding to the mix. ;-)

A word about evil seo Generally speaking, we won't be talking about the truly bad methods: we're all adults here, and I submit to you that the truly outre seo practices, the spamming, the link farms, etc, are an overstated threat to the majority of sites. Perhaps that's my first divergence from the received wisdom. Not because I can't read simple statistics--for example the rising number of those vast "archipelagos" of spam described elsewhere--but because your site, you the person reading this entry on search engine optimization, probably don't use, care, or possibly even know about those shady seo practices. My hope is you're reading this because you're ready to move along and there's little point warning you about really bad seo practices.

So I have in mind a working definition of search engine optimization. Surely search engine optimization is the arrangement of content within a website in order that search agents will find it and conduct their users to it. I think we must consider the end goals of the search developers, to make the search engines themselves stand in for the action of human beings.

Search Engine Optimization is the arrangement of content within a website in order that search agents will find it and conduct their users to it. In other words, the content is readable and "indexable" by the search engine software, absolutely. But it is pointless if the engines do not connect their users to your content. So the act of reading and indexing is done by these systems designed to stand in for human beings. The search engines, and therefore the content they index and mediate, is tethered to human beings.

SEO depends on the real world The proposition is that human utility is the guiding heuristic behind the search engines. Is this not what is so clearly implicated in the behavior of things like Pagerank? The impact of links on search performance? People (want to) trust the words they read to signify the very things they say they are, and hypertext links embody that even further. Thus the people who program search engines will build them to reward content that reflects that trust, content reflecting human needs.

Untethered Search Engine Optimization is bad. I'm saying that "doing great in Google" or "ranking high on Yahoo" or "getting first on MSN" are useless goals without an emphasis on leading users to content. I believe activities like the old "nigritude ultramarine" contest (explored here) have proven that a completely pointless exercise can be performed to "score" in the results produced by search engines. And that helps no one (except hustlers I suppose).

Transparent Search Engine Optimization is good. But what if you aimed through the search engines at real people? In other words, constantly challenge your web site and web application to produce content that people want and need in order to make their experience of the web better.

Do these ideas about Search Engine Optimization work? I don't know; you're reading this, aren't you?

Labels: search engine optimization, seo