So what do I intend when I throw around "search performance"? It's not just a shibboleth to compete with organic marketing and search engine optimization and the rest of it. Search performance is what I prefer to use when talking about search engine optimization, seo, and organic marketing as a whole. Not because I know necessarily any better, but when you think about it, it just makes more sense.

Search performance identifies a good working range of concepts. We can talk in terms of organic marketing, but to a certain extent I don't want to promote marketing. I want to see marketing as an emergent or ambient property of the overall performance of a site and its content in the realm of service to users.

Search performance means fulfilling the connection between searcher and searched. Search performance is the better term for what I want to promote because it describes the ultimate utility of what is profoundly a meta-activity. Search engine optimization and/or organic marketing represent the various tactics used to build the bridge between searchers and what they're searching for across the search engine(s). With the factual opacity of the biggest search engines (Google's proprietary algorithms, for example) and the functional opacity of the rest, the people delivering content through their sites, the users of that searched-for content, and the people trying to measure the effectiveness of both the searching and the presentation of the searched (whew!) can only guess if their efforts are working. Educated guesses, but guesses nonetheless, representing a chasm of knowledge. Even if the algorithms or methods were made public, like in Wikia perhaps, experience teaches that many laypeople and even many "experts" don't fully understand how search engines work--how they "know what to do" so to speak. This does not give us that much transparency. But you can measure search performance. The engines will, generally speaking, not tell you if you're "optimized". But the movement of traffic will describe for you a clear picture of your performance.

Search performance is the measurement of effects, found in data gathered at a remove from the end user.

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