July 13, 2009

Shedding Some Light: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Posted by Dan Supinski

Let's discuss basic SEO and the positive behaviors that it has encouraged throughout the online community.  After we've taken some time understanding the concept I would enjoy reading what you thought, or if you had an entirely different take on SEO.

Virtual highways are here to stay.

It puts a smile on my face when I think about the simplicity of Search Engine Optimization(SEO).  To give some context let's treat the internet as if it were a highway.  This highway has a foundation, pavement, lines, signs, and other connecting highways.  To improve the SEO for any one website we need to follow a set of rules laid out by Google.  These rules direct us, the marketers, on how to build effective highways and educate us on the necessary tasks involved to maintaining these highways.  The foundation is built with basic tagging, keywords, and descriptions that are relevant to the content provide within our websites.  This is a positive push that gently nudges people to drive within the lines.

SEO takes things a step further by keeping our roads pothole free.  It accomplished this by increasing our PageRank when we add new and relevant content to our websites.  All road-lines need to lead somewhere and SEO encourages us to put signs up that direct drivers to valuable and relevant content.  Google expects us to build signs that point internally, but we are encouraged to make signs that lead outside of our own boundaries and interact with other content on the internet to help educate our consumers.  This basic premise alone has kept the internet from becoming information silos and instead has turned it into the beautiful web that we enjoy today.

Every web has a spider;  Every spider, a trap.

As any spider, Google continues to improve, strengthen, alter, and manipulate its web to adapt with the ever changing online environment.  Marketers and web developers are forced to adapt with this focused manipulation of the search engine algorithms that affect PageRank and highway infrastructure.  The closer we follow best practices the higher our PageRank becomes.  If we ignore the best practices, or try and take a shortcut by putting up misleading road signs, our PageRank drops.  In some extreme cases our highway is disconnected from Google's web entirely.  It delights me that such a powerful and influential corporation takes the time to penalize the players for cheating, or taking unethical shortcuts.  It's brilliant because Google benefits by provided quality to its users and we benefit by gaining PageRank with hopes of being seen by abundant users.

If you aren't convinced by the power of PageRank take a look at this interesting study about the Golden Triangle of Google.

Conditioning, highways, and webs.

If we boil it down, SEO is the classical conditioning of marketers and web developers.  If we perform x then we get y, but if we don't perform x then we don't get y.  In this case, x is Relevant/Fresh/Quality Content and y is PageRank.  Herein lies the simple elegance; if we build a solid highway and links to other relevant highways, while keeping our own roads pothole free, then we'll gain PageRank.  Through this interlinking of highways we help Google create a meaningful web of information that improves all of our chances for higher traffic and more conversions.  It might seem intimidating that we're all caught in Google's web, but it's important to remember that you can do no harm unless you try to mislead the online user with false signs, or misleading roads.

To learn more about Google's web follow me

One web to rule them all.

At this point you might be wondering why I haven't mentioned the other 'game players' in the search market, and quite frankly I don't see any.  If you're new to SEO and are trying to find ways to improve your PageRank then you should focus on Google PageRank. Don't waste time researching Yahoo or Bing.  We're all caught in Google's web right now and need to play by it's rules.  As with all things, I expect this to change as time goes on, but for the next 10 to 15 years I don't see anyone dethroning Google.  Have a different view on SEO? Be sure to share it below.

What do you think?

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