SEO - Myths and Mine Fields

SEO – Search Engine Optimization, Myths and Mine Fields

“It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma…” Winston Churchill 1939

What Winston Churchill had to say about the former Soviet Union seventy years ago, is equally descriptive of Search Engine Optimization. Start with a boiling cauldron of black magic; add one part art, one part science and blend in a five pound bag of exaggerated claims and promises and you have the recipe for the SEO soup du jour offered by many practitioners.

This is not to say that web designers, as a group, are dishonest or intentionally misleading. In fact, while there are a handful of truly unscrupulous scoundrels in our industry, I believe the vast majority of web designers to be honest, well intentioned individuals, who possess varying levels of SEO competence and understanding. Of course some possess varying degrees of SEO incompetence and misunderstanding.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

According to the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results.” It further goes on to say, “As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.”

SEO: Moving Target or Holy Grail?

Of course the 800 lb. gorilla in this room is Google, who along with its 500 lb. cousins, Yahoo and MSN dominates the search engine industry with an iron fist. This unholy troika, with ill-defined and often unquantifiable guidelines cloaked behind a curtain of “algorithmic trade secrets,” has become a mine field to be traversed with great care, instead of being a helpful resource to gain exposure for your business. Instead of being a proactive endeavor to increase traffic to one’s website, SEO has become an exercise in risk management designed more to not offend the internet Gods.

What worked in years past, such as meta tags for keywords, may have marginal value with Yahoo, but no longer is a criterion used by Google to determine page rank, unless, of course, you misuse them in some manner unknown to anyone but Google engineers, then you can be left with no indexing at all.

Capricious and arbitrary, the major search engines have become much more than an indexer of web pages. They have positioned themselves as the sole arbiters of worthy content. This not only applies to the proper format and structure, but also to the political correctness of your site should you wish to use Google Adsense or Yahoo Publisher Network. So what do you do?

Related Articles: Common Sense Web Traffic