Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become one of the biggest internet buzz-words recently. Everyone is talking about it. These days it seems there's an "expert" around every corner promising all kinds of wonderful things to online business owners. Beware! If you are interested in building a long term successful online business, there are few things you should know when it comes to search engine optimization.
Before we move too far along we need to understand a little about the economics of search engines. This will give us a better understanding of why they behave the way they do and why common Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices will continue to provide diminishing returns, eventually into obscurity.
Contrary to a very common belief, internet users searching the web are not the search engine's customers. Advertiser's are. Just follow the trail of money and you'll see what I mean. Internet users are the "product" that the search engines "deliver" to advertisers. Specifically they are selling highly targeted traffic to their advertising clients. When a user types in search criteria, they are expressing their desire for information (or products) related to those search terms. By delivering ads that are directly relevant to the search results, search engines are in a unique position to capitalize on the concept of targeted traffic. For advertisers, search engine users are a gold mine of pre-qualified potential customers and they are quite happy to pay a premium to get their products in front of them.
So now that that's out of the way, how do search engines (SEs) compete with each other for those advertising dollars? The answer is two-fold and closely resembles the way any marketer goes about increasing sales. The first is obviously to get more traffic to the search engine. The second is to increase the conversion rate of that traffic. In other words the percentage of traffic that results in sales for the advertising clients. So if you own a search engine how do you accomplish these two things? The answer lies in delivering the best search results for any given search criteria. The more relevant the results that a search engine can deliver consistently, the more people will rely on it. This translates into more overall traffic and better targeting of ads to that traffic. Simple in concept... very complex in practice!
A little history lesson
In the beginning, search engines employed some rather primitive methods of determining a web page's relevance to a search query. These methods proved to be quite simple to reverse engineer and as a result "Search Engine Optimizers" (SEOers) where able to use techniques to manipulate the search results in their favor. This abuse, often referred to as SE spam undermined the search engine's main commodity, the quality and relevancy of it's contextual search results. To combat the problem, the SEs developed increasingly complex mathematical algorithms to evaluate pages for possible inclusion in search engine result pages (SERPs). In addition to the traditional "on-page" information that was so easy to manipulate, many SEs began looking at a multitude of "off-page" criteria and giving them an increasing amount of weight in their overall equations.
On-page vs. off-page criteria
There are many different items that a SE looks at "on-page" when it evaluates it. The page's title, how many occurrences of a searched word or phrase (keywords and key phrases) are on the page and their proximity to one other, what the headings on the page describe, etc. all come into play. The chief disadvantage of using only this information (aside from the ease of which it can be manipulated by clever SEOers), is that it tells nothing about the quality of the information on the page. Until the day comes (and it is coming) when search technology and computing power are sufficient to take advantage of "artificial intelligence" to make sound judgements about the quality of a page by evaluating the page alone, SEs will continue to rely heavily on "off-page" criteria. The reason for this is simple. Nothing compares to human intelligence when judging a page's importance. Computers running even the most complex algorithms simply can't do it.
So instead, the bright people who develop search engine technology have realized that by tracking how humans behave and interact with a web page, they can get a fairly good idea of how humans rate that page and the quality of it