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Thanks,
Mat
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Professionals and What They Do For You
Authored by: Mat Bastian
Competition on the world wide web is fierce. With the billions of sites out there, what is a company to do to increase exposure and and gain targeted traffic to thier website?
The answer is simple… Enlist the help of a Search Engine Optimization Professional.
Search engines have one goal… return the most relevant results for a given search term or phrase. A search engine is simply a computer operating on predetermined mathematical algorithms. When a site is submitted, the search engine sends out what is affectionately called a robot, bot, webcrawler, or spider to find and “crawl” the new website. Once a site is found and crawled, it is indexed in a huge data base of web pages for quick and easy retrieval by the search engine appliance. The largest search engine, Google, now indexes 3,083,324,652 web pages as of last months major crawl. It generally updates it’s index once per month, but has begun a daily, “Fresh Crawl” in an effort to keep it’s index of pages as up to date as possible. That’s a lot of pages. As you can imagine, organizing and reorganizing over three billion web pages is no small task. In order to do this effectively, a simple mathematical system must be employed in order to organize pages for indexing and to extract the relevance of a page as related to a given search in order to be able to return relevant results for a given search term. The algorithm that Google uses at any given moment takes into account somewhere in the ballpark of 100 different variables when determining the indexing and relevancy of a website.
The role of search engine optimization, is to aid the search engine and it’s ability to index websites and return the relevant results that people desire when they do a search in a search engine. An SEO Professional accomplishes this by determining what the search engines algorithmic variables are and engineering the web page that is to be crawled and indexed for later retrieval in a fashion that makes it easier for the search engine to determine what search terms the web page is relevant. Sounds simple right? All a person needs to do is figure out the algorithm and essentially, a person can engineer a page to be the most relevant and top returned page for any term searched for. Here’s the catch… When a person is able to break down this process into one hundred simple, easy to manipulate variables, and given the competitive marketplace, and the obvious advantages that high search engine rankings can supply to a company, it invites abuse otherwise known as search engine “spamming”. The shady optimizer is able to manipulate and affect the core virtue of what a search engine company stands for… that being the return of relevant search results. As those results are manipulated in a malicious manner, it minimizes the usefulness of a search engine and effects the search engine companies bottom line. This is the reason we have seen such a large growth in the usefulness and traffic of Google and such a dramatic drop in the some for more easily manipulated and often abused engines such as Alta Vista. The reason Google is able to maintain and improve upon it’s search results relevancy, is that they closely guard their algorithm and change the variables often. This results in a constant state of flux between Search engine optimizers and the search engine themselves.
In a perfect world, companies like Google would be able to freely give away the variables in it’s algorithm and work in harmony with SEO professionals in an effort to bring optimal results to all search engine users. That is simply not reality. There is too much at stake and a top ranking for a given search term can mean the difference between a highly successful company and a complete failure. This is what fuels the corruption and deceptive practices that many “spammers” employ. This breeds intense competition between the forces of legitimate optimization and those who are bent on deception. Herein lies the challenge of the SEO professional.
The challenge of an SEO professional is to effectively aid both the search engine and the company who’s website they are optimizing for in returning relevant results. Relevant results equal targeted traffic. Targeted traffic, simply put, increases a company’s return on investment. It is incumbent upon the SEO Professional to stay abreast of the latest changes in the search engines algorithms. The role of the SEO professional is to figure out ways to utilize the algorithmic structure in the engineering of a website that is in all practical purposes, equal to a company's competitions relevancy, and make the SEO’s website more relevant than the competitions in the eyes of the search engines. By optimizing for relevant keywords and phrases, this keeps both the search engine and the optimized website owner happy. The search engine maintains relevancy, and the website receives that “all important” targeted traffic.
It is also the role of SEO Professional, to understand the complex and ever changing relationships between different search providers. The purpose of this is to be able to cast a sufficiently wide net in an effort to capture as much of the webs targeted traffic as possible, and to drive those targeted search engine users to a company's website.
The value of an SEO professional, lies not only in the initial optimization of a particular website, but in the ongoing maintenance the SEO professional provides. The initial optimization is rather formulaic, the real trick lies in increasing and maintaining relevancy over time and through the constant state of flux forced upon search engines by those who don’t have legitimate search engine optimization at heart.
In conclusion, the utilization of a competent SEO professional is of key importance to a website marketing strategy. SEO professionals deliver targeted traffic over time. There are no legitimate quick fixes when it comes to affordably driving traffic to a company's website. The only sure fire way to do it is by providing relevancy to both your potential clientele or website visitors as well as the same level or even an increased level of relevancy to the search engines which those potential clients find your website through. Staying on top of what the search engines deem relevant and Implementing strategies for achieving and maintaining that relevancy is the only long term solution for success on the web. (of course an off line marketing campaign and perhaps a targeted pay per click campaign wouldn’t hurt either, but we can talk about that later.)
[edited by: mat_bastian at 7:01 pm (utc) on Nov. 20, 2002]
the only disagreement that i had was:
Staying on top of what the search engines deem relevant and Implementing strategies for achieving and maintaining that relevancy is the only long term solution for success on the web.
I've found there are many, many other ways to promote on the internet (ethically) which do not involve search engines and which have an even higher return. These include targetted emailings, newletters, viral marketing, and so on and on. There are perhaps as many ways to promote a site as there are sites.
Richard Lowe
There are perhaps as many ways to promote a site as there are sites.
Hey Rich,
you didn´t say you were a philosopher in your profile. :)
You are right of course, there are lots of ways to promote web sites. But there are certain generic ones that apply to almost all sites. SE are one of those generic ways.
Andreas
I just don't wanna sound wishy-washy.
thanks again all.
The word you want Mat, most every time, is "ITS" - not "IT'S". With that apostrophe in there, you mean "it is," so this line:
"...to aid the search engine and IT'S ability to index websites..."
...reads as:
"..to aid the search engine and IT IS ability to index websites..."
Ok, time to hide under a flame-retardant rock... ;)
<added>
Sorry, forgot to mention that I liked the article!
</added>
duck, again
[6]DUCK![/6]
...that was close. ;)
That said of course, many people here think, I think, that the Google SEO page was a veiled attempt to scare people away from SEO companies, and a section of those also think was that it was a way to spin Adwords. I'm still to be convinced but if thats the case, GoogleGuy may not be running up to your stickymail offering to buy your copy anytime soon!
Nice write up.
A few more for ya:
...company who's website -> company whose Web site
HTH,
Jim
