Source Jockey

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, has jumped considerably in popularity over the last year or so.  Many more people have websites that do the same thing as others, and as a result, when someone searches for a keyword, tons of results are returned, many of which are not necessarily applicable, or not YOUR company.

Enter SEO.  It tries to increase your site’s spot on the web so that more people see you faster.  If you Google search for “sourcejockey”, this site shows up at the top of the list.  In fact, the name Sourcejockey is so unique, that most of the search results are me.  Pretty cool.  But if I search for “Adam Weiss Blog”, I’m not visible until the fourth page, and it’s not even this web site, it’s my Friendster profile.

Now, I don’t really care that this site, my personal blog, doesn’t show up on Google immediately.  There’s no need for it to.  But companies out there DO want their pages to be visible.  An attorney practicing immigration law wants to show up near the top.

So SEO is designed to “hack” the search system, to make the result show up higher.  Here’s how it’s supposed to work–and why it doesn’t.  I’ll take the focus of Google, the company with the largest search volume.  Mind you, their algorithm is proprietary, but this is pretty much the system as I’ve come to understand it:

Back when Google started, it was simply a spider–it would roam the web, looking for links.  It would then follow these links, storing the words from the pages it came across.  When you searched for “attorney”, it would find pages with the word “attorney” on it, including the meta-tags–keywords hidden within the web site to help search engines categorize content.  Well, something interesting happened.  People would start to add irrelevant keywords to their web sites to bring in more traffic.  As a response, Google began to focus more on content.  But people began to add more irrelevant words there.  So they counted the number of times a word was present on the page.  The SEO guys figured that out, and simply added keywords multiple times.

So Google took a different approach–they increased the weight of a website based on how many pages link to it, the idea being that the more people link to a site, the more relevant it must be.  Well, as cool as an idea this is, more and more sites accept comments from anonymous users–and nefarious users began adding spam comments that link to their own sites.  Google geniuses got that, and began a system of figuring out what web sites are legit and which ones aren’t.

Where we are right now is that SEO firms now charge an arm and a leg to produce “real” content that link to their client’s web sites.  It’s more difficult to determine who’s legit!  Either way, the method will probably not last.  Google and the other search engines will catch up, then SEO will figure something else out.  Really, this is a great opportunity for the search engines to just go nuts and charge people to have higher organic listings.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 9:48 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.