This post is concerned with the phenomenon of Search Engine Optimisation, commonly known as SEO. This is a subject on which I anticipate making a few more posts, so I thought it would be a good idea to start out with a non-technical trip through its meaning, history, practice and, importantly, the way in which it is sold as a service. We can start with an innocent ideal, 'ideal world' view of the topic before we have to incorporate the corrupting influence of the various companies out there selling 'snake oil'.
When search engines were first devised, their purpose was to catalogue all the information on the Internet, in order to help people locate information when they didn't know where to look for it. For the mutual benefit of the search engine, the person posting the information and the person looking for it, the idea of 'meta data' was incorporated into the web pages. This meta data consisted of a description of the page's contents as well as some 'key words' which summarised the pages content. This content enabled the search engine to better understand what the page was about, the searcher to have a better chance of finding what they were looking for and the publisher of having his content found: everybody benefitted.
However, as the web became more commercialised this altruistic element disappeared. Even before the days when the dedicated SEO companies appeared, unscrupulous web designers would aim to outwit the search engines by, for example, repeating the same word again and again in the keywords. The search engines - or, rather, the people building them - got wise to this trick and began to penalise this activity. Since then search engines have had to become far more clever about evaluating a site's content, actually examining the site in detail, rather than simply trusting the meta data. Some people will even tell you that search engines ignore meta data but this isn't true; the description is often used on the search results page and there are many people out there - who know more detail about this subject than I do - who will tell you that keywords are still taken into account, at least by some search engines.
It was as consequence of this that the phrase "content is king" became popular when discussing search engines and it is absolutely, undeniably true that if your site has plenty of relevant content then you have done 80% of the work. The other 20% is in making sure that search engines can find their way around the site in order to process and index this content and this is why elements such as site maps - which simply tell search engines where to find all the pages on your site - are so important.
It is this process of making a website accessible and easily digestible for search engines that I would describe as 'true' search engine optimisation: the site is optimised for search engines. This True SEO also ensures that every aspect of your site is fully indexed and available, via the search engine, to anyone who is looking for it. This means that all your specialisms and unique selling points are made available to your potential clients and customers.
So what's the difference between this True SEO and the snake oil version, which is promoted by these companies that profess to specialise in SEO? Well, the first thing is to look at what these companies offer. One of the first and worst signs is when they "guarantee" to get your site in the top ten on, typically, Google. It stands to reason that this cannot be guaranteed - what if eleven competing businesses hire these services - so read the small print and marvel at the number of ambiguities and get out clauses. The next thing to watch is that they offer to get your site in the top ten for a number of key phrases, perhaps two or three. So, let's say you are selling sports shoes, they might guarantee to have you in the top ten for "athletics shoes", "running shoes" and "sports shoes". If you are reckless enough to sign up, the first thing they will want to do is to remodel your site and its content to reflect these phrases. This gives search engines a skewed view of your site and takes the emphasis away from the finer detail.
A phrase that is coming into use at the moment is 'long tail' SEO and this is the antithesis of the snake oil SEO. Long tail SEO is related to the fact that a significant proportion of, for example, a retailer's sales will not be in his best sellers. (One example of this that I've read about states that less than half of Amazon's sales come from their top 140 thousand products.) This highlights the mistake of emphasising a few key products: long tail SEO is about making sure that all your products (or services) are clearly visible to search engines so they can be indexed and made available to people searching for them.
It's clear, I'm sure, from this posting that I take a dim view of these companies. Quite apart from their dubious ethics, they make our life at Meantime harder. We carry out True SEO and the results from that can sometimes take months to become apparent plus we never guarantee results. Unfortunately, these other companies lead our clients to expect the undeliverable. However, we know that a well constructed site with good content will work well with the search engines and that our clients's will appear - often in the top ten - when people search for their goods and services.
