SEO

SEO or Search Engine Optimization, like Religion & Politics is almost impossible to talk rationally about and everybody has an opinion:

• there are some internet marketers like direct marketer Marlon Sanders & Affiliate Marketing's Rosalind Gardner who minimize the importance of keyword research
• whereas others base a great deal of their business around SEO, in particular, keyword research & densities

...so it must be disconcerting for newbies to work out who's telling the truth. From my point of view, both sides are correct...and keyword research may or may not be important, depending on onsite factors such as:

• is your site protocol in order?
• do you have a sitemap?
• have you too many keywords on the page, whether by accident or intentionally...in which you might be penalized by the search engines

...or are there offsite factors, such as:

• is there a media buzz around you (e.g. Paris Hilton)?
• do famous sites like CNN or the BBC want to quote you & link to your site? ...in which case it wouldn't matter what you had on your pages, people would be interested in your site. (You can replicate this to a certain effect with the use of press releases.)

On the other hand, even with the best SEO, are you failing to keep visitors because your site is:

• too ugly?
• too busy?
• too boring?

Really, you can do all the  SEO you like but if your site isn't interesting, you'll have gone to all the trouble of getting visitors to your site...only for them to click out of it quickly, a great waste of time for everybody.

Further...and probably far more importantly, the way Google is advancing, it won't be too long before it will be able to use Artificial Intelligence to make devastating decisions about sites that it doesn't consider are appropriate for its customers:

1    You may have heard mutterings lately about something called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). Essentially, it's a language algorithm, which, although it doesn't yet enable Google to "read" your page, it can certainly "sense" its meaning. As LSI becomes more sophisticated, Google will be able to "read" your text and decide whether it's any good, irrespective of SEO. 

The following video is a 3.00 excerpt on LSI which infortinately ends really abruptly, a teaser from a big-money SEO education course by Andy Jenkins & Brad Fallon. Nevertheless, it conveys the basics: 

Latent Semantic Indexing explained

You can see LSI at work with Google's translation tool, in which you can often get a reasonable, sometimes understandable, translation of a foreign site's page, with the words and phrases created by mathematical probability rather than the Artificial Intelligence possessing an inherent understanding of language. 

Google continually tweaks these language algorithms and grades your page accordingly, monitoring the phrases you use, the "authority" phrases you might use etc. 

2    Even further, Google's Site Analytics (see Website Stats) takes into account:

• whether site visitors bookmark you
• how long site visitors stay on the page that they enter your site on
• whether they then dig deeper into your site
• whether the same IP returns
• any internal links
• any external links 
• whether other people link to your site directly (backlinks) etc.

3  With search engine Artificial Intelligence offering an increased personalization (for those who want it) based on a user's history means that traditional search engine rankings will eventually become meaningless. Like with cable TV, they'll only find web-pages that are outside their loop if they choose to do so.

4    Soon, possibly even the quality of the other domains owned by the same webmaster, (see SEO blog Johnon.com's comments, July 2007) may influence your site's search engine ranking. Developing that line of thinking further, it may even soon be that sites which hide their WHOIS domain details are penalized.

So, in my eyes, the whole SEO question is very complex. It's undoubtedly the battleground for the billions of dollars up for grabs as advertising moves from traditional media to the web...and it's constantly changing. Or is it? Perhaps advanced technology is merely helping put into place the tenets of good essay writing, the logical progression of ideas & the popularity over time of any particular web page.

I'll soon be presenting a review of an excellent SEO product which covers all the basic steps for optimizing your page but until that's finished, I suggest that you visit:

1      The 6 Most Common SEO Mistakes

2      Keyword Research

3      Backlinks