The Theory behind Search Engine Optimization
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009Web marketing falls into several categories: publicity and pr, advertising, social media management, and search engine optimization. Search engine optimization has been the target of pretty harsh criticism because some people (Web spammers) use invasive and abusive techniques to promote their sites to the top of search results. But many marketers in the search engine optimization community practice what are called white hat techniques. They try not to violate search engine guidelines while adjusting their clients’ sites to improve search referrals.
Search engine optimization is built on the theory that there is a searchable Web ecosystem that contains publishers, indexers, and searchers. In this ecosystem everyone can optimize search for their own own needs. Publishers optimize search to be found, indexers optimize search to serve better results to their users, and searchers optimize search to improve their chances of finding what they are looking for. This concept is part of the basic theory that is used to explain how people use search engine optimization.
Search engine optimization, called SEO, works like any other scientific process. People study what happens when they make changes to Websites and then they try to reproduce those effects. So if you change the title on a Web page and the page gets a better ranking in search engines then you know that changing a page title can help. If you put a link on a page and the site you link to gets more search traffic you know the link is helping.
SEO uses a lot of SEO theory to figure out how to get more traffic from search engines. A lot of sites stop the search engines from sending them traffic. So often an SEO specialist just works to fix the problems on the site. In SEO theory this is called maintenance work. Some people spend a lot of time putting links on other sites. Some people ask other sites to link to their sites. In SEO theory this is called link building.
If you want to read a blog that practices really good SEO theory then you should check out the Best SEO Blog.