I’ve been talking to a lot of people recently that seem to think that Search Engine Optimization is bullshit. There seems to be a rising opinion that it is all snake oil and if people just ignored the search engines then the world would be a better place.  This is not true.

The whole reason why search engines work as well as they do is because of the huge amount of effort that publishers put into SEO daily. That’s right – without SEO the search engines wouldn’t work.

Why?

Well, what a search engine tries to do is understand the meaning of a page and subsequently display it in the search results when someone types in a query that indicates that they are looking for that content. This is phenomenally difficult to do; even with the best brains on the planet it is currently impossible.

The reason for this is that machine learning isn’t nearly advanced enough to be able to understand at the levels that humans are able to understand.

So the search engines rely on publishers to shape their content so that they can better understand its meaning. Back when the search engines where pretty unsophisticated this literally involved telling the search engine using the meta keywords and meta description tags.

As the search engines and spammers have become more advanced the means of conveying meaning to the search engines has become less overt, but no less important.

RevaHealth.com definition of Search Engine Optimization:

SEO is the science of narrowing the gap between the search engines’ understanding of a page and a human’s understanding.

You will notice from the above definition that this doesn’t include link building. That’s because we regard link building as PR. Just as old school PR was about getting your company correctly positioned in newspapers and on radio, new school PR is the same thing online.

So what can happen if you build a website that solely targets users and not search engines?

The following examples are completely legitimate ways of constructing your website that will have no negative effects on your end users, but will completely ruin your chances of being distributed through the search engines.

Let’s say you are building a listing site similar to RevaHealth.com

  1. You use parameters instead of hard URLs.  If you construct your parameters without thinking about SEO  you can easily create a website that the search engines simply won’t index.
  2. You use JavaScript to dynamically call in the content similar to Kayak. This can provide a very useful end user feature. However, if coded without reference to SEO it will result in the content not being indexed.
  3. You use a template for each page that results in the search engines thinking that each page is a duplicate of another page.
  4. You include useful additional information for the user (for example from Wikipedia) that is not original.   At best this will result in the search engine marking down your pages and at worst they might list you as a spam site and exclude your entire site from the index.
  5. You have a infinite number of combinations of search results available resulting the search engine giving up before they have crawled all of the relevant content

In Summary

Search engines are the number one means of distributing your content. If you develop a website without considering the SEO implications of your decisions, you are effectively giving the search engines two fingers. Don’t be surprised if they give you two fingers straight back.