Chris Bennetts - Internet Consultant

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and refers to optimizing websites in order to appear on the top of organic results (the listing of sites returned when a search term is submitted to a search engine).  Having your website appear on the top of the organic results means that you will get a lot more visitors and if your site is commercial you can make a lot more money.  Thus a whole industry has spawned around specialists who help you get on top of Search Engines like Google. 

Search Engines have traditionally provided a portal for internet users wanting to find something on the world wide web.  The idea is simple.  You enter a search term (keywords) and the search engine returns what it considers to be the most relevant results for your search.  The problem as most of us have already encountered is that too often the results are not what we are looking for.  Not only are they not relevant but they are not even quality as they are “spamy” websites that offer very little real information.

The selection of what are quality and relevant sites is performed by an algorithm (a computer program) and here lies the problem.  A computer program follows rules and attempts to evaluate websites on predefined criteria.  When a webmaster understands the rules and criteria by which search engines evaluate sites they can try to manipulate things to propel their website to the top of the results.

Search Engines like Google recognize that they need to offer value to their users by returning the most relevant quality sites possible.  Over the past year Google have been talking a lot about “user experience” because they know that unless they reduce manipulation of search results they will fast fall from the Search Engine pinnacle as so many have before them.

A war between Search Engines and “black hat” webmasters has been raging for more than a decade and caught in the middle are genuine webmasters and site owners who for the most part have been trying to do the right thing. 

The Google official line is to tell honest webmaster to simply follow their guide lines and they will be fairly dealt with when it comes to ranking on Google.  The reality is that Google does not care about individual webmasters and websites.  They are commercial enterprise with shareholders and their own revenue streams. They only provide organic search because it is expected and if they could change their model to exclude organic search and maintain their revenue they would do so.  In fact that is exactly what they are moving towards but more on that in a later post.

The thing to understand is that they simple don’t want anyone trying to manipulate organic results.  If you follow their guidelines to the letter they are not going to reward you with top rankings.  Their guidelines are at best incomplete if not downright misleading.  So what does an honest webmaster or site owner do?

Over the past 12 months there has been a fundamental change to how Google evaluates websites that I would estimate that 90% of so called SEO specialists have not come to terms with.  This change has reduced the ability of webmasters to manipulate results and has created more level playing fields.