What is SEO, really?
Google should have a good idea, feel free to go to Google and enter the query: “define:seo.” You can verify it, but, Google returns 26 results for the definition of SEO on the Internet.
Most of these are consistent, however, they all focused on the end result of Search Engine Optimization, not what it actually is. Needless to say, very few of them are close to my personal definition.
There are two very different aspects of SEO:
WhiteHat SEO – When you focus on building value for the user and letting all other things fall into place, or at least not trying to artificially inflate your rankings, artificially being the keyword. Building value in users eyes is the first step in properly addressing SEO. The things that I consider to be important will be discussed during the rest of this post.
BlackHat SEO – When the ends justify the means. In other words, doing what ever it takes to get to the top. Similar to a desire for money, a thief steals money so they can have it, they got it in the wrong manner. When the law catches up with the thief and the money is taken away, the thief is back where they started, at the bottom and no one wanting to give them a second chance. Just like the thief, a black hat SEO will do what ever is necessary to get to the top, and when the engines find out and drop them from their index or move them into the supplemental index they start over. Unlike the thief, it is easy for a person to build and develop a new website or persona with no history.
Let’s analyze it further.
First, there are three components of Search Engine Optimization, let’s discuss them:
- Link Popularity
Link Popularity is the number of links that point to your site. What is important about this? It let’s the search engines in on a few things about you:
You may be asking, “Where does PageRank fit in with link popularity?”
Well, PageRank is a determination of a couple of things, 1. the age of your domain, 2. the pages (not sites) that have links to you, and 3. the value of the pages (not sites) that link to you. Understanding this, if you use an algorithmic model to analyze this, you must calculate that every page on the Internet has a default value, every page, no matter the domain. I will stop there, because PageRank is not SEO! PageRank is an indication of popularity, and as in life, just because you are popular does not mean that we want or need to listen to what you think is important.
I will stop here for now, look forward to the other two components of SEO and the SEOpittfall definition of Search Engine Optimization.
For those of you constant readers, I did post about this on Build a Better Website, however, I wanted to revisit this because I felt that there was more information that I left out than I included in the original post. That is one of the reasons for splitting this up into multiple posts.
Click here for Part 2 of “What is SEO?”
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I do agree on the fact that there are two different types of SEO namely black and white. There is one more category apart from this which is called as Grey hat SEO. Things that are new and are doubtful to be declared as black hat SEO fall under this category and depending upon the search engine algorithm you may or may not be penalized for using the grey hat seo.
Dave,
Thank you for your feedback. I do plan on addressing the conept of Grey Hat, but I will hold to address that during the aditional posts on “What is SEO?”