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The Straight Dope on SEO
by Aaron Merriman, Feb. 2007
As with virtually all emergent online trends, the SEO bell curve has peaked and just begun that gentle sloping decline into obscurity.
This statement probably contradicts everything you've ever read or heard about SEO.
More than likely, you've been peripherally aware of SEO for the past few years. And you've probably noticed, with subtle anxiety, its evolution from a distant online drumbeat into a thumping, pounding urgency: Get optimized or die!
Can this be true?
If even a fraction of what we've read or heard from SEO providers is to be believed, then this is not only true, it's absolute gospel.
But if we peel back the layers of hype and dissect SEO, we'll find that this answer shifts from a resounding yes to a more reasonable 'sort of,' and in some cases even a flat-out no.
To make sense of it all, we must first understand what SEO actually is. And to do that, we must step back and understand what a website actually is.
An acronym for Search Engine Optimization, if SEO appeared in a current dictionary it would read something like this:
seo \'es • ee • oh\ acr., v. [search engine optimization] (ca. 1997): the process of creating, modifying or eliminating website content in an effort to convince visiting search engines that the website merits higher placement in natural search results than competing websites.
Pretty straightforward, right? Not too complicated, easy to understand. Except that the devil is in the details, and the detail here is the word 'convince.'
What's a Website?
While the Internet at large has a deep and fascinating history, we need to skip ahead from its inception in the early 1950's to the addition of a new layer in the early 90's known as the World Wide Web.
Recognizing the Web's potential as a global clearinghouse of information, its architects refined a system of syntax through which individual "sites" could be identified and differentiated from one another. Under this system, URLs (Uniform Resource Locators, such as www.mysite.com) established a unique identity for each "website," and a new programming language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language) provided a means of creating and customizing each site's content.
Anticipating the eventual need to differentiate sites based on more than just their URL, HTML developers included provisions for website builders to embed invisible information into each "page" of a website. Known as meta tags, these elements provided for the inclusion of a brief human-specified title, description and handful of keywords, each of which could later be captured and sorted to compile an index of sites on the new Web.
What's a Search Engine?
Despite the existence of relatively few websites in the early 90's, it became quickly apparent that the need to locate webpages via queries was vital, and would only grow.
And so the first "search engines" were born — rudimentary scripts that trolled the web, recording basic information about each webpage they visited. This information typically included only the aforementioned URL, title, description and keywords.
For the web's early adopters, this was more than sufficient to assist in locating information; by today's standards, these users were exceptionally web-savvy, and inherently understood the parsing logic required of search queries to produce useful results.
By the mid 90's, however, the nascent web was beginning to experience what would arguably become the most revolutionary and explosive growth in history. Access by the general population grew exponentially, and brought with it a proliferation of new websites — most composed of multiple pages, all of which needed to be indexed.
As the web's majority user base shifted from the tech-savvy to those with little or no technical experience, operators of the few existing search engines — hobbyists who were essentially competing with each other over bragging rights to the greatest visitorship — retooled their user interfaces to better parse everyday language, and improved their engines' algorithms to deliver more "relevant" results to users' queries.
This unprecedented growth also gave rise to an entirely new paradigm: the Internet economy. In addition to its usefulness as an information repository and its burgeoning popularity as a social and cultural phenomenon, the web had become a marketplace.