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A Three Cornered Fight

It is important to remember that Search Engine Optimization is a three cornered fight. You are up against the search engines (although it is better to think of it as a partnership) and their rocket scientists who are continually tweaking algorithms and dreaming up new ways of ranking pages and you are in competition with other websites that are targeting the same or overlapping keywords. To be number one you have to not only produce good content but understand how search engines work better than the next guy and put in the effort to use that knowledge.

These factors make your task difficult but at the same time challenging and exciting. There is a certain buzz from researching some new SEO angle, checking out the competition, applying what you have learned then seeing your site bubble up through the rankings. The reward, of course, is more traffic and, if your's is a commercial site, more business.

It is worth reflecting on the objectives of search engines. For publicly listed companies the principal aim is to make money for shareholders. Forget talk about "not being evil" and such like, they have a fiducial duty their owners. From a user perspective if the search engine can return one page at the top of its results that perfectly answers his query it has succeeded. The search engine doesn't have a duty to list commercial sites in its results and where submissions are free it has no contract with websites in its index. If there are a dozen equally relevant pages it only needs to return one of them.

I mention this because I often hear a lot of complaining about how a certain site hasn't been listed, or how it has been dropped from results, especially after some dubious techniques learned from a forum or a book have been used. Some people even say they are going to sue the search engine, perhaps by starting a class action with other disgruntled users. Rather than moaning web site owners should find out where they have gone wrong. The aim of an SEO expert is to make sure their pages are among the first few results returned by a search engine for their chosen keywords. The rest of this book will show how search engines work and give ideas on how to go about optimizing a web site.

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