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SEO is Not Hocus Pocus!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.Arthur C. Clarke, “Profiles of The Future”, 1961 (Clarke’s third law) English physicist & science fiction author (1917 – )
Some people insist that search engine optimization and marketing is black magic. SEM / SEO isn’t magic at all but is advanced technology. Despite that fact, it does have some similarities with common types of magic. SEM doesn’t have an instruction manual. Practitioners must study and experiment to discover what works and what doesn’t. Since Google makes regular changes to its secret algorithm so that sometimes that which works one day doesn’t the next. SEM comes in black and white (and even gray) varieties. Black hat SEM uses techniques that are questionable or forbidden to get high search engine return placement (SERP) and, in my opinion, should be avoided because of the risk of getting the target site delisted.
White hat uses industry standard practices to eliminate the risks taken by black hat practitioners. The downside to white hat techniques is that the results take longer to occur. Neither approach can guarantee the longevity of the improved SERP which is affected by the activities of others. The way we use Google to identify the optimum search terms for a site has been dubbed “the Google method” or correlative analytics.
If you remember your high school science class you’ll remember the classic scientific method: study, hypothesize, experiment, analyze, repeat the previous four until you find a theory. Correlative analytics starts with massive data collection then skips right to analysis. Speaking at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in March 2008, Peter Norvig, Google’s research director, has been quoted offering the following insight: “All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them.” Google has succeeded in advertising and even language translation by amassing petabytes of data and analyzing them to find successful patterns. Google ”knows” nothing about advertising or language translation.
The Google method has recently succeeded in predicting the existence of previous unknown organisms in the air. An interesting example of this is the shotgun gene sequencing performed by J. Craig Venter. Venter gained notoriety several years ago by nearly beating the government funded Human Genome Project at mapping the human genome. Chris Anderson at Wired Magazine wrote about Venter going from sequencing individual organisms to sequencing entire ecosystems enabled by high-speed supercomputers that statistically analyze the data they produce. In 2005, he started sequencing the air. In the process, he discovered thousands of previously unknown species of bacteria and other life-forms. Venter can tell you almost nothing about the species he found. He doesn’t know what they look like, how they live, or much of anything else about them. All he has is a statistical blip – a unique sequence that, being unlike any other sequence in the database, must represent a new species.
Correlative analytics is used in SEO by looking at as much of the usage statistics as possible to find the most relevant search phrases for a particular website. Those are the search phrases that are then used to optimize.
So resist the urge to call SEO hocus pocus.
