SEO, From a Search Engine’s Perspective
SEO has become a monster.
For those of you who haven’t thought about it recently, SEO stands for Search Engine OPTIMIZATION. The “O” being the key letter. SEO does not stand for search engine ranking, or search engine traffic. It does not mean getting lots of links or putting a site on lots of social networks. At it’s core, SEO is simply optimizing a site so that search engines can easily and efficiently crawl it.
Instead of this simple definition, time and again you will hear SEO “experts” talking about this or that linking strategy, or the latest and greatest software to submit your site to all the major search engines and directories. How does any of this fit into optimizing a site for search? Really, it doesn’t… more often than not it has to do with gaming the system.
SEO is misplaced. I truly believe that if a webmaster does his best to make his website open and available to people, he will naturally be ranked high in the search engines. Remember, search engines do not exist to bring you traffic. They exist to bring searchers to relevant sites.
If you design your site and marketing strategy to attract people, no doubt you will soon find you’re attracting search engines as well. Asking (or buying) a link on a popular blog will not only get you visitors directly, it will bring with it Google page rank. Similarly, writing quality blog posts or powerful content on your website will naturally result in Stumbles, Diggs, and other social networking attention.
In Short: attract the people, and the robots will follow. Remember, people design robots, not the other way around. 
Tags: search engine optimization, SEO
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