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12.15.09 Understanding A Search Engine To Better SEO Your Sites  By David HarryThis post has been a long time coming. This is a topic that dives me mad to no end. Can you imagine a web developer that didn't know HTML? A conversion expert that doesn't know what Google Analytics is? How about a social media marketer that's never heard of Twitter? Well, to me, that's what an SEO professional who doesn't understand a search engine is. And I am not talking about understanding search engines in the sense of having a grip on the difference between a regular SERP and a Universal one. We're talking about actually digging into the nuts and bolts of Information Retrieval and related sciences (linguistics, NLP, machine learning etc..). Let us bear in mind that 'search' and 'engine' make up 2/3rds of the job title.... It seems almost intuitive that this is an area of study.  SEO Higher Learning Waaaay back at the beginning of the year I wrote a post called SEO Higher Learning because I wanted '09 to be a year where people in this biz learned more about search engines beyond the usual regurgitation. We then took it even further by starting a IR Patent and Research Paper library.. and ultimately an entire SEO Community where people could take things to the next level. All of this because of a hope to bring SEO practitioners knowledge of search (engines) to new levels. This year (as with most) I've been watching one of the more amusing (and never ending) industry conversations; SEO standards. And it seems almost exclusive that each effort made rarely deals with elements beyond the usual 'basic' understanding of search engines and is more about the known elements we're all fond of regurgitating. NEVER do we see any element of understanding search engines in the mix. Most 'SEO courses' are no different. Each time I read them, I have to wonder; WTF? People are quick to tell me that it really isn't important. That SEO can be done without learning about this stuff. While that is certainly (somewhat) true; it does us no justice. Very few of the educational systems/courses out there neither encourage nor teach much about how search engines work either... I'll repeat it again; WTF? Sure, it's not the sexiest topic and can be a bit of a snooze fest at times, but this is IMPORTANT stuff. How can you optimize for search engines if you've no idea how they work? It's beyond me...I am talking about the pro's, not the 'just make great content' crowd. Being able to build systemic models for maxing out an SEO program is what makes one a professional. Continue reading this article. About the Author: David Harry is the President of Reliable SEO and has been building and marketing websites since 1998. He can be found writing about search and internet marketing on the Fire Horse Trail and is the author of the SEO Handbook series. http://www.reliable-seo.com http://www.huomah.com http://www.the-seo-handbook |
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