The Ubiquity of SEO in a Competitive Environment
Search engine optimization is still thought of as a half-con, half-crazed snake-oil selling industry by many people. It doesn’t help that unscrupulous Web spammers employ the search engine optimization techniques used by legitimate business sites to push their own iffy content high into search results. Michael Martinez, a leading SEO theorist, says that often the only difference between “white hat” (good, ethical) SEO and search spam is excess.
Although search engine optimization is unregulated, the United States government has sponsored a series of SEO Webinars in the past to assist government Website operators in adopting better practices for government Website design. These better practices focus on making Websites more crawlable, better organized, and more useful to people who search the Web for information. The need for government Web seminars underscores just how much of the government Web is hard to search.
When a long-time SEO specialist offers SEO consulting service, he enters into a practice not unlike that of an attorney. The SEO specialist acts as an advocate for clients in the court of public opinion. Search engine optimization today is focusing more on building brand value for Websites because in late 2008 Google CEO Eric Schmidt signalled that Google thinks brands are important to the Web.
Good search engine optimization looks at what the user — the searcher — wants and tries to provide that. Bad search engine optimization just goes through the motions of building links and making reports. Evil, corrupted search engine optimization uses deceptive tactics to lure unsuspecting searchers to Websites that are really not what they want. Although most deceptive Websites are just built for advertising, some are designed to install malware on searchers’ computers.
The ubiquitous nature of search engine optimization has opened it up to exploitation by unscrupulous people who really don’t care about the end user experience. But that ubiquity has also transformed the Web marketing industry into highly competitive field. When you’re choosing a search engine optimization specialist to work with your company, you’re recruiting an arbitrator of natural forces. That is, you’re hiring someone to shape the flow of SEO energy on the Web to help your Website obtain better search performance.











