have a bandit day

“SEO” frequents many of these entries, but hasn’t been formally defined. I’ve put this off for a barrel of reasons: What if I put up an incomplete definition? What if an SEO expert stumbles across this entry and laughs at my pathetic attempt to illuminate their craft? Worst of all, what if I begrudgingly realize I have no idea what SEO really means? Attempting to box in this elusive beast with definitions sends shivers down me spine, but this post is as good as any to get rid of the water wings and plunge into the depths to harpoon this leviathan. Yarr! (Prepare for a pirate themed post. Cue the seagull noises.)

Hoisting the mast! A brief history

Formally defined, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization:

the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Typically, the higher a site’s “page rank” (i.e, the earlier it comes in the search results list), the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. - Wikipedia

This term became prevalent when web users found they can manipulate and change search engine results, giving birth to a very marketable and lucrative service. And like any lucrative service, they slapped a fancy sounding name on and charged lots and lots of moolah.

Subsequently, what followed is a game of cat and mouse between webmasters (or web magicians, depending on your preference) and the search engines; an eternal struggle between two unrelenting forces. Webmasters would conjure up new strategies and search engines (SE’s) would simply change their criteria for a website to be considered “relevant”. Keyword stuffing, fooling spiders and hiding text are all black marks of the SEO’s history. As the popularity of SE’s exploded, following their guidelines became mandatory: if you want to play ball, you gotta follow house rules. Presently, not following the rules and angering the mighty SE gods could result in being deindexed, the equivalent of jumping off the plank (Thought I forgot about the pirate theme, didn’t you? Well I did).

With that (excruciatingly) brief history, you can now enlighten future generations of the great struggle that  formed SEO strategists, turning them into lean, mean, alt tag loving, 301directing machines that they are.