Photo taken by assbach, Flickr Creative Commons
It’s 7h50 AM and I am sitting down in the hallway leading to the office. Not having any key to get in, I decided to use this hallway moment to bring up another article from SEO Theory called The Theory of Search Engine Optimization.
For Michael Martinez, SEO has three actors with their own personal agendas – the search engine, its users, and content providers. Search engines aim to provide a satisfying listing, the user wants the most relevant listings, and the content providers want the most advantageous listing. Optimization therefore is not the business of a few individuals, but is instead anchored into a complex process of interrelated actions.
If the searcher changes his queries, the content provider changes his content or if the search engines modifies its algorithm, results will be affected and optimized to reflect these changes. The author states that there are 4 reasons that explains why search results tend to change:
- You do something with your site
- Someone else does something with their site
- The search engines do something with their data
- People change how they search
Point 4 occurs when a user can’t find the information he’s looking for. He will then change his query, change search engine else they try at some other time. So what does this all mean for those working in the field of SEO? Of course we can’t control the web, all we can do is have an influence on the rankings. But how much of an influence can someone have next to those agendas?
This is where we’re going back to yesterday’s post, when I proposed Michael Martinez’s theory that search engine optimization can only be performed algorithmically. Indeed, since we have no control and limited influence on search engines’ indexing and ranking methods, on searchers’ queries and on content, what we have an influence on is the site structure and how it performs next to the search engines’ algorithm.
The author sums this up nicely:
Search engine optimization is therefore the use or application of algorithms to influence the predictable content and quality of search engine results according to the chosen criteria of the optimizer.
Again, I think this brings an interesting point of view to the table. As of yet, I haven’t got enough field experience to say if this can be proven or not, but it sure does give me something to think about.
That was quite the Dr. Doogie conclusion wasn’t it!