Is SEO Art or Craft?

Is SEO Art or Craft?

SEO is a three letter acronym (TLA) for Search Engine Optimisation. SEO involves optimising a web site to rank highly for certain keyword phrases that are input by users on the major search engines namely Google, Yahoo and Bing (formerly Live).

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A good SEO strategy makes the search engines send quality traffic to a website through natural or organic results displayed on their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). The higher a site is ranked on the SERPs, the better visibility it gets and attracts a lot of visitors.

The optimisation process consists of identifying the most frequent keywords typed in by users for the particular industry in which the website does business. This is called keyword research. Keywords preferably with good search volume and less competition are chosen and the site is optimised for these keywords.

How is a site optimised for keywords?
This involves editing the content on the site and tweaking the HTML code to firstly increase the relevance of the site to match the targeted keywords. Secondly, clean code helps search engine spiders (or bots) to visit the site and store the content on the site in their database without any obstacles. This process is called indexing.

Once the pages of the site are indexed, then there are hundreds of factors that go into calculating the relevance of a site in relation to the users' search queries as part of the ranking algorithm. There are many on page and off page factors that search engines give weight to when ranking a site. These have to be borne in mind when a site is optimised.

If the search engines find a site extremely relevant, then that site is ranked at the top of the SERPs. This process outlined above is simplistic but is sufficient to give a good idea of what SEO is about.

The great SEO debate
There is a debate as to whether SEO is an exact science or an art. It is scientific because the algorithms used by search engines to measure relevance and ranking of websites is highly complex and mathematical. It can be an art because ingenuity is needed in structure and design to create a site that makes it user friendly, easy to navigate for both humans and search engine bots and ultimately provide searchers a great user experience.

Strictly speaking, SEO can be called a craft. An SEO professional has to wear two hats at the same time. One hat is to keep the human users in mind when designing the site. At the same time, she has to don the other hat where she makes it easy for the search engine spiders to move through the site without any hindrance and index the content.

Ethical SEO
The ethical way of doing SEO is called white hat SEO whereby the best industry standard practices are followed. Black hat SEO refers to unethical and illegal methods used to trick the search engines to rank well for searches.

Google is the most prominent search engine enjoying the highest market share of nearly 65 percent to 70 percent. If you go to Google and type in the search box the keyword organic gardening, you get the following screenshot:

The results on the left are labelled organic search and optimised sites that are considered relevant by the search engines to the term organic gardening appear here. The results on the right column are labelled paid search and these ads appear by virtue of being paid text advertisements on the Google Adwords network.

The field of SEO today is complex and optimisation is a lengthy process that has to be maintained on an ongoing basis to remain on top of the game. It is a vibrant and dynamic field with new developments virtually every passing day.

Credit:
Ravi Venkatesan
Senior SEO Consultant
Netconcepts - Auckland SEO Specialists

Search Engine Optimisation images from Flickr: seo, Transparent Screen and Mac + Starbucks.