The Art and Science of Search Engine Optimization
I have often used an accountant as an example of how a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) professional relates to your business. Just as you know basic math and could do your own taxes, you rely on the expertise of your accountant to keep abreast of tax laws and get you the most return legally possible. Search engine optimization is much the same. It does not require a brain surgeon to optimize a Web site, it does require someone who is knowledgeable about the search engines, their guidelines, and how their algorithms work.

Unlike your accountant however, who has tax law information readily available to him, your SEO professional has to rely on a community of SEO professionals willing to share information about what has and has not worked in their campaigns. The search engines provide basic guidelines which your SEO professional should abide by to protect your site from being banned, but the search engines carefully guard their algorithms as "top secret."

What works today to get a client's site top rankings very well may not work tomorrow. The search engine arena is an ever-changing environment. On top of that, what works for one search engine may not work for another since each search engine has their own algorithms. Sometimes, even though the search engines may be sharing a database, they may well be applying different algorithms to that database to get different results.

What exactly is an algorithm? It's really nothing more than a logical statement that filters data based on a query. For example, if you have a database of client names and addresses and you ask to retrieve only those that are in the state of NH, that is an algorithm. While it's a simple algorithm compared to the complex algorithm of the search engines, it is a basic example. Search engine algorithms apply many other factors to the query - stop words (words that they consider generic like articles and conjunctions), position of the words on the page, frequency of the words within the site, etc. It's important to understand that no search engine uses only the content of the home page to rank a site — they use the content of the ENTIRE SITE (or as much of the site as they can index). That is the science behind SEO.

Who's on top? Not only does the search engine algorithms change, so does the popularity of various search engines. Buyouts, mergers, and busts all change the search engine environment. How many of you even remember NBCi (SNAP)? There was a time when they appeared to be a "contender" in the search engine arena - today they are unheard of. AltaVista lost it's popularity a few years ago and how many of you even knew that Yahoo now owns them? (They were acquired by Yahoo when Yahoo bought Overture.) Your SEO professional keeps abreast of all of these changes, much like your stockbroker, to try to determine who the players will be in the upcoming months. This speculation determines where he or she will spend your pay-to-include dollars to ensure your site new traffic. This is the art of SEO!

Web-Kare, LLP has been an SEO professional firm since 1998. We have seen search engines come and go, bore the brunt of them asking for money to include, and have improved our clients' site position throughout this time. While we have never promised top 10 positioning in any specific search engine because that's impossible, we do promise increase in search engine traffic and site visibility overall. With the addition of our Sponsored ad program, you can reduce the effects of slipped rankings, while keeping your overall Internet marketing costs manageable. Contact us today to learn more about how Web-Kare can benefit your site's Internet visibility.