SEO is Voodoo?

I honestly can’t believe some people still think that SEO is some kind of black magic or voodoo. I remember back in the old days of 2004 Brad Fallon and I were out hocking SEO services and we got the same reaction. Heck Home Depot looked at us like we had built a time machine and asking Nardelli to take it for its initial test drive.  But this is 2008 Google stock is over $500 a share and I still come across post that people think SEO guys are charlatans and scam artists. So let me set the record straight. SEO is for real and the tips and tricks used work and are necessary. If you are on the other side of this debate the reason you are is you don’t get it so I will spell it out for you.  This part is high on the redundancy factor but it must be done. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Now is a in principle often paraphrased as “All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one.” In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest hypothetical entities. It is in this sense that Occam’s razor is usually understood. Understand. Ok keep up. Lets look at the first two words “search engine”. These are the machines, like Google, that use complex algorithms, that’s math to your nonbelievers, that retrieve information off of a computer system. So now that we got that straight lets focus on the second word “optimization” now that is the idea of trying to find maxima and minima of a function. Since our function is to have our site rank well on the SERP’s we will focus on the maxima. For example if we were doing NASCAR optimization we would want to optimize our race car to win the race. Really low drag coefficient, good sticky tires, solid engine and so forth. So since we are doing Search Engine Optimization we want our web site to win on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. We want it to be optimized to win the search engine race. There are two parts to SEO, on page factors and off page factors. Or what you do to your site and what you do on your site. More on these later but you have to do both to rank well. So here is where I end the debate since there are Search Engines and they are built on mathematical function you can optimize your web site to work in conjunction with there algorithms then SEO is real.