Climbing up the Search Ladder

j_heisenberg writes "Wired carries a story on SEOs or search engine optimizers. Among some bold claims: traffic is up 6 times and sales double, once you hit the first page of results on major engines. The catch: eventually everyone will use SEOs, and there is only one first page."

Comments

Sigh

[DarkHand]

This was tried during the dot com boom. It just dosen't work. Isn't this what Google was supposed to stop?

SEOs Overrated?

[SuperficialRhyme]

Just by using XHTML compliant code and writing in our blog my fiancee and I are the #1 result in Google, Yahoo, and the new MSN search for a wide variety of topics. This includes areas we only talk about in one post or something. Perhaps the $$ and time that people spend on search engine optimization sites/links/etc would be better spent writing proper XHTML?

Our site is http://www.caseyandanna.com [No link, please don't slashdot!]
A few of the common search terms that we see involve: Cinara Aphids, Shrek2 pictures/etc (my typo), Aramark norovirus

Anyway, that's our experience.

Similar

[clinko]

I run a music site (Yeah, i know, shameless link...) that is constantly being beaten out by 3 domains. I did a whois on the owners and they're all the same guy in india.

I heard that this is why Google signed up for domain selling. They're getting their hands on the whois information to cross reference.
That would get rid of a lot of falce pagerank building...

Aren't SEO unethical

[The Grey Clone]

Am I the only one who considers SEO unethical, almost to the sense of Nvidia or ATI making drivers that would cheat on benchmark programs? If your page is what someone wants, good, if it isn't, you can pay Google and they'll advirtise it on the side of the page along with all the other junk.

Good value?

[winkydink]

"I'm willing to pay to attract a more qualified customer," Kosciewicz said. "It costs me 15 cents in advertising for every buck I get back in sales. That's a great margin in any business."

Really? Doesn't that assume that you have at least 15% of margin to play with? A lot of business would kill for that much.

Take Search Technologies in a Different Direction

[CoccaNut]

Since the dawn of the web, workarounds and cheat have continually been found to "optimize" search results. The sad result of every web site's quest to appear at the top of search results is that it has prevented search engines from providing "objectively relavent" results.

While Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft continue to develop "search relevance technologies", someone out there needs to develop and bring to market a cognitive search engine that can actually understand the content of a page the way a human does and connect it with the requested search terms. Something similar to the Cyc project that Doug Lenat has been working on since the 80's (and its subsequent OpenCyc F/OSS derivative, only tied into search engines. And, no, I am not talking about Ask Jeeves or other silliness like that. ; )

Otherwise, "relevance" is just going to become a euphamism for "the people with the most money to 'optimize' their results"

Re:Who has the most cash...

[halltk1983]

The point of a search engine is not for the comopanies to be found to sell things to people... the point is for people to be able to find the information they are LOOKING for, thus the most visited, or however x search engine runs things. This DESTROYS that method, so whereas when you now look for "2005 Corvette" Chevy's website comes up, in a few months, it'll be Yo Mama humping a camel, because the pr0n site hosting that crap will be able to pay the most....
Christ I'm not crying cause my site won't be found, I'm complain cuz I won't be able to find the site I need.