Amadeus Consulting Discusses What is Search Engine Optimization

On a recent article on MarketWatch.com, a site associated with the Wall Street Journal, BARRONs and other big names, author John Dvorak made some interesting comments on what he sees as "Search-Engine Subterfuge." Although Mr. Dvoraks perspective is rightly from a business standpoint, as it relates to Googles flat lining stock prices, his perspective on what is happening in the world of search is surprisingly misinformed. Unfortunately, the negative impression of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) presented in this article is not unique to Mr. Dvorak. In fact, few people outside of the industry really understand what Search Engine Optimization is, what it does, and how it works. Even though Amadeus Consulting is primarily a custom software development company, we do deal heavily in online technologies and have become very familiar with the capabilities and necessity of Search Engine Optimization. So we would like to provide some insight for anyone still mostly unfamiliar with the concept.

Understanding Search:

Search engines are a very important aspect to finding information online. Search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, or many others, process your inquiry and produce results related to that inquiry.
For example, if you type in "Wedding Photographer" into your favorite search engine, it will produce millions of results that relate to wedding photographers, photography, and weddings. But how do search engines decide which results to place first, since any of the top results are directly relevant to your search?

This is actually a very complicated process, and it varies slightly depending on the search engine, which is why you may not get the same results in Bing as you would in Google. In general, the process includes the following steps:

A "bot" (automated program) scans each site on the Internet.

When the bot finds a new site, or a site that has been changed, it catalogs the site.

This catalog includes information about the content, the topics, and hundreds of other bits of information about your site.

This information is then stored in a database, which is then used to produce results when you type and inquiry into the search engine.

The most important thing to understand is that this is entirely automated. Nobody at Google decides which websites should rank above others. Instead, they are constantly fine-tuning their systems so that the software becomes smarter and better able to manage your requests.

How Does Search Engine Optimization Effect Search Engine Rankings?

Search engine optimization does exactly what it says: it is a process for optimizing websites so that search engines can understand them.

Search Engine Optimization helps design and configure websites so that the search engine software can more easily interpret them. It does this by helping comply with a complicated set of standards, sometimes called "best practices or "rules."