| What
ethical search engine optimization really does
Suppose there are 1000 hotels in New York, each
of which has a website. When somebody types "New
York hotels" into a search engine, all 1000
websites are equally relevant to the search. Because
of the way that Google and other engines have
been designed, they normally display the results
10 at a time. But which of the 1000 hotel sites
will be displayed in the first 10, which of them
will be displayed in the second 10......and which
will be placed right at the bottom of the pile?
It is well-known that searchers don't look very
far down the results, so the sites that are nearer
the top will take all the business, and those
that are further down will get none. But which
sites will be at the top? Google uses its algorithms
to determine the order of the results. It is patently
obvious that all 1000 equally relevant websites
will not be displayed on the first results page
(the top 10). It is also obvious that equally
relevant sites cannot be displayed where they
belong. Some necessarily become more equal than
others.
So what if the owner of one of the websites decides
to try and push his site to the top? Is that wrong?
Of course not. The site is just as relevant as
the top ones; it's just that Google cannot satisfy
all the relevant sites. This is where ethical
search engine optimization come in.
Search engine optimization optimizes a website's
pages, so that they will be ranked higher in the
search results for the most relevant search terms,
according to what the website has to offer. Search
engines may well display relevant results at the
top, but they can't display all the relevant results
at the top. Search engine optimization allows
the pages of relevant websites to be displayed
at or near the top of relevant search results.
And that's all it does.
So what are search engines like Google so afraid
of? SEOs have exactly the same aim as the engines
- relevant search results. The difference is that
search engines don't care about individual websites,
whereas search engine optimizers and website owners
do. That's the only difference. Engines don't
care if a particular website is in the top 10;
SEOs care very much that a particular website
is in the top 10. But they can't get an off-topic
site there because the search engine algorithms
see to that. And that's an important point - search
engine optimization can only get pages to the
top of relevant results. The search engines' own
algorithms keep off-topic pages out.
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