This is my convoluted idea about so-called search-engine optimization (SEO).
I like to think of SEO from the search engine company's perspective. Every time that someone does a search on name of search engine, the site needs to return a list of links to pages that match that search query. It has to return the right links, or the user will go away and try the same search on another search engine. So it is very important to the search engine company's business model to return the right links.
I like to think of it as the principle of least disappointment. Let's take an example, and say that you search for "minnesota vikings" on Google. What would you expect to come up? You would probably not be disappointed if the first returned link was the official Minnesota Vikings football team Web site, right? Of course not. Maybe you'd be looking for something else, like community discussion web sites maintained by fans, or Vikings merchandise from online stores, or history or reference sites like the Wikipedia page, or collections of Vikings news stories from the local newspapers or other media. So you'd probably be OK with seeing those things after the official site.
Maybe you were looking for some other kind of Minnesota viking -- like, say, a theory that Leif Erickson made it to central North America, or a historical reenactment society, or some other conjunction of the two words that made some logical sense. But you wouldn't be freaked out if the NFL team's links came well before your fringe theory's links.
Further down, there'd be just the novelty hits -- where did people use the name "Minnesota Vikings" in a joke, in a poem, or just at random without actually thinking about it? And there's the long tail of box scores, gibberish, and other flotsam and jetsam that you don't really care about.
If the search engine returns the third-party merchandise links ahead of the official site, or the random gibberish links ahead of the fan community sites, well, you'd be disappointed. If the official site weren't on the first three pages of results, you probably would stop searching and take your search business elsewhere.
A search engine company's job is to present the links to you in the order that will least disappoint you. Since the Web is such a big place, they have a secondary requirement to assemble and organize those links with a minimum of human interaction.
What this all means is that a business model that depends on getting your link arranged out of its expected order in search engine results is a business model that is fighting against time. The search engine company is financially incented to find your out-of-order link and re-rank it where it's supposed to be.
It's possible that your out-of-order link might escape detection; it might escape detection for a long time. But, realistically, an out-of-order link on a non-trivial search query is not going to go unnoticed for very long. And an out-of-order link on a trivial or unimportant search query isn't going to attract the traffic that makes gaming the system worthwhile.
So these are my ideas about search engine ranking.
- You can't really get your site a results ranking higher than it deserves for very long. But you can get one lower than you deserve. Make your site WebSoftwareFriendly so it doesn't stay artificially lower than it could be.
- If you want people to beat a path to your door, you have to earn it by building a better mousetrap. If you want your community forum to be the next link after the official Minnesota Vikings site in Google results, it better damn well be the best possible community forum on the Minnesota Vikings. This should be a community where members cry at each others' weddings. Where journalists log in to get the most up-to-date information. Where players check to see if they're going to have a contract next season.