The future of search engine optimization is seriously in doubt today. Search engine administrators hate the practice, and usually rightfully so. The vast majority of search engine optimizers today are, in effect, trying to “trick” the engines for first place on search engine results pages, and that goes directly against what the search engines want.
So, what do the search engines want, and more important, why? Search engines want relevant and high-quality information to show up to anyone using their searching service. However, their customers aren’t really the huge numbers of people that use those services to find websites. Instead, it’s the large advertisers that pay the search engines directly for sponsored listings. Those companies will only pay the sponsored listing fees if the search engines attract lots of people. Search engines only attract lots of people if they regularly provide what those people want. Therefore, search engine administrators are constantly upgrading their algorithms in order to bypass the vast amount of optimized junk out there and get to real, relevant content. Each and every time those algorithms change, search engine optimizers scramble to catch up, and then scramble again to redo all of their web pages.
It doesn’t really matter if a search engine specialist is a “white hat” or a “black hat”, both are, in essence, doomed. Search engines will keep improving their algorithms to the point where they cannot possibly be cracked or substituted for. However, that doesn’t mean that search engine optimization itself is a pointless endeavor. Search engine spiders have to be able to read web pages in addition to humans in order for search engine results pages to even pick them up. It doesn’t do much good for a web page to be high quality and appealing to people if search engine spiders can’t find it for a technical reason.
The ultimate answer, of course, is to get a quality writer who also knows enough about search engine optimization to create a page appealing to both humans and search engine spiders. The basics behind search engine optimization aren’t going to change. Metatags don’t provide the kind of incredible results they used to, but they still do a pretty good job of giving spiders a general idea of what your site’s about. HTML is much more visible to spiders than other sorts of Internet programming. These sorts of technical optimization techniques combined with high quality writing offer websites that will continue to rank highly in search engine results regardless of algorithm changes or increased SEO resistance. Get a SEO copywriter, and quality will always shine through.
