What Your SEO Guy Doesn't Tell You

You've heard about Page Rank, you've suffered through the technical details of how crawlers see your web pages, and you've read perhaps hundreds of different descriptions about the relationship between your content and your meta data.

You've heard all of that and more, I'm sure, if you've been trying to figure out SEO for any length of time. But, here's something you probably weren't told:

Your SEO guy doesn't know Google's algorithm... or Yahoo's, or MSN's.

We talk about page vectors and virtual pages of "naturally occuring phrases". We debate the value of keyword density, meta tags and reciprocal links. We even roll up our sleeves and sit in with the IT staff and brainstorm schemes for generating automatically optimized active server pages. But none of us knows the actual algorithms the search engines are using.

SEO Guys Have Their Own Algorithms

While we share an incredible amount of information with each other - just check the number of blogs, forums and groups out there dedicated to SEO - and while that information is based on all sorts of studies and tests and evaluations , it is speculative. We have our OWN algorithms. We don't know the REAL ones.  

I'll say it again... We do not know Google's algorithm. None of us. Yahoo and MSN are mysteries too - sort of. Our own algorithms, sort of reverse engineered from the results of our many studies, are pretty good.

Search Engines Are Driven by Relevance

The search engines don't care who comes out on page one. They don't care if you're a small fry with solid content and links, or a big guy with solid content and links. What they want to do is deliver an organized, prioritized list of relevant documents to their clients - the searcher.

Google, Yahoo and MSN  would rather try to keep the playing field as level as possible, judging web documents by their relevance. These great and mysterious algorithms are simply formulae by which they attempt to determine relevance.

What Your SEO Guy IS Telling You

Does it matter that your SEO guy doesn't know the exact algorithms in use? Not really. These guys are some of the most informed, involved and dedicated professionals in the world. And, to the last man and woman they're telling you this:

Relevance. And THAT is what matters most.