I wrote a comment yesterday in response to a couple of blog posts that attacked SEO and the SEO industry, attempting to illustrate to the author of the rants that search engine optimization brings a specialized skill set and a core group of knowledge that can help others, from small businesses with great ideas, to larger organizations that can benefit from an independent voice that has experience and knowledge about search engines.

Unfortunately, my comment went unpublished for whatever reason.

One of the underlying assertions of the post I responded to was that in the hands of a competent web developer, a site should rank well in search engines as long as the people behind the site created something great and beautiful, and told a couple of friends. Another of the underpinnings behind the rants against SEO was that search engine optimization wasn’t a legitimate form of marketing. A third postulated that SEOs were the force behind such things as the botnets, blog spam, and scraped and autogenerated content that appears on the Web.

With the exception of striving to build something great, I couldn’t disagree more strongly.

The practice of SEO isn’t web development, though it sometimes requires that development problems on a site be addressed. Successful search engine optimization starts with a number of questions, such as:

Who is your audience? Who are your competitors? What makes you stand out from your competitors?

Some other important steps can include learning about the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities,and threats to a business, defining business goals, collaborating on defining metrics to measure success, and developing an SEO strategy to optimize a site for search engines and for visibility in other places on the Web.

The practice of SEO isn’t spamming the Web, with the creation and use of spyware, viruses, and scrapers that autogenerate web spam. Instead, it’s helping people make intelligent and creative decisions that help them reach an audience that is interested in what they have to offer.

In my response, I included 10 questions involving SEO and search engines which might be issues that search engine optimizers might come across, that I wouldn’t expect most developers to have spent much time thinking about. I’ve written about most of these here, and I thought it might be fun to share them.

1. What impacts might Microsoft’s VIPS, Yahoo’s Template Extraction, and Google’s Segmentation of Visual Gaps have upon a search engine’s weighing of links, document representation, shingles based duplicate content detection, and categorization of topics on a page, and how might a search engine determine which segment is the most important?

2. What steps should one take to try to get a site to rank well for a query in Google Maps, and how might something like location prominence and location sensitivity of that query term impact the range and rankings of sites that appear in a Google Maps listing?

3. What are some of the potential flaws that a search engineer might make when using a discounted cumulative gain approach to evaluating the relevancy of search results at different positions?

4. How might image size, image resolution, image contrast, inclusion of a face in an image, use of images across multiple pages of a site, internal links on a site to images, and external links on a site to images impact the possible rankings of images in search results?

5. What should be contained in a video XML sitemap to make it more likely that the videos included are crawled and indexed by Google?

6. How might Google customize search results for a searcher based upon language and country preferences and past browsing history, even when a searcher isn’t even logged into their Google account and seeing personalized results?

7. What types of user behavior data might the search engines be using to reorder search results besides simple clickthrough rates, and how might those kinds of signals be used in determining sitelinks or quicklinks that Google, Yahoo, and Bing may show in search results?

8. How might a search engine determine which kinds of results besides web pages to blend into search results, and how might that approach change when named entities are involved?

9. What kinds of ranking signals might make it more likely that a news source ranks well in Google’s news search, and why might the search engine choose one article over others when the stories are substantially similar?

10. How are search suggestions (query refinements) chosen by a search engine to include in search results, and why might a search engine show one type of search suggestion at the top of search results, and another type at the bottom of the results.

Fero Alenc know most of the best SEO tips, because he has been practising SEO for six years. For more information check Fero Alenc’s excellent SEO tips.

It is no secret to all that ever since Google has emerged as the foremost leading search engine company in the world its competitor Microsoft and Yahoo has been constantly trying to take away such title.

But it is not only in the search engine field that the companies are battling each other out but in any other business ventures such as the search advertisements and even the operating system industry. Now the two companies Yahoo and Microsoft is being joined by another prestigious company that deals with the selling of books, this is the company known as Amazon.

This opposition to Google by Amazon along with Yahoo and Microsoft emanated from the fact that Google is almost total with its project known as Google Books. The project Google Books aims to publish or quite advertise different types of books even those books that are already out of print but still has copyright defence or otherwise called the orphaned books.

This project aims to digitise all books even those out of prints with the aide of the different national libraries and then sell the books online and sell ads done on book searches. The proceeds that will be taken from this venture will be divided among and between the author and publishers where seventy percent of the proceeds will go and with Google where the remaining thirty percent will be accounted for.

Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon has banded together and formed a coalition that will oppose such action by Google. This is because of the fact that the group assails that with Google controlling the book of such books there would be a feasible violation of the antitrust law and even the correct to privacy of a citizen, not to mention the fact that Google can then dictate the prices of such books and would then make the opportunity of the search mechanism giant tagging the books with unreasonable pricing.

The coalition was formed give a united voice in opposing the Google publication project.

Fero Alenc know most of the best SEO tips, because he has been practising SEO for six years. For more information check Fero Alenc’s informative SEO tips.