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Unfortunately, my comment went unpublished for whatever reason.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.

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In our modern world today, discovery low-priced domain hosting is easy, but discovery the finest hosting for your specific needs can be a tiny more difficult. In fact, with the wide variety of low-priced domain hosts out there, it can really be beautiful tough to figure out what meets your need best. In view of this, some people assume that the most necessary thing is to save money. To that end, they find a domain that fits their minimum bandwidth requirements at the lowest rate.

However, this approach can backfire. As your commerce continues to expand, your low-priced domain hosting might be outpaced by the rate of growth. We all know that this kind of commerce is more competitive. So, when you instantly find yourself not having the bandwidth to handle all of your clients, you will aspire that you had spent a few more dollars on your low-priced domain hosting. After all, the intention is not to sustain up with the demands of Internet traffic, but to stay ahead of them.

But of course, it depends a lot on the kind of business you are running. You know that there’s a lot of business in line with this. If your web needs are minimal and restricted to a handful of web pages, it makes a lot of sense for you to go all out and get the best cheap domain hosting you can. If, on the other hand, you are running thousands, or even tens of thousands of web pages, a couple bucks extra here and a couple bucks extra there can quickly add up to a lot of money!

When your host server is down, it’s not good for business. That’s why you want a web host with a proven track record of unparalleled tech support and reliable, cheap web hosting. So, it is important to use Linux or windows servers built in standard of quality and hosting reliability.

As a matter of fact, the most important thing with cheap domain hosting is to stay informed about your own business. Always keep track of your Web traffic and pay attention to when it increases or decreases. A lot of cheap domain hosts have plans that are adaptable for people with flexible needs. On these hosts, it is easy to upgrade or download downgrade your account as you develop more or less traffic. Sometimes, the flexibility costs a little bit more money, but in the long run it is always worth it.

Your business grows. Your business model changes. Things happen quickly in the world of business e commerce and you want to be ready to adapt in this fast-paced business environment. And when choosing your hosting provider, be sure to note all of the features involved before deciding which hosting plan is right for you.

Particularly, one thing people seldom consider until it is too late is the quality of service provided. Well, having generous bandwidth matters little if your host is down half the time! The problem is that it can be difficult to research the reputations of different inexpensive domain hosting companies. Usually, there is no central site where people compare their domain name host experiences, so you may have to spend quite a bit of time on Google to find out.

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

But it is not just in the search mechanism field that the companies are battling each other out but in any other commerce 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 nearly complete with its project known as Google Books. The project Google Books aims to publish or rather advertise different types of books even those books that are already out of print but still has copyright protection 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 publication of such books there would be a possible violation of the antitrust law and even the right 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 possibility of the search engine giant tagging the books with unreasonable pricing.

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

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