While attending a birthday party I overheard an interesting conversation between two of the participants. A man was telling, or trying to tell, a woman that you should avoid making things complicated. But in an attempt to say Eschew Obfuscation gave me my headline. He proved his point to me but confused the woman.
Keeping things simple is a lofty goal. I often try to explain what I do to people at parties, because if I can’t explain it simply no one will be particularly interested. Some things are very easy to explain in real world equivalents.
- Your Title is like a nametag
- Headers are how you introduce yourself
- Content is what you say
- Design is like the clothes you wear
Pretty simple right? You can even get into more complicated issues in a real world conversation.
- Keyword stuffing is similar to people who say like every third word
- Links are what other people say about you
- Statistical inference is what I know about the people we know in common.
As I am getting deeper into the conversation I start to realize that the above board practices are all easy to explain. However, as I get to the part about SEO as game theory I realize that explaining things like cloaking, redirection, Markov Chains, and duplicate content not only challenge my attempts to use plain language — but also open me up to difficult questions.
The question is how many people are cheating? Being a good white hat means being very aware of the black hat techniques that you are avoiding. Because so much of the content on the Internet is made by amateurs search engines are lenient about low-level cheating.
Most of the concepts in Search Optimization are not complicated by themselves, it is the application that is such a delicate process.
Tags: Design · Search Engines · SEO1 Comment
Related Posts
Are You a Sellout?>>The Next Big Thing On The Internet>>
1 response so far ↓
Great post - I enjoyed the way your broke down the elements of a web page into real world equivalents very much.