The Googleplex Blog: Harold Davis's Blog

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization-affectionately called by its acronym SEO-is a wild-west frontier of the Internet: a boisterous new field with burgeoning revenues that employs tens of thousands of people with job titles and descriptions that did not exist five years ago.

In the SEO arena, gaudy patent-medicine *get rich quick* hucksterism meets successful marketing techniques (and people who do make a great deal of money), and both meet the nuts and bolts of a technology framework.

Like a beautiful spy with limpid eyes and unknowable depths, or an iceberg with 95% of its mass hidden beneath the surface of an arctic ocean, SEO can appear wondrous, mysterious, and baffling.

Less poetically, the core of SEO is the art and science of promoting web pages so they are high in natural search engine rankings. (A natural search engine result is one that is not paid for, as opposed to paid advertising links that also appear on search-results pages.)

Extended SEO has come to mean the whole field of marketing in relationship to web properties-so it is not unusual these days to have an SEO expert propose paid advertising via Google AdWords or another program as an adjunct to core SEO techniques.

I?m pleased that my book Google Advertising Tools: Cashing in with AdSense, AdWords, and the Google APIs has been doing well (it?s shown up on Amazon?s list of computer bestsellers in the last few weeks).

My book is about the landscape of making money on the web: how to create content that will make money, how to monetize that content with Google's AdSense program, how affiliate programs work, how to effectively use Google's AdWords program to promote traffic, and how to program custom applications related to Google's advertising programs.

In other words, this is a practical book aimed at helping you make money, but it is primarily about effectively using technology. There are two chapters in the book (out of 16 chapters) that discuss SEO issues from a nuts and bolts perspective.

So I was pleased when O?Reilly (the publisher of my book) asked me to write a short electronic book specifically about SEO. You can download Search Engine Optimization: Building Traffic and Making Money as a PDF.

Like Google Advertising Tools: Cashing in with AdSense, AdWords, and the Google APIs, my SEO PDF is not get-rich-quick hype, and is focused on concise nuts and bolts issues. It doesn't really tackle marketing techniques at a strategic level (which I am looking forward to doing soon).

Help! I've been Flickrwhacked!

To googlewhack means to find a search term that returns only one result in Google. To be a true googlewhack, the search term should consist of actual words that can be found in a dictionary. The googlewhack craze has been around a while. It's worth noting that when someone finds a good googlewhack like ambidextrous scallywags, the search term doesn't stay a whack?note the 740 (or so) hits for this term in Google.

Now there's a new game in town: flickrwhacking.

A successful flickrwhack finds a flickr tag that uniquely identifies one Flickr photo.

To back up for a moment, when a Flickr member posts a photo that can mark their image with tags that describe the contents. These tags are a useful way to find photos on Flickr (one's own, or photos relating to the subject of a tag). Flickr tags have come to play an important role in the folksonomic categorization of the web because they provide a high-volume approach to correlating subject-matter with visuals.

Some Flickr tags can be pretty idiosyncratic, hence the game of flickrwhacking.

I tagged a somewhat unusual photo of mine of a holly flower with the tag By Golly. It turns out that By Golly is a flickrwhack, and was added to the Flickr flickrwhack thread.

Flickrwhacking is part of a general Flickr trend of making a game out of everything. Another example: one group is devoted to each member finding their least interesting photo on Flickr. Of course, as with googlewhacking, the moment a photo is labeled as uninteresting-which is an automated Flickr ranking system for photos-it becomes more interesting.

Googlewhacking! Flickrwhacking! The web! Ain't life grand?