• Shoemoney, Thursday, May 15, 2008 12:49 PM

Jeremy Schoemaker has a love/hate relationship with the practice of SEO (and by default, many of its practitioners), but this post swings to the friendly side of the spectrum. Schoemaker asked a number of search pros for their definition of SEO, promising to leave out his own snarky commentary. What he got was almost 20 answers that vary based on the respondents' level of expertise and the kind of firm (core search, interactive marketing, etc.) they come from.

For example, Clientside's Todd Malicoat says that: "SEO is an evolving marketing school of thought born from the desire to rank high in search engines...not a process."

And for Netconcept's Stephan Spencer, it's more granular. "While SEO is not a hard and exact science (there is definitely an art to it), SEO experts do seek to apply rigorous logic to reverse engineer the 'black box' that is the search engines' algorithms, in order to 'deconstruct' (identify, quantify and qualify) the hundreds of factors which play a part in search engine ranking."

Meanwhile, for QuadZilla, a self-confessed black hat, the definition is simple. "SEO is when somebody tries to cheat or take shortcuts so that their Web site shows up higher [in search results rankings] than it deserves to show up."

Read the whole story at Shoemoney »