fantomNews™ — the ultimate know

My ongoing time restrictions being the prime reason why I haven’t fired up my FeedDemon RSS reader for months, it’s only to be expected that many interesting posts will stay pushed to the back burner, more often than not allowing me to read them much later than they would merit.

Here’s a case in point, a very informative piece by Michael Martinez on the issues governing the question of how much of a “science” search engine optimization actually is – and who can validly be considered a veritable SEO scientist (academic or not) with a more than average claim to credibility. (Hint: you typical A-bloggers ain’t among them…)

It certainly wouldn’t do this excellent article proper justice trying to summarize it here. So suffice it to say that it’s a brilliant overview any SEO worth his or her salt should read, bookmark, download and read again. Needless to say, this applies to the resources and links he points too, as well.

Make no mistake: Michael doesn’t claim his list is comprehensive i.e. all-encompassing let alone definitive. So by way of a personal, obviously subjective assessment I’d like to point to two bloggers I’ve recently had the pleasure to get in closer contact with – both of them very much into the academic background and patent analysis pertaining to SEO (not to mention a ton of hands on real world experience), even though they may not raise a lot of ballyhoo about their achievements: certainly worth a read by any count.

To wit:

Dave Harry and his HuoMah blog at http://www.huomah.com/

and

Marie-Claire Jenkins (aka cj) and her Blogger (fie!) hosted  Science for SEO blog at: http://scienceforseo.blogspot.com/

You may also want to read her noteworthy piece – published elsewhere – Introduction to IR, LSA (and SEO)

(BTW, Michael does refer to her blog so this isn’t an addition to his list, merely an additional pointer.)

Here’s a quote by Michael from the comments section (well worth checking out by itself) which seems a fitting way to end this post:

search engine optimization is not just about unraveling how any one search engine ranks content. It’s also about understanding how people use search engines. So even if we knew everything about how the search engines work we would still need to study how people use them.

It’s not about algorithm chasing, it’s about understanding the system that is much larger than the indexing, crawling, and ranking algorithms. They are just a very small part of the picture.

Truer words in SEO were seldom spoken…

Anyway, make sure you don’t miss out on Michael’s piece here: The Scientists of Search Engine Optimization

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