Folksonomics

Highly effective search engine optimization requires a thorough understanding of how search engines interact with Web communities. But if you scan popular SEO blogs and forums they usually don’t even discuss the topic. At best you will find many SEOs talking about social media, but their chief interest in social media is for acquiring links to their sites from popular social services. Real search engine optimization is rarely discussed in depth any more, in part because so few people in the SEO community feel the need to dig deep into the finer points.

You will certainly learn about more than how to get links from random sites at the SEO Theory blog, which is one of the Web’s leading sources of information on search engine marketing and search traffic analysis. Eschewing typical “paint-by-numbers” SEO techniques that the social media experts favor, the SEO Theory blog disassembles the searchable Web ecosystem unlike any other site out there.

SEO Theory specializes in explaining how to approach search engine optimization from a scientific point of view. In fact, the “theory” is not about constructing imaginary ideas but rather is actual science. By using the scientific method to test the popular ideas found in most SEO blogs and forums SEO Theory is able to debunk many myths.

One recent example of how SEO theory provided a shining light amid the darkness of SEO myths is the PageRank sculpting debate. For two years the SEO Theory blog advised people not to attempt to sculpt PageRank on their sites. Many people in the SEO community nonetheless supported the radical idea, even claiming that their tests showed it work. Those same people were shown to be wrong when Google announced in June 2009 that it had disabled their efforts more than a year before.