As a writer being challenged is part of the growing development process. Writing is a lonely business. You begin with an idea and because it is yours it always seems perfect, developing it, thinking about it and then spending what seems an inordinate amount of solitary time; making it real only helps convince the writer about the correctness of his belief in the act of writing but it does little to challenge the assumptions upon which he has based his creation.

To be fair, I have been active in the commercial world long enough to be aware of the trap. I know that when it comes to my ideas unless I think about them in depth and then market test them I am never sure if they will work. So when I was in a debate with some friends on whether SEO Help (now an Amazon best-seller in both the UK and the US since it was first published) actually can help someone learn correct search engine optimization, it made me take a really critical look at the book I had written and the way it works.

No introspective look at SEO, however light-hearted it may be, can fail to take into account the fact that much for what passes as SEO activity these days is actually not that much different to online marketing and online brand promotion. There is a very good reason for that. The social web, which used to be an add-on attached to any SEO campaign as an afterthought has now become central to every effort to promote a website. Because the web has grown, become slicker and much more functional and because we are now firmly in the grip of Web 2.0 many of the things we do in an online ‘social context’ have become part of the criteria used to assess the importance of a website. More than that, the ‘under the hood’ approach which drives everything technical has hidden much of the technical functionality of website design into WYSYWIG drag-and-drop applications. These have made it easier and cheaper than ever to design a website but they have also made it more difficult to successfully optimize it.

Discussing the effectiveness (or not) of my book, a couple of points were raised by colleagues: first it is thin on theory (practically non-existent I would say). Second it is a little prescriptive. They are right on both counts and there is a good reason for both.

First, while I love theory on SEO and search engine behaviour it is of value only if you are working in the industry or want to show off at parties. SEO Help was not written to help you do any of that. I field –tested the original hypothesis on real-life clients giving them theory-stripped, practical SEO steps to perform which they (in total faith at the time) simply incorporated in their daily or weekly routine of running their websites and updating their content. Because the steps were fairly straightforward and practical they soon found that they became second nature to them even down to the fact that they forgot they were really working on the optimization of their websites.

This then led me to the second approach which is the prescriptive part. SEO Help does not ask if you know this or are aware of that. It tells you to do this and see this effect. Do that and get that result. Because it is prescriptive it convinces only based on results. You do what the book tells you to do and you will see your website’s position on search engine rankings improve.

This approach is easier to follow and, in the first instance, it allows you to get working on your website from the first chapter of the book. There is no reading reams and reams of pages, absorbing it all and then trying to understand how what you have just learnt applies to you.

There is an additional advantage to this approach which, I would have very much liked to say that it was intentional from the very  beginning, but which, really, is only a by-product of its format: SEO Help is language independent. Too many SEO books which go into great detail are, inevitably, language linked, which usually means English. SEO Help is practical. What it tells to do you can be put into effect on any website in any language. You could, for example, use it to optimize, equally well, a website in Spanish, or German or even Chinese. All you would need to do is follow its steps and check the results.

The original question which sparked off the debate I had with colleagues was whether it would be possible to learn SEO from a book like SEO Help which contains no theory and only details 20 steps. In terms of the depth and breadth of SEO there are very few people in the world who can completely grasp it all. This means that out of necessity most of us work within a particular aspect of it and even though, as SEO experts, that aspect might be wider than the segment given to a reader in SEO Help, it does not stop being a segment and therefore the difference lies in scale only. I have to concede that if you are interested in knowing why something happens in SEO and you want to know SEO theory then SEO Help is not the kind of book which will help. But in terms of learning to do specific optimization techniques, learning them well and being able to do them, well in that case SEO Help works very well indeed and, in that sense, does indeed teach you SEO.

The need for search engine optimization, when you think about it, is an oddity which makes little sense. I mean, here is the web, there are websites in it and the search engines are designed specifically to find them and index them all. All this should happen in an environment native to them all, in an instant, without any effort. There should be no need for me and my skills or for a practical SEO book like SEO Help. Yet here we are reading lengthy entries in my blog which have arisen from even lengthier discussions with friends and colleagues which argue exactly the opposite. Why?

Well, stripped of all jargon and pretence, SEO is a translation service. It is used to ‘translate’ what a website is and what it does in a language which a search engine can understand and then use properly. Realistically this should not happen. Websites and search engines should speak the same ‘language’ and work in close synch with each other. In reality this does not happen because websites, though designed to live in the web, are geared towards human visitors rather than search engines. If, for argument’s sake, we think of the web as a colourful ecosystem where websites are feeding stations working to attract us, the users, so we can go there and satisfy our need, engines are beasts which roam it at will and only see black and white. SEO is the art of helping search engines understand colour.

My example, oversimplified as it might be, helps you understand the direction SEO is taking on the web. It will become ever more necessary as websites become all the more geared towards human visitors and ever ‘easier’ in terms that now it moves away from the structural, code-driven aspects of it and is focused more on aspects which can be executed by anybody. It will however also become harder in terms of the time it will require to do and the subtle combination of factors the struggling webmaster will have to be aware of.