The Search Engineer and the Optimizer Should be Friends

Oklahoma! references aside, a great thread at SEW gets into the antagonistic relationship that search engineers often perceive to have with SEOs. Luckily, two individuals (myself & new member Xan) believe that things can change. In a post, I explain many of the reasons SEOs & engineers should be friends:

  1. Engineers making SEOs understand that keyword density and keyword stuffing are not valuable, and that term weight is a far better measure of a page's connection to a term/phrase.
     
  2. SEOs helping engineers understand good methods to stop blog spam (rather than nofollow), including seperate indexes for blogs, tags that indicate a software type of blog, patterns that show blog spam, etc.
     
  3. Engineers helping SEOs understand why well-written, natural language is optimal for SEO thanks to advanced sentence structure analysis and its use to tag spam pages.
     
  4. SEOs helping engineers to see blatant spamming/scamming techniques including the 301 hijacking, new techniques for cloaking, re-directs, etc.