Search Engine Optimisation is Just Like Predicting the Weather

Working out how to optimise a web page is quite a lot like predicting the weather when you get down to it. Both the weatherman and the SEO professional have a huge number of variables to deal with, and both don’t know for certain what is going to happen in the next days and hours.

Just like the weather forecaster, the SEO professional can tell, with some degree of accuracy what a particular page of words will achieve, but they have to take into account a whole lot more information besides the words on the page (e.g. about the links to the page) and then make their guess based on their knowledge of the ‘rules’ that are used by the Engines to rank pages.

The weather forecaster does a similar thing when you think about it, their data being things like air pressure and temperature. They too make their predictions based on rules, but in their case they are perhaps the luckier, as the rules they deal with are the rules of physics and they don’t change, unlike those in the SEO world, where changes to the rules can be made at whim by the masters in Google.

This means that any predictions about rankings you get must in essence, like a 5 day weather forecast be very much a guess, and that in turn means anyone who is guaranteeing a first page position cannot in truth be giving you the full facts.

Worst still for the Search Engine Optimiser, is the fact that the rules may and do change all the time and that for some keywords different rules apply than for others. Sites too can have different ‘handicaps’ applied for different ‘keyword zones’ (keywords about a particular subject area), Google preferring to display certain types of sites in some cases.

These SEO rule changes can also be switched on and off, which makes testing to see what is the best way of getting a ranking difficult to say the least, as you don’t know for certain, if it is the changes you have made to a site that causes any alterations to the rankings, or whether in fact it is a change in the underlying rules that are the culprit.

So, the Search Engine optimisation expert and the weather forecaster are both ‘up against it’ in one form or another, but in the case of the weatherman, they do at least have the benefit for knowing the rules and knowing that they won’t be being changing overnight.