Yahoo filed a patent of an automated SEO application this January, 2009. Full information about it can be seen in the United States Patent and Trademark Office. At first, this may sound very enticing for it will limit the SEO work of web developers. This elicits the idea that they do not have to go through the trouble of optimizing their site just to get recognized by the search engines. However, this application seems to pose more problems than solutions.
The creation of the application is done with the aim to improve search engine optimization on web pages. It will help web developers by doing the SEO process for them. This involves a string of automated processes that does keyword analysis through the frequency of searches.
The process starts as Yahoo takes note of the search queries. It will look at factors such as browsing activity, search query logs, and the search log database to determine popular concepts or units. These are all done by semantically relating terms with each other. The concepts that will come out will be used as the main keyword. This will then be automatically optimized in a particular website.
After getting the keyword, it now proceeds to perform the search engine optimization process. It does this by simply replacing the important parts of webpages automatically. These parts are the titles, headings, alt text and link text.
Let’s look at an example so you can understand the process better. For example, you have a blog related to internet marketing. If you are targeting the term, you may come up with the title “Internet Marketing” for your site and optimize all other areas such as H1 tags, alt text and the likes. When Yahoo runs its application, it will gather all related terms to “internet marketing”. In one instance it may get “guerilla marketing” as a popular term. With this, your title tags, H1 tags and alt tags will automatically transform to “guerilla marketing”. Why? That is because that is the popular term.
On one hand, you can see that Yahoo is actually helping you get ranked on a term with greater traffic. But on the other hand, it automatically shifts your target audience. This can become very problematic especially for web developers who want to rank for long-tail terms. Also, since the keywords are shifted automatically, the same sites can be expected to dominate in each popular search term because the keywords change all the time.
I think the idea behind this application is intelligent but limited. It does not understand that SEO is done so a website can serve targeted audiences rather than receive more traffic. It is not surprising though. It is just an example on how a search engine such as Yahoo views the search engine optimization process.
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