I was at a conference a few days ago, and as a follow-up you could visit a website with the presentations in a pdf format.
For me it is a lot easier to handle digital formats to store, than paperwork, so I went and downloaded them.
But as I was reading one of them concerning SEO, I read a definition of SEO that stated it means “Search Engine Optimalisation”
This one was new to me……..
The speaker is a well informed Search Engine Optimizer him self and is very good at it.
But now he got me more then a little curious.
What is the right term for what a Search Engine Optimizer does?
I did some soul searching but in the end I did run some Google queries.
With these results:
search engine optimalisation 21,900
search engine optimalization 22,900
search engine optimization 36,400,000
search engine optimisation 40.7007.700
I did the same with Live.com and Yahoo and:
DMOZ.org
No results on search engine optimalization
No results on search engine optimalisation
Open Directory Sites (1-20 of 1478) search engine optimization
Open Directory Sites (1-20 of 533) search engine optimisation
So I went to the best place in town to learn :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seo
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a subset of search engine marketing, and deals with improving the number and/or quality of visitors to a web site from “natural” (aka “organic” or “algorithmic” search engine) listings.
Which brings also a nice historic point on SEO Contest (read it, just for inside knowledge)
A Good thing to me….. because I went for Joomla Optimization, lucky me!
But from the wikipedia article I now have a question for you:
SEM is it really Search Engine Marketing…..or should it be Search Engine Manipulation?
I was reading a forum thread recently that was talking about who invented the term search engine optimization and the common thinking was that Bruce Clay had but there was no evidence. Maybe whoever came up with search engine optimalization is trying to brand that term. I like search engine manipulation, I think it might stick.
David,
Thank you for your comment, I don’t know either if Bruce Clay came up with it.
But for the Term search engine optimilization, I think it is just a “Germanism” meaning it just a bad translation from in this case the dutch word “optimalisatie”.
So another idea….
Black Hat optimization = Search Engine Manipulation….
SEO = Search Engine Optimisation if your english is from the UK. Basically the correct UK english spelling of Optimsation/Optimzation is Optimisation.
The correct US spelling is Optimization!
Take ya pick, are you feeling more british or american?
I am from the UK, so I am more inclined to go for the ‘s’.
Hello Joe,
Thank You for pointing this out to me!
I am from The Netherlands, so closer to the UK then to the USA.
But for my website and Blog I am more focused on the USA english part, sorry…
I will stick to Optimization for now :-)
I think its probably best to use the language that your readers are used to… and there are a lot more americans lurking around the web, so ‘z’ makes sense!!
Great post. It's a common mistake, mostly made by the dutch. You see, we have the dutch word 'optimalisatie' which is translated to English all too easy as 'optimalisation'.
@Tim: ik weet het :-) It was a Dutch Joomla Optimization engineer from Joomlatwork.com, and they really, really make the best patch for Joomla when it comes to Search Engine Optimization.
And yes, I know there are some english mistakes on this Blog :-)