By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

A new spate of  ‘SEO is dying because it deserves to’ posts are making the circuit again. This argument is getting old.

We can all be in agreement that there are untoward techniques and unsavory characters that are a part of the search engine optimization landscape. And that it is changing – not dying.

But we should also agree that blind faith in technology and the results that search engines put in front of users without human manipulation are equivalent of believing in Santa Claus at the age of 42.

Search engine optimization will always have a place on the web. The current major players change their algorithms constantly which frustrates publishers that have their content indexed in them which causes them or others that see opportunity to build new engines.

There are more startup search utility companies companies today offering solutions that claim better results than Google, Yahoo or Bing. How can they do this? Because they think they have a better algorithm. And that is great.

However, the results for any search query that are put in front of a user come from that algorithm and its ability to:

1. Find the content
2. Index the content

Finding content online is something that these little search bots are really good at. Well, I should say URL’s to content. This is generally the first step in deciding is something should be indexed. The bot makes the decision.

Now, if you are publisher and your content isn’t being indexed by a major or minor search engine, isn’t well within your ability to find out why? Sure it is. The common wisdom says that you want to get links to your  content in as many places as possible. The best places are the ones where lots of users congregate. Let me see . . . search engines? Yes.

So how do you go about ensuring that your content is indexed by the search engine? You figure out the way that the robot they are sending out works. You want to know what it is looking for. Whether it is meta tags, title tags, javaacripts count or auto-discovery RSS, you find out what it is and optimize your content to meet requirements of indexing.

I’m not talking about rank – though it follows the same logic. It isn’t the same as simply getting your content indexed by a service. Rank is a more nebulous topic that relies advanced testing and understanding of how the search engines work.

I assert that anyone complaining that SEO sucks or is dead would be clamoring for its existence if all search results they came across were selected by an algorithm without publisher intervention. Blind faith that one company or its engineers have all the answers for a query without allowing the public to chime in isn’t a healthy way to discover content.

There is nothing sacrosanct about search engines. They were made by people like you and me. They’re not perfect. A little human intervention to make them better can go long way to creating better results.

Related articles by Zemanta

• SEO Optimization Basics And Concepts (ronmedlin.com)
• Trailing Slashes: Root Domain Same Page But File Names Can Be Different Pages (seroundtable.com)
• Newsweek prediction for 2010: Ballmer out at Microsoft (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Denver SEO – Search Engine Optimization at the Top (or Getting to Page 1 on Google), Several Case Studies (prweb.com)