When it comes to Search Engine Optimization there are many paths to follow. In this short article we will look at the web as a forest, where sites are trees and links are branches.

On those branches grow leaves aka “content”. And like the words, pictures and layout of a webpage every leave has nerves, colour, texture. From this perspective the enormity of the task our beloved Google has taken on becomes dazzling. For imagine, standing in the middle of the forest, having to answer the question: “Good Sir, I’m looking for a leave with a little brown spot on its right edge. And worse, just like the forest continuously changes with the seasons, the wordlwide web is in a constant state of flux. Sites and pages are like trees and leaves that come into being, grow, die. Unlike the forest however, the web has a memory. Google’s servers retain an image of the forest, its trees, branches and leaves even after they have faded away. Every spring nature starts anew.

In midwinter there’s no trace left of the fresh spring green, the lush colours of summer, the weary fall.

No such thing in Google. The recycling process in Google is not based on the earths’ circumvention of the sun but on fierce competetion. Keep in mind Google does not actually carry an image of the web. Rather, it’s a collection of pointers to location. Both pointer and location are real, in that they are actually represented by physical bits somewhere on a server. In contrast, the relation between pointer and location - the thing that points and the thing that is pointed to - does not exist in physical space. Their relation is an idea, something that exists only in our mind.

No single bit in the whole wide world carries its meaning in itself. It is us, humans, that bestow meaning upon them.

Withous us, there would be no meaning in the world, no reason, no cause and effect. The collection of pointers that makes up Google’s Index has no inherent structure, it is just a collection (like a pile of leaves), not a system. But it is not a random collection. Google’s spiders follow a precise set of instructions, genetically engineered or not, when they set out to crawl through the forest. Now, what exactly are those instructions? If only the human mind can turn raw data into information then how does the spider know what it must collect? The answer to this lies buried deep in Google’s carefully kept secret page crawling algorithm and its subsequent processing by the even more mysterious Page Ranking process. That’s why SEO is much more then finding the ‘right keyword’. It’s about that most elusive of ideas, ‘meaning’.

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