Using Opacity to Enhance Search Engine Optimization
Things are not always what they seem, and that is certainly true in the deep world of advanced Web marketing. Masters of stealthy marketing tactics in the industry of search engine optimization look at many factors that elude most practitioners of the “art” of SEO. Theory in practice eliminates the weaker strategies and techniques before they even get started or grab hold of key positions in search results.
One of the more interesting topics in SEO theory is the idea of opacity. Opacity is a measurement of how much natural search results have been influenced by veiled or stealthy optimization techniques. For example, let’s say you have a query that returns 1,000 results. If no one has optimized any Web listings in those results then the query is said to be Perfectly Natural, and it has a Naturality of 1.0 (1,000 divided by 1,000).
As soon as one listing is optimized to improve its performance, the Naturality of the search result decreases (999 divided by 1,000). If the optimized listing is easily recognized as having been optimized it is said to be Transparent; otherwise it is an Opaque listing. In competitive search results you may have a mix of Natural, Transparent, and Opaque listings. The formula for measuring these values is denoted by 1 = Ny + Ty + Oy.
True masters of SEO theory work easily and smoothly in the Opaque Search Listings, whereas most people use Transparent search optimization techniques. But what makes your SEO opaque? This is where the true “secret sauce” of SEO lies: not revealing which methods, resources, and strategies you employ. It has been said that all the basic techniques have been written about over and over again, but there are so many ways of getting the job done that people can choose to be Transparent or Opaque in their optimization.
When people talk about SEO theory they usually have very basic ideas in mind, but the best SEO theorists in the world employ techniques that look complicated and hard to achieve. There may not be any rocket science involved in achieving Opacity but there is certainly a lot of strategy.
