For many years I worked a few months out of every year in Japan. The company I worked for at the time had over 100 Japanese suppliers and thus I spent a great deal of that time working with Japanese engineers at various companies. One cannot spent much time in the Far East without absorbing some Eastern philosophy, and Kaizen is a Japanese manufacturing and design philosophy that I found myself very interested in.
Kaizen is a Japanese term that roughly translates to “continuous incremental improvement”. That basically means that a designer or manufacturer is continually looking for ways to make something better. The Kaizen approach works because design and process improvement never ends with companies who adopt this approach. There are always ways to make something better or do something more efficiently, and that is the heart of the Kaizen philosophy.
Kaizen quite naturally works well with search engine optimization. For many years search engines have favored sites that are continually making changes to content and constantly adding new pages and new information. Recent information revealed about new Google patents shows that they have an algorithm that tracks the growth of inbound links to a site, and that algorithm favors “natural growth” of links to a site that build slowly over time. The addition of large numbers of inbound links to a site in a short time reveals an unnatural link building pattern and thus the site may get hit with a spam penalty.
SEO is also a process that never really ends due to changing search engine algorithms. Kaizen SEO is therefore a philosophy that continually seeks ways to make a web site more visible and attractive to the search engines. It is a process that requires periodic tweaks to a Web site’s content or script code in order to help the site to rank more favorably. The process never ends because the evolution of search engine algorithms never ends. They also practice the art of Kaizen SEO.
The Kaizen SEO philosophy is one where a web site is under continual scrutiny. Small changes are made every time something is discovered that may help the site perform better. The goal is perfection, but perfection can never be reached, and thus the art of Kaizen SEO lives on forever.
To practice Kaizen SEO, spend some time reviewing your web site every day, and every day find some small way to improve the site or the user’s experience.