I think search engine optimization of websites and web content (ie, site copy, the actual words you write on a website or blog) is ruining the web. Allow me to explain.
SEO requires a site author to adopt a set of practices in sourcing, writing and formatting content that makes that content more easily crawled by a search bot, thus leading to improved search relevancy and higher traffic. The merit of the approach is that more people interested in what your site is about are able to find it. In economics this is called lowering transaction costs, and it leads to gains through efficiency. The entire field of marketing and advertising deals with search efficiency in a theoretical sense– ensuring the maximum number of potential consumers of a product or service are aware of its existence, capable of affording it and able to make use of it.
SEO gimmicks change all the time. This is because people selling SEO services are constantly studying new search engine rules and then coming up with strategies for gaming the intent of the rule to exploit it. As a result, search engine rules change and SEO changes occur in lock step. But some aspects of SEO seem rather hardcoded, due to the nature of non-human agents (search bots) being the driving mechanism of web crawling.
Three major hard structures seem to be present in SEO recommendations no matter the rules. One is the recommendation to pepper one’s site with relevant “keywords” that help a bot quickly catalog a site’s content as part of this or that interest set. Another is to write content with clear subheadings that indicate the logical structure of the content and again provide a kind of mini-keyword set to what is on the page. The final recommendation is to write really short paragraphs, using short sentences and simple words. The idea here is this is “readable”, especially on mobile devices and especially by search bots who might find long arguments and linguistic nuance difficult to parse.
All of these things suck and make for shitty human-read websites.
The worst offenders of keywords write jumbled, nonsensical content strewn with locations, service names, emphatic descriptors and other errata that is literally incomprehensible to a human reader and is only good for a bot. But it ends up on the page, visible to humans, resulting in a confusing mess. The more savvy offenders try to make the keywords seem contextual by purposefully writing the content in such a way that keywords replace the word that might make naturally come to mind in a given place. This content reads like someone is being paid to name-drop or use particular words, that is, it’s jarring.
The use of subheadings breaks up the flow of an essay, article or argument. It rewards the proverbial reader with ADD, who can’t be bothered to follow a train of thought for more than 15 seconds. It demeans the audience by suggesting they need the structure of the message highlighted and flagged lest they lose their way trying to find their own footing. It violates the law of simplicity, adding things that aren’t necessary when so much of good writing comes from taking more and more away.
The blasphemy of the final SEO recommendation should be readily apparent. Read any classical treatise, any philosophical work, anything at all written by a serious thinker, especially long ago. See if you can find many paragraphs shorter than half a page. See if you can find many chapters that don’t contain words you need to look up in a dictionary. In other words, see if you can find any kind of writing that doesn’t require the reader to work hard to get the reward of understanding from the author, an individual who has likely striven even more mightily in his life to be in such a position as to bequeath his knowledge in a text. Now, ask yourself, what kind of quality can we expect from writing whose primary virtues are to be contained in short paragraphs, in shorter sentences and in words a barely educated 10 year old finds himself conversant?
So let it be known, here at A House Rises, we’ll be taking a stand against this SEO nonsense. We will optimize nothing but the power of our ideas and the gloriousness of the writing we use to wield them. We will write for people, not algorithms, and rely on common word of mouth and the virus of impulse to spread our content to the right people at the right time. We’ll write things we are proud of, about things we actually care about, with an authenticity fitting to us and our purpose in sharing our ideas. To hell with the rest of it!
A House Rises 