Filed under: business, technology | Tags: CMS, digital space, leaves, Not Foliage, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Sexy Elephant Opera, websites
For years I’d been seeing discussions of “SEO” all over my websites. Every company seemed to want to help me improve this SEO business so I eventually looked it up to try and understand it. In case you don’t have six websites the way I do, (I am a maniac. They’re here, here, here, here, here and right here) or maybe you’ve never encountered SEO before or maybe SEO stands for “Sexy Elephant Opera” for you – allow me to explain. In this case SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It is what you’re supposed to do to make yourself easy to find on the web. People who are concerned about discoverability and visibility on the internet tend to care a lot about SEO.
I am, as someone who makes many things in this digital space, very interested in making myself discoverable so I looked into it. Most of the companies that make CMS (Content Management System) templates give their users tools to optimize their searchability.
Many of my websites, including this blog, have given me ample opportunities to improve my page’s SEO. It has little boxes I can fill out and ways to boost. I never bother, really. But one time I did. I was working on one of my many websites and it made what I needed to do to improve my SEO clear. I tried to do it right. I really did. But the more I attempted it, the stupider it all became.
Let’s say I had a webpage about leaves. For it to be useful in a SEO sense, the webpage’s name had to have the word “leaves” in it. Call it foliage and you’re not getting a SEO boost. You need to use the word “leaves” in the title. You need to use the word “leaves” as many times as possible in the text and you have to tag the images with leaves. You have to saturate your page with the word, or the clicks will not come to you.
This redundancy is, of course, the absolute opposite of good writing, wherein it is optimal to use as large a variety of words as you can muster. You will have better SEO luck just writing the word leaves over and over again than you would in writing something interesting or salient about leaves. I’m pretty sure this is a big factor in why so much stuff on the internet is useless trash. Magazines and newspapers have gone out of business over it because they’re bought by people or companies that just want clicks – so they can make advertising dollars or whatever, and they privilege SEO over good writing. Owners would rather have a bot “write” an article that generates clicks than a thoughtful essay by a person that reveals truth. But try and write a thoughtful essay while also trying to include SEO attractive words and you’ll find yourself in a quandary. The SEO likes simple repetitive things. It does not like complex ideas or expansive language. It’s a baby that recognizes a handful of words and can act on them.
Could improving my SEO bring more eyes to my work? Absolutely. But improving the SEO would make the work worth very little when those eyes arrived.
Improving one’s SEO means making the work for robots. Writing for SEO means privileging robots over humans. And robots don’t read. They just select the words they’re looking for and spit out results.
People are now making things for search engines instead of other people. This doesn’t make any sense to me. I just can’t bring myself to do it. Leaves leaves leaves leaves leaves leaves. Not a leaf! No. Leaves leaves leaves.
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