I bet George Orwell never thought about SEO
Posted on | June 7, 2010 |
- Image by Olivander via Flickr
In my search for workaday happiness, I left another job. This is becoming a habit. This job was one of the dullest things I’ve ever done - filing news via an awful content management system that didn’t let me format pictures properly, wouldn’t let me embed video, and didn’t give me a byline. The editors emphasised volume over content, paying low wages for a huge numbers of words, which left no time for research. They even stipulated in the commission that they wanted rewritten press releases.
It was the worst kind of gig, and after 20 years of writing, I should have known better. But was an interesting job in one way, because the company responsible combined this approach with a focus on search engine optimisation, and I spent a lot of time grumbling about it.
Funny stuff, paper. The Chinese invented it, and it lasted us for millennia. Now, the Chinese are killing themselves making 326ppi displays for Apple that essentially give us paper-like display quality in digital form. And of course, as content becomes digitised, it becomes searchable. Most of my clients these days are online, and half of them pay me to write blogs (which is partly why I don’t write as often as I’d like for this one).
What comes with online writing? Traffic, that’s what. My clients want to know that my articles are drawing traffic. They want to know how much traffic, because they want to know how interesting people think my subject matter is, and partly because the advertisers want to know how many people are looking at their banners, even if they’re not clicking through. It’s easier to sell advertising on a web site that gets lots of page views.
Consequently, search engine optimisation (SEO) becomes important. There are thousands of corpulent, pasty types sitting in dank basements who do nothing else besides working out how to game Google’s search algorithms. In these times, SEO is necessary. But taken to the nth degree it is, quite frankly, a royal pain in the ass.
I can do most of it without much effort. Linking out to lots of stuff, updating regularly (I can post regularly when I’m being paid, honestly I can), writing controversial stuff for linkbait - sure, bring it on. But the client that I just fired was adamant that I had to change my writing style. One deputy ordered me to stuff the text with enough instances of a relevant keyword to achieve a certain density. Their content management system even measured the word density as a percentage. It ended up making my copy look like Adrian Mole’s My thoughts on Scotland (written on the M6 at 120 mph):
“The hallowed mist rolls away leaving Scotland’s majestic peaks revealed in all their majesty. A shape in the translucent sky reveals itself to be an eagle, that majestic bird of prey. Talons clawing, it lands on a loch, rippling the quiet majesty of the turbulent waters. The eagle pauses only to dip its majestic beak into the aqua before spreading its majestic wings and flying away to its magisterial nest high in the barren, arid, grassless hills.
The Highland cattle. Majestic horned beast of the glens lowers its brown eyed shaggy haired majestic head as it ruminates on the mysteries of Glencoe.”
Another deputy ordered me to stop creating witty headlines. No puns. No clever use of language. “Write something that a computer could understand,” he said. Hmm. So, I did it, because that’s what they wanted, but if you listened carefully, you’d have heard my creativity glands squishing under the technocratic jackboot. Not only is it difficult to do this stuff while maintaining an article’s readability, but it also distracts you from the subject matter, which should be sacred.
I doubt Dylan Thomas was thinking much about word density when he wrote Under Milk Wood. And even though Vannevar Bush had predicted the web by proposing the Memex three years before 1984 was finished, George Orwell probably wasn’t thinking about replicating popular search phrases in his content when he wrote that, either.
Here’s the thing about SEO: it’s difficult to tell who’s visiting, and how influential they are. I would prefer to tweet a post and add it to my Facebook status, so that a higher proportion of quality, highly-connected people read my stuff and think about it. And if you systematically drive down quality and creativity at the expense of quantity and searchability instead of finding a happy compromise, that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you use a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters to produce content, instead of writers who produce articles, then only monkeys will end up reading that shit.
I understand the need for SEO, and I know there has to be a compromise. SEO and good writing are far from mutually exclusive. But I find it distasteful when it starts getting in the way of the writing, and turns what you’re doing into a commodity. There’s a whole industry built around that concept. Article spinners take seed content, and use software or, in some cases, human beings to generate low-value content that lends nothing to the debate, but which will be picked up as a vehicle for ads. I wrote about some variations on this theme here.
I’ll keep thinking of my words as writing that matters, rather than as a fungible commodity that has to be butchered to attract click-through traffic, thank you very much.
So, here’s my manifesto: concentrate on SEO that can be done before and after the fact of writing. Designing a web site to optimise searchability? Sure. Planning regular updates on a blog (cough) because it’ll keep the spiders coming back? Absolutely. Putting in links after you’ve written the copy? Yup. Going after valued sites for reciprocal links? Happily. But leave the process of writing itself alone, or before you know it, we’ll end up with a situation like the dysphoric one proposed near the end of EPIC 2015, and it’ll be a lost art.
Here are some good tips for writer-friendly SEO.
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Word Herder is a site for writers and readers of both fiction and non-fiction. Surf here to read more about useful tools to help you organise your writing and optimise your research. I'm Danny Bradbury and I'm a freelance technology writer writing for the Guardian , the Financial Times, the National Post, Backbone magazine, MSN Canada, and the trade press. Here's a feed showing some of my work.
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June 8th, 2010 @ 2:17 am
Well said, Danny!