 |
| Could THIS be a search engine? (Wiki commons) |
There can be little doubt that one of my household gods is good writing. Mine (I flatter myself), my friend and colleague Judy Carmichael’s (see her blog here), and the great authors of all times, places and styles. I have altars to those gods, myriad bookcases that overflow faster than a stopped up sink. I have prized every unique phrase I’ve ever read. And as a result, I have expanded my vocabulary if not to the point of an Oxford scholar, at least to a serviceable magnitude for all the kinds of writing I do, from journalism to junk.
SEO
And now, learning more than I ever wanted to know about keywords and SEO (search engine optimization), I have begun to understand that soon, Susie will not only be unable to read, Susie will have a vocabulary driven to drivel by the need of authors to construct their offerings around those few words and phrases the internet gatekeepers say are the ones searched for most often.
Morons, because it's a good key word...and also fits Bush
In short, if one wishes to be read, one will have to stuff one’s pages with repetitive―but not TOO repetitive―terms that the lowest common denominator of internet searchers will find. Duh. Maybe I should use that term again. Duh. OK. So now I have at least one repetitive term that should appeal to morons and is used even by people of normal intelligence when imitating morons. And no, this is not about George Effing Bush, although I suspect he wouldn’t do well on the internet, despite his miniscule vocabulary, mainly because his vocabulary has no repetitive terms. How could it? He made most of them up, or at least, the incompletely firing synapses within his cranium made them up and his monkey mouth spit them out.
This is about making sure every page on one’s website or in one’s blog contains high visibility words, and that the same words appear enough times for a search engine spider to find them and properly catalog (not the right term; still in actual writer mode, sorry) the pages so that googlers will discover them and read them and click on the ads and enable the writer―who used to write as opposed to spending precious hours of intellectual life learning geek-crap―to earn a few measley bucks.
Journalists' tools? Not so much
OK. Journalists have been warned for years not to use the term yellow elongated fruit when banana will do. But this goes beyond repeating banana in the second and third references and avoiding the use of yellow elongated fruit. It means choosing one’s subjects according to what various “tools” will tell you are popular terms in the public’s so-called imagination at present. I actually bought such a tool. It’s called Traffic Travis, and is has a cute little cartoon of a nerd. Uh huh. Also, one can use Google’s own tool, the Wonder Wheel…if one can only recall how to get to it from one day to the next. (As far as I can tell, you actually have to do a search, which still won’t put it onscreen. You must also open one of the websites arrayed and then, if you’re lucky and the stars are not in Jupiter or something, it will appear.)
So let’s assume that one of the best search terms for me to use would be Cornwall acommodation. Yup, misspelling and all. I mean, can I really write an article about Cornwall acommodation rather than Cornwall accommodation? How illiterate. But that’s how the peckerheads* that apparently know or think they know a word longer than hotel will search for it.
No, I can’t do it. I’ll use hotels. I’ll use lodgings. I’ll use hostelry. But I won’t use acommodation. I suppose I could try accommodation and see if search engine spiders can correct misspellings when they crawl my work. (Isn’t that, in itself, a bit creepy?) Might as well. Hotel, lodgings and hostelry are WAY under the search engine radar.
More search engine points to ponder
I must also remember to use a bunch of H1 headings; is that the same thing as a larger point size? And I must remember not to stuff my pages with the chosen words too much; apparently, spiders get full after about five helpings of each word per page and spit it out thereafter. Their keepers can even ban your site if you try to force feed the little arachnids too much. Oops. Sorry. Fifty-cent word in a two-for-a-penny world.
I really only have one question. It was going to be, “Whatever happened to librarians and recommendations of good books?” But instead, I think I’ll cut to the internet chase, and just ask, “WHY?”
* I'm not sure the journalistic debate over whether dickhead or peckerhead is the preferred term has been definitively decided. Votes?
* I'm not sure the journalistic debate over whether dickhead or peckerhead is the preferred term has been definitively decided. Votes?
