It’s a rainy Sunday morning in the Martine house. I’ve been 
awake for the last two hours now, not because I’m worried about the fact two of my largest sponsors haven’t returned my emails concerning a pretty high percentage of next year’s total revenue, or even because of any of the now nearly constant issues occurring in Morgantown these days. Nope. It’s because my damn gutter near our bedroom window is overflowing thanks to a couple birds, leaves, and no doubt some terrorist like activities from our backyard squirrel. I probably should delete the last line or Mrs. M will escalate her shadow war on the fuzzy little pest.
The above paragraph was not search engine optimized. See, I used pronouns and didn’t repeat the same word 25 times for density. If it had been search engine optimized, by that I mean SEO, or also search engine marketing I’d have repeated SEO, search engine optimization and search engine marketing numerous times in hopes of creating “key word density”. SEO is the new driver of my world thanks to a number of things.
First, TechWhirl ranks remarkably low on most searches other than our own name. Second, frankly I mistakenly thought that if we created a good looking site, which was structured well for search (copy instead of images for labels, CSS vs. table layout) and it had killer content Google would find it without a problem. And, before I hear the black helicopters of big G start circling the house they’ve already documented from space Google and Bing have sort of indexed the site. What hasn’t happened is that many of these posts don’t rank very high, nor do we rank particularly high on big picture technical communication searches such as “what is technical writing.”
Currently search only brings us about a third of all visitors. Since we have almost no budget other than a couple special events and the occasional free $50 on Facebook this number is far, far too low. Search should contribute to around 80 to 90% of all visitors since our marketing reaches around 400 people and there’s a couple billion people conducting searches for everything from car reviews to new pictures of clowns and donkeys.
Now that a majority of our technical work is done, it’s time to start increasing our profile with search engines. Connie and I have gotten ourselves a good little book called Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day and have been working through it.
My biggest take-away so far is that the bad guys who try to game the Google and Bing algorithms are winning. They’ve figured out how to fark with the priority system so much that G and B have had to make less than useful changes to their ranking systems. Now, if you don’t have a good landing page with the right page name, title, web title, description and those darn key words then forget about a high ranking unless the search is pretty obscure. Maybe it’s just bad memory, but I don’t remember it being like this eight to 9 years ago when I was doing a good bit of web work (and launched this blog).
So far, the search spiders can’t seem to understand pronouns and what they are referring too. This isn’t that surprising considering I doubt a decent percentage of American youth (or my age to be fair) really understand the concept either – yo. However, until these search engines become better and figuring out the nuances of the English language the poor pronoun is going to take it in the pants.
Connie and I have decided that while our posts certainly will keep an eye on key words and ensure that we do a lot of the stuff the SEO book suggests, we will not sacrifice good writing. We’re a magazine and website network for writers for goodness sake. Our hope is that the big brains at Google and Bing when they’re not inventing cars that drive by themselves or killing remarkable next-gen tablets (Courier we never knew ye’) can either build or buy technology that helps those little spiders become more like a well educated English majors at Princeton rather than a high school dropouts with lobotomies.
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