Search Engine Optimisation; it’s making us all very literate
What I like about the concept of search engine optimisation (SEO) is that it is encouraging us all to write.
Google tells us that if we want to improve our rankings, that we must write well, we must write content that is unique, fresh, engaging, grammatically correct, and consistent – it’s all beginning to sound like my English tutor...
It’s no good trying to be smarter and try to outwit the computer spiders crawling through the Internet searching through all those articles, keywords and websites. Any attempts at cheating and cutting corners through what is called “ keyword stuffing” (filling your website pages with keywords) and “cloaking” (when one website presents one version to a user and another website presents a different version for a search engine), would result in our pages becoming less relevant, devalued, and, in some cases, removed from the search engine listings.
And so with all this writing that we’re all doing every day, the race to email out news articles, tweets and blogs, the research and reading of articles we are all doing so as not to miss out on a good story, are we all becoming mini journalists – all fighting for the best story, the one that is going to captivate our readers and entice them to “share” it with their followers on Facebook and Twitter, to make sure our readers “like” us, “like” our story and their friends “like” our story and so on?
And at the end of the day, there’s nothing better than healthy competition as we finally can see the results of our efforts as our “keyword” makes it to the top of the search engine rankings – all perhaps for a minute or an hour or a day and then when we check again, we see our keyword moving down the page again as our competitors jostle us for position 1 and they, in turn, move up the rankings.
Lisa Lomax, Format.ie Web Design, Sligo, Ireland, 15 July 2011
