As a writer I have mixed feelings about search engine optimization (SEO). On the one hand, no one writing to engage a human audience wants to do things like beating popular search terms to death with repetition, in hope that a simpleminded search bot will notice them more that way.
On the other hand, I learned the power of search terms a few years ago when my old website turned up as the first Google result for interstellar trade. My top ranking did not bring worlds knocking on my door to broker deals, but it was cool being Google’s go-to guy on the subject. (Alas, economist Paul Krugman once wrote a paper on interstellar trade, and when it got online it knocked me out of the top spot. But I am still on the first page.)
More recently I was delighted – and, the first time, a bit startled – when Amazon.com went live on my work, adding links to relevant books and films. There was the occasional miss (a writer about frontier-era Canada who had the same name as one of Henry VIII’s wives), but all in all it was an impressive display of Amazon’s ad algorithm at work. It did exactly what it was supposed to do, using text I wrote for people, not bots.
All of this – on both hands, so to speak – has confirmed my skepticism about some popular SEO hype.
There is no magic bullet formula for pushing your page up in the the search engine rankings. The story of search for the last 10 years has been people trying to game search engines, starting with simple tricks like white-on-white text, invisible on the page but read by search engines spiders.
Google muscled past the early search leaders like Alta Vista by making search smarter, which in part means not letting themselves be gamed. Their bread and butter is delivering useful search results, and they put a lot of effort into it, because if any other search engine – like, say, Bing – became markedly better at it, Google would be in a world of hurt.
But there is a third hand. I do a lot of search, and on the whole Google works pretty well. Practically none of my search use, however, has anything to do with e-commerce. And on those occasions when my search terms do relate to e-commerce the results get very cluttered very fast. Getting on the first page of results for interstellar trade is one thing. Getting a high page rank for auto parts is another matter. It is hard to blame merchants for struggling to get every bit of advantage they can.
A great deal of SEO, in fact, has nothing to do with fiddling text to game search engines, but is a matter of best practices in website design, such as using meaningful terms for links instead of ‘click here.’ Another part of SEO, perhaps the largest part, amounts to recognizing that search is about words and language, and the ways people use them to look for information online.
So I remain skeptical of anyone who claims, for example, that larding text with some artificial percentage of search terms will improve your rankings. Google has shrewd linguists who have analyzed billions of lines of text; chances are their algorithms can distinguish natural emphasis from artificial larding. But most websites can stand to be cleaned up, and so long as you don’t expect magic bullets, an SEO perspective can help you help the people who might want to find your site.