SEO, or search engine optimization, is the art and science of lacing content with keywords and phrases that will help search engines to bring a website to the top of their search results. However, it has a bad name in some circles because all it does is cause people to use completely ridiculous keywords and ridiculous ratios for those keywords, and it causes search engines to come up with protocols that penalize perfectly legitimate businesses when they make updates. Consider why search engine optimization is a bad word/phrase, and then think about how you can take a common-sense approach to it.
Bad Keywords
Some of the worst keywords and phrases in the history of the universe have been formed because of SEO. People are asking writers to use keywords like “best photographer NYC studio” rather than writing about “best NYC photography studio(s)”. These types of keywords make content look ridiculous, and it makes it very hard for writers to do their job.
Instead of leaning completely toward search engine optimization, it is better for businesses to use keywords and phrases that are close enough to what SEO calls for but that still sound like plain English.
Density
Keyword density is an item that drives some writers crazy because the density that people ask for changes from project to project. Some people only want a keyword mentioned once in a 1000-word article. However, that keyword is something simple and mundane like “site.” Other times, people choose a stack of keywords so thick that they are the size of the phone book and request that the article must only be 200 or 300 words. Unfortunately, the entirety of the keywords consist of about 200 or 300 hundred words alone.
Length
People ask for “blurbs” on their website that will be “easy to read”, but these “blurbs” are not long enough to hold any real information. Then, they are supposed to fit in or incorporate some random keywords. The focus must be on the quality of the content rather than how long it is or the thousands of keywords that must go into the document.
Now, it is clear why I hate “search engine optimization”. People use this platform as a way to get “better results”, but these protocols only make it harder to write interesting content and encourage keyword stacking. Let us write good content and let people read it rather than force-feeding the reader a bunch of keywords.
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