When I write a book, I write it to a reader, some individual who will benefit from the information contained in the book. Apparently my publisher now believes that when I write a book, my goal is to fine tune the information for something called SEO.
You probably don’t know what SEO is. I didn’t.
After my editor repeatedly used the term in an email, I looked it up: SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Unless you’ve worked on a web site or have been sold a bill of goods by someone convincing you of how important search engine ranking is, you’ve probably never heard of SEO.
My observation is that the goal of Search Engine Optimization is to cheat. It shifts the emphasis from creating a web page that provides people with good, solid information to having a web page that provides good solid information for a search engine algorithm.
So I see the goal of SEO not to make a person happy, but rather to simply appear higher in the search results ranking. Obviously that’s more important.
A higher ranking on Google, Bing, or Yahoo equals more page hits, which translates into more money. And we all have heard the same thing from the great philosophers throughout history: Money is what makes people happy.
Oh, please. What a load of crap!
Maybe I don’t get the whole SEO thing because I’m not someone who marketing droids feel is the run of the mill idiot blindly clicking a top search result. Rarely do any of those results contain what I’m looking for. In fact, now I know that those pages appear there because the people who designed the pages paid heed to good Search Engine Optimization, not good content.
No, typically I have to wade through page after page to find the proper result. And you know what? Often times those top two or three search results are just the same nonsense repeated over and over! The real search results, the information you really need, that’s down on the list — maybe even on Page 6 of the search results. That makes it worth finding, regardless of SEO.
Because money is to be made, SEO will continue to be the goal of web page designers and big business everywhere. The search engines will modify their algorithms and the SEO will change accordingly. Still I have hope.
The hope I hold is that eventually people will recognize how search results appear and how silly SEO is. People know that you don’t choose a plumber because his business is named AAAA Plumbing and it appears first in the list. They look for quality. That should be the priority, not SEO.
