The other day I was chatting with a friend who is something of an expert in the field of SEO or Search Engine Optimization and all things WWW-related. And a fact of life of our brave new online world just sort of spilled out and I'm embarrassed to admit, although this fact of life or fact of internet architecture is apparently common knowledge to anyone posting content online, I had somehow never heard or read this fact.
Blog posts should be written around a set of search terms and the search terms should be carefully selected through research into the most common search terms in the topic about which you're writing. Apparently this is the way people who do not already know you and your blog will find their way to you.
When your posts have been carefully constructed around a curated set of key words and phrases designed to attract the right people to your blog, i.e. the people most likely to find it interesting and worthwhile.
Here's the very first post which now strikes me as a little wet behind the ears and possibly somewhat blind to the vast tundra that the internet can be to the writer who posts from the heart without even a moment spent considering how people might find their way to you.
In a way, then, this blog has been floating in the shadows, only entering the field of vision of the people somehow connected to its contributing authors. Maybe that's why what began as a group blog eventually dwindled down to pretty much me posting 90% of the time.
Were the other E.C. Authors simply not getting enough bang for their buck? I wish one of them had told me.
Since I founded Extra Criticum in May of 2008, I have simply been writing about whatever thing struck me as important, odd, amusing or troubling. The most thought I ever gave to search happened once I'd finished whatever post I was working on when I'd stare at that empty box and come up with about a dozen key words to enter which I assumed would assist the Google bots and any other search engine creatures to find the article based on... what I thought it was about.
Boy was I misguided!
Apparently the way blogging is done is almost the reverse, but not really. A topic is thought of only after really valuable key words and phrases have been assembled. And they are assembled as bait to lure the ideal client from their usual digital pathways and straight into the middle of your post which you will write with an eye toward luring the keyword junkies and then stringing them along from one key word or phrase to the next sort of like hopping across a bubbling brook from one stone to the next.
Because there's another fact of internet life I was not aware of. And that is the fact of our fickle and restless attention. It's not enough to have your reader arrive at your post. No. It's important that these search terms appear with some frequency from start to finish otherwise your reader is likely to bail midway. And that is never good.
We already know from the universe constructed by Amazon that a writer's ability to hold our attention from page one of a book on and on and on to the end is no longer a private matter known only to each individual reader. No, no. Now, every time a reader puts a book down to interrupt the journey, the Kindle sends some data to a mainframe somewhere in the cloud and Amazon begins a quiet sorting of authors. Those whose readers stick and those whose readers drift away.
And make no mistake: no one wants to be the latter. Not in this, the Era of the Algorithm where everything is quantifiable or if it isn't, we'll find a way to pretend that it is. Here's something I found by Googling "Search Engine Optimization Research" and is it just me or does this way of composing have the potential to drain everything important, exciting, unexpected and brilliant out of our online lives?
Tell me if you think I'm just being a terrible curmudgeon.
Oh, and for the record, the keywords you see at the bottom of this post were chosen at random off the top of my head. So if you notice something about them you'd like me to consider, please post your feedback in the comments. Thanks.
postscript: It's worth noting, maybe, that the EC post which got the most traffic of any in the history of this blog was this one about an incident in a Broadway theatre in which a celebrity called out a latecomer for speaking loudly as though she were alone when the show had already begun. Thank you, Hugh Jackman.
