Unix is a great system, designed to make writing programs fast and easy. So, being a basically lazy person, I like to write programs for Unix. A few years back, I realized that the best way to get most people to use Unix was to write programs they could operate from the web browsers on the default operating system that came with their computers, which, as we all know, is not Unix, and probably won’t be for some time to come. Thus was born a concept that we know today as “cloud computing.” Too bad I didn’t promote the idea outside my customer base. I might be retired today, out riding my bike instead of sitting in the basement grinding web grist on a sunny day.
But, to get to the point, which will be short, since there is a lot of information on the web these days about writing for the web, this paradigm shift to the web led in strange directions. In addition to being a system administrator and software engineer, I became an accidental web designer. Abandoning my knowledge of curses escape sequences (for text terminals) and even my PerlTk skills (a toolkit library for generating graphical interfaces), I embraced HTML and Cascading Style Sheets, but kept on coding in Perl, PHP, and Ruby to create interactive web applications.
All was well, and I was happily coding solutions to problems and hanging web page interfaces on them, until I got a comment from one of my clients, to the effect, “We’re not getting enough hits on our site. How do we attract more traffic?” OK, I’d been building web pages since the mid-1990s and knew a bit about meta tags and keywords, and how to keep the search engines out of your back-end data with the robots.txt file, but, spending most of my time building application front-ends for a pre-selected audience, hadn’t paid much attention to marketing. That’s the job of the client, I thought. “It’s all about the content,” I said. “I can write great code and know enough about human-computer interface principles to put together a decent page and site layout, but you, Ms. Client, know your business best. Write content that says what your customers want to hear when they shop for your product.” Well, it wasn’t all that simple.
By now, I started seeing SPAM show up in my mailbox, addressed to ‘webmaster,’ that claimed my sites weren’t #1 and what I needed was SEO. The industry newletters and blogs I subscribe to were talking about the same thing: Search Engine Optimization. This is what I need, but I’m not going to hire it out, I’m going to do it myself. First, I clean up my page design and code to spin page titles and keywords, but that’s only half the issue. We need some press. We need links, we need the search engines to really notice us, out of all the competing web sites. There’s more to SEO than structure, and the content issue gets complicated.
The web evolved into a major marketing channel since I started in this business. The admen figured out what gets the attention of the search engine robots, and they spammed the robots, by hook or by crook. The first, by stuffing the meta tags with keywords, and the second, by flooding the pages with invisible keywords (text the color of the background). Suddenly, searches for new cars, baby blankets, advice on getting rid of moles in the lawn, and whatever else all came up with lists of top porn sites. This wouldn’t do, so the robots started ignoring sites with lots of keywords, as a matter of principle. Keywords still work, but in a minimal fashion. Robots got smart enough to look at the fonts and colors, too, and only looked at visible text. The folks who desperately want their site in your face at all cost started filling page footers with irrelevant keywords in tiny print, and the chase was on.
In any ecosystem, organisms evolve or die. The robots evolved, becoming critical readers of the web pages, to a point, looking, like Goldilocks at the Three Bears’ house, for things that weren’t too hot, too cold, too hard, or too soft, but “just right.” All this effort is with the goal of separating the good sites, that have something useful to say about the keywords, from the bad sites, that want to divert your attention to them instead of what you were really looking for. The kind of writing finesse it takes to pass the robots’ critique is just way outside the scope of what most clients can or want to do. So, I became an SEO copywriter, at least part time.
An SEO copywriter is essentially a person who writes for robots. Now, the robots are supposedly trying to judge page content by looking for qualities that human readers would find useful or interesting. But, robots don’t buy cars, they don’t shop for shoes or diet pills, and they don’t get embarrassing skin conditions, so they pay more attention to the hot/cold, hard/soft aspects and not much at all to the color, pattern, and overall aesthetics. It is said about business reports that they must be accurate, concise (or proper level of detail), and pretty. Robots get the concise part fairly well, but they don’t have the life experience to judge accuracy nor appearance. The successful SEO copywriter isn’t just a person who knows how to please the robots, so they will invite real people to view the site, but a good enough writer so the information will be useful and attractive to the viewer.
The accurate part takes knowledge of the subject matter, or at least the ability to research it. The pretty part is even more difficult: the writing must be grammatically correct, involve the reader, and flow smoothly for easy reading. The latter becomes a huge task, since the goal is to sprinkle in some pretty arbitrary keyword phrases in at the correct level of detail to satisfy the robots that this is indeed the subject matter and not a diversion. When I’m working directly with a client, I try to dissuade them from using awkward keyword phrases, but sometimes the one they want is what people searching for that particular product or service invariably use, so it’s a challenge to create something that both people and robots will like to read.
Treading the narrow path between what robots consider good copy and what humans will willingly read is a tedious art. There are a lot of SEO shops out there, churning out volumes of what is essentially ad copy that robots will buy. The sheer volume and low pay scale guarantees that the least professional examples are senseless drivel, and the best of them are a quirky sort of formula read at best. The SEO article is the dime novel of the 21st century, churned out in weekly installments for the robot market. When I tried my hand (unsuccessfully, I might add) at submissions for the pulp sci-fi fanzines in the 1950s, they paid a half-penny to one cent per word. Now, over 50 years and several hundred percent inflation later, writing SEO copy for the web pays a bit less than a half-cent a word. Such is progress. But, it’s an outlet, and it’s writing practice, and practice makes perfect. The great American novel is just waiting to be written. The question is, will it be on the robot best-seller list?