If you grew up being the middle child, you know what itâs like to go unnoticed. If youâve spent a ton of time creating great content that never appears in Google, it can feel like youâre the middle child of the publishing world. That changes today, kid. This weekâs newsletter is about learning the basics of Search Engine Optimization, utilizing its advantages, and sharpening your writing techniques to work in your (and Googleâs) favor. Letâs go!
I remember a time when SEO meant ensuring that your blog was formatted in a way that Google could crawl easily, writing good stuff, and getting organic backlinks.
I find it very sad that anybody would recommend that you decide what you write based on what Google wants you to write. The whole idea of doing âkeyword researchâ and changing your content to satisfy it is weirdly upsetting to me.
I mean, I get it, itâs a way for people to drive more clicks to their blogs. But⌠it also means that, instead of writing the things you want to write or the things you know, youâll be writing things according to some vague ethereal algorithm based on guesses at what google wants.
I have friends working for major publications and⌠You know when you search for âwhen does season 6 of such-and-so premiere,â and you get a super long article with eight different sections you have to scroll through before it tells you that they donât know when season 6 premieres? And itâs just unrelated plot summaries and random descriptions of the show that have nothing to do with your search query?
They used to write about one article a week, and it was good, the kind of thing they wanted to write. Now, theyâre expected to do that, plus five of those fake SEO-optimized trash articles, and they hate writing those articles, but the company demands it because it drives SEO.
That sucks. Itâs really lame. Thatâs not what the internet should be.
That was SEO around 10 years ago. Now Google search results are (sadly) mostly made out of reddit, quora or huge websites with high domain authority. So it might be a good idea thinking about alternative sources of traffic.
I canât quite believe that in the year of our Lord 2024, people are still talking about keyword research. For organic search traffic, forget it. Itâs all about where the article starts: think of questions people ask or problems they want sorted. Those are the sorts of pieces that tend to deliver well for search.
Keyword optimisations? 2014 called. It wants its search strategy back.
