I’ve been reading a lot lately about the latest SEO changes made by Google. Now whenever Google makes changes to the way it rates content, there’s a big firestorm of forum posts and debates from SEO crowd. So, what’s SEO and why does this matter. And what does it mean for writers?
SEO is search engine optimization. It’s a process used to boost content and websites so they show higher up in the search returns for Google and other search engines. It’s heavily used by those who write for sites that want to market to you, be it hotels, vacation destinations or energy drinks. Being ranked higher can mean more money in someone’s pockets. Which is all well and good if the reader is getting the information they need.
But the early search spiders or bots weren’t very smart. They determined rank by finding terms, metadata and other information in the post. This created a problem because the industry started creating entire pages that were nothing but terms for the search engine to find. Google caught on and started looking for text that looked like articles.
I have seen things that would make me weep passed off as content. Articles that were obviously written to fool a machine because the moment I tried to read them, they made no sense. I’m not talking about bad writing where someone used the wrong form of its or missed a comma. I’m talking about content that was created by feeding existing articles into a computer and having it churn the content regurgitate something that looked like an article and would get past a Copyscape test for originality. Yes, it was original. Mostly because it was random and no one trying to write an article would want to arrange sentences that way.
But all of this pushed to cost of content down. How was a real writer to compete for jobs when then needed time to research and write a well-written readable article when SEO providers were able to buy vomit content generated to work with Google’s SEO engine with just the right distribution of keywords. Articles from overseas were down to $1 for 500 words. I saw some of those articles. They were created by chopped up bits of sentences rearranged to look like an article at a glance.
And Google has apparently seen them too. They’ve changed their search indexing process to make it even tougher for articles to get to the top rank. And the SEO people are all scrambling and debating it because Google won’t tell them exactly what the changes are. But I have a solution for them.
Look, guys, it all comes down to hiring or paying good writers for quality articles. Yes, we’re going to cost more than a dollar or two for five hundred words. This is because we care about the actual words we write and are going to give you content that people can actually read. Sure, we can work in a few SEO terms for you, if you keep it within reason. But what Google is telling you is that content – good content – is king. What I’m telling you is – we’re the people who write good content. We’re real writers.