Category — SEO

Strunk & White, authors of Elements of Style wrote one of the best chapters ever anywhere (about composition). It reads: “omit needless words.” that’s it. And really, what more do you need to know? OK. a little bit more. But the idea still stands. Write less… get more. Write less… and get better copy.

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These days though, people are doing the opposite. In an all-out SEO onslaught, they’re stuffing their copy with as many (key) words as possible. I wrote a paragraph for a travel agent the other day that read: “My name is John Fortson. I’m a travel consultant - I help travelers get good deals, and have good vacations. It’s what I do, and what I like to do.” Pretty good, right? Well, now it reads: “My name is John Fortson. I’m a leisure travel consultant - I help leisure travelers get good deals, and have good vacations. It’s what I do, and what I like to do.” It’s still alright, but it has two too-many words in it now. The timing is gone, and with it, so is some of its’ effectiveness.

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Now, I’ve come a little way from my why new tech doesn’t need SEO post… I get why you should use SEO, and really, I think it’s a good idea. I even think a good SEO writer (which admittedly, I’m not) can find a decent balance between what appeals to spiders and what appeals to people. But the reality is that it’s always a tradeoff. You can’t ‘omit needless words’ while at the same time ‘adding important words.’ It’s just not possible.

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So, though I’d like to tell you to screw SEO, I won’t. I’ll tell you to consider it. But, I’ll tell you that if you’re in the position to trade SEO for readabililty (and I think a lot of people are), then you should. You should omit needless words, and you shoud write better stuff.

I’ve been going back and forth with Alan Jones the last couple days, in this set of posts, and on Twitter. You guys might be getting sick of it (I promise I won’t write about his blog for another week!), but he just posted another good piece… this one a conterpoint to my Why New Tech Doesn’t Need SEO post. It’s really good stuff, and brings up a point I’ve been meaning to write about. I won’t now (remember… at least not for a week), but I will sometime soon. Keep an eye out.

Almost all copy these days is SEO (short for Search-Engine Optimization) - it seems like people can’t write an ‘about us’ section anymore without stuffing it full of keywords. I hate reading that stuff, and I especially hate writing it. Now… I don’t mean to bash all of SEO here – I can see how, for some projects, you’d want to use it. But if you’re developing new tech, your project isn’t one of those.

Why? Because new tech people will find good new tech. Andrew Hyde relayed a funny quote the other day: “marketing is punishment for a bad idea.” It’s a little flip, but for new tech, it fits. If your shit’s good enough, it’ll go viral - people won’t need to find it searching on google… they’ll find it on your blog, on twitter, on facebook, or even on the street.

And when they do – when people get to your site, they just want to see your app (and a bit of good copy). They don’t want to see what keywords a computer-generated writer spit out. They don’t even want to see marketing… they want to see who you are, what you made, and why you made it.

So, just go write this stuff free of limitations. If you still think you need SEO… you don’t. That just means your product stinks. In that case (even more so), don’t spend time on the keywords, spend time on the code.