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No to SEO

Winter has a thoughtful essay on the ills of SEO.

I’ve got to say that I’ve never ever done SEO stuff. I don’t have a bunch of meta keywords, which maybe people don’t even do anymore but it was the first “SEO” technique I heard of. I just immediately went “nope! That sounds skeevy!” I just try my own limited best to make the pages as useful as they can be, so they work as resources, for myself if for no-one else.

I don’t rely on search to “grow traffic” (which wouldn't even make sense, since I pay for bandwidth). I have no incentive to game the system. I just write because I want to write and I want to do it honestly and straight-forwardly.

SEO is like a shouting contest, a screaming contest. It’s trying to make a book with the most garish cover. Not into it. It never made sense to me logically.

Let’s say you’re writing about cats or something else that there’s already ten thousand pages. You don’t want to be on the front page because you SEOd the hardest even though you’re not saying anything unique about cats. “Please, pick me, I’m the best at being like everyone else who’s writing about this!” Spare me. If you have something unique about your own take on cats, that unique thing is gonna be what people want.

If I ever manage to write something useful or moving, people will send it to each other just like I send links to my friends, just like crazy aunts and cranky uncles all over the world have always done.

And even if that never happens, that’s fine! Trying to “compete” in the world of writing, art, music etc is hopeless in the era of the global village where people can spend their time reading texts from any place and any era and even have AI-generated, tailor-made entertainment.

Write for yourself and for your friends.