September 16, 2007

Search Engine Optimization and the Tightness of One's Pants

All-out search engine optimization is like all-out bodybuilding. Muscles can be nice, but when you focus entirely on building bigger muscles, you end up a muscle-bound freak. That's what all-out SEO sites are like. They do well with search engines but at the price of ridiculous code and redundant, irrelevant content.

My own take on SEO can be summed up by a quote from Frank O'Hara's faux poetry manifesto Personism: "As for measure and other technical apparatus, that's just common sense: if you're going to buy a pair of pants, you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you."

Translation: I respect the motivation for SEO (more traffic), so I'm willing to make some reasonable concessions in this area.

Translation of the translation: Aside from the various search engine-friendly practices I do as a matter of course and would continue to do in a world without search engines (structured markup, CSS for layout, unobtrusive Javascript, no Flash navigation, no pop-ups, image replacement for text graphics, custom error page), I've taken to determining keywords for each article I write and including these in the title element, the h1, and the file name.

Perhaps that's not much in the way of concessions, but I'm unwilling to write "keyword-rich" content, to say nothing of nonsense like using header markup for lists, as one SEO "guru" recently recommended a friend do.

If my pants aren't tight enough, so be it. I won't cut off circulation to increase traffic.

Published in SEO