Search Engine Optimization

This is a Seinfeldian blog, which is to say that its main purpose is entertainment and beyond that, it is a blog about nothing. I write because I like to write. I write to readers who like to read just for the fun of reading. I use my language in ways that I hope will be interesting, entertaining and fun.

English is my native language. Many people write in English nowadays because of its international accessibility, but not all of the people who write in English on the Web are native speakers of the language. I have nothing against them, but English written by people who are not native speakers does not always read very well.

It is a matter of fluency and artistic merit. Even though English is a lingua franca on the Internet and often thought of as simply the most effective common-ground language for writing web-pages—something of a “necessary evil” sort of idiom—we native speakers know another, often-overlooked side to it: English can be a beautiful language when it is spoken or written by the people who love it.

Speakers of French and Spanish often rave about the beauty of their language. We rarely hear anyone singing the praises of English. English is so common that we take it for granted.

Drumming in the Dark loves the English language, loves writing, loves communication, loves to push at the boundaries to make the art of communication a stronger and deeper art than most people would think is possible. This is the goal of all artwork: to constantly refine and improve and to take the chosen art-form further than it has been taken before.

But today I have to think about getting people to read what I have written. Today, I need to think about how to bring readers to my page. Today, I have to think about search engine optimization.

If you are an experienced Internet user, there is one thing you must have noticed by now: if you do a Google search for anything at all, your results page will have an Ebay ad on it relating to what you searched Google for. No complaints from me…Ebay ads help generate the revenue that keeps Google in business. It’s just that the Ebay ads that appear on Google results pages seem to follow an equation that makes the inherent silliness of the ad proportionate to the silliness of the search. All these ads are in this format:

“Searching for YOUR SEARCH KEYWORD HERE?
Find it now on Ebay!“
(with a link)

It works exactly the same way no matter what you search for.

Suppose you’re feeling philosophical one day and you search Google for the meaning of life. You’ll get an ad from Ebay that says:

“Searching for the meaning of life?
Find it now on Ebay!”

Or maybe you’ve misplaced your keys and you’ve already looked in all the places you can think of to look, so you sit down at the computer just to clear your mind for a moment and on a whim, you decide to search Google. You may very well get an Ebay ad like this:

“Searching for where the hell are my keys?
Find it now on Ebay!”

Shifting gears just slightly, I really have no idea what you would have to search for to find my blog. In my effort to figure out how to get some traffic to this page, I’ve read a few articles about search engine optimization. Ebay has of course offered to help. As I understand it, an article must contain some keywords in order to appear in a search result, but too many keywords makes the article look like spam to the search engine. One writer (I use the term loosely here) recommends a “keyword density” of 3 to 6 percent, meaning that for every one hundred words in an article, 3 to 6 of them should be popular search keywords.

My personal homepage is on Yahoo! (the exclamation point is part of the name and is not there to indicate that I am especially excited about where my homepage is) and a Yahoo homepage always has a window that lists the top ten most popular searches for each day. Today—March 19, 2008—the number one Yahoo! search is for Miley Cyrus. I have no idea what a Miley Cyrus is, but I’m sure I could find one on Ebay.

I looked at all ten of the top searches for today without seeing anything I am familiar with in the top nine. I got all the way down to number 10 before I saw anything familiar. Today’s 10th most popular search on Yahoo! is for “second amendment”.

It has something to do with armed bears or bare arms. March in Chicago is still a bit cold for arm-baring and—this may be controversial, but—I have never been in favor of giving firearms to wild animals. I shouldn’t worry since there are no bears in Chicago other than the Chicago Bears football team. Come to think of it, they don’t really need guns either.

I’m joking. I know what the second amendment is. I found one on Ebay.