When it comes to SEO it appears that content is still king, over and above all the advice given by so called “experts”. I first wrote about this back in 2014.
There’s a lot of bull written about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) . Why? Well because the people who write the bull make a lot of money from people who don’t know a thing about SEO.
There are the guarantees for starters. Page 1 guaranteed! Really? How do you do that, when Google can’t do that?
What the field of SEO has done by its emergence is give a lot of people a lot of opportunity to write contradictory information and confuse the hell out of the average person.
“You need to use Google authorship to get good ranking”.. “No you don’t, Google is ditching authorship”.
“This or that no longer works because of Google Panda updates”, or whatever update is the most recent.
“To really rank you need to use long tail keywords”.. what?
“You need to put keywords in the title and the first paragraph of the content”.
OK, that’s just a tiny cross section of the type of stuff that people write about SEO. I haven’t written too much more, because what I have written so far is enough gobbledegook.
Then about a fortnight ago, I wrote a blog post about the dangers of artificial intelligence. I wrote this because I have been very slack on my blogging of late, and it was an easy post to write, since I am fascinated by the idea that if we develop a computer system that ends up smarter than us, we by definition will be unable to control it.
I wrote this post and did my standard posting it to Facebook to get a few people to read it. I didn’t give a moments’ thought to SEO. So I was surprised when I did a Google search for the dangers of artificial intelligence, in order to research more on this topic, to find my little blog post was on the third page of Google about a week after it was posted.
Why? Because despite what the so called “experts” say, content is STILL king.
Google themselves say, “don’t write for search engines, write for people”. That is true about a blog and true about a web page. There are tools that check your content and say “Well you don’t have the keywords in the first paragraph”. What if it doesn’t fit well into what you want to write? What then? Do you shoehorn it in and make the content look absolutely stupid? No of course you don’t. You write for people, as Google suggests.
One if the rules I constantly break is,”Long posts (greater than 1200 words) work best for SEO. I don’t actually care if they do, because when I find a 1500 word article, it’s TL;DR (too long;didn’t read). I would rather write 500 words that get the message across succinctly than 1500 words of waffle. And if that penalises me in the eyes of Google, too bad.
Shaun
Latest posts by Shaun (see all)
- Leaving Windows - November 18, 2021
- More on the dangers of Artificial Intelligence - July 27, 2017
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