It’s remarkable how many writers – and good ones too – are writing SEO articles as their day job nowadays.

I’m glad you think my strategy has struck some kind of balance between being a human being and being a salesman. As you can probably tell, I’m a bit embarrassed by the whole idea of promoting my book. But, in the spirit of “Don’t eat meat unless you’re willing to look a Spring lamb in the eye and shoot it,” I’m willing to roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty. Nevertheless, as with the lamb thing, I’d much rather I had the money to pay someone else to do it.

1) I can spot the keywords stuffed into it, and because I’m experienced using a keyword percentage calculating program, I can tell when someone has been overzealous and stuffed too many in (search engines don’t approve of that), and when they’ve been too sparse for the search engines to find them.

2) These articles SAY NOTHING. They are merely keyword delivery devices for search engines.

When I search Google for something, because of all this SEO stuff, I now almost never find any genuine information. I find superficial, keyword-stuffed articles designed only so the perpetrator can grab me and yell “BUY! BUY! BUY!” Everything is reduced to money, but there is little human value in any of it. I consider Google, now, to be almost worthless when I really want to learn something.

It may be the case that all these keyword-stuffed articles and posts bring the people on the top few Google listings a pile of money and sales. But with everyone doing it now, most of them are still left on page 30 of Google results.

It seems to me that the real way of disseminating value is still the more personal stuff, rather than all this calculated, contrived fakery. I don’t dismiss SEO entirely, because it does bring some genuinely interested people to a place (I think, cynically, probably by accident). But I didn’t arrive at your blog because I found a keyword, but because of interacting with you on Twitter.

So I think your efforts to find and inform people are a good compromise. And…I believe this turned into a bit of a rant. Gah, sorry!

soap, bloody hell…..

terry