SEO, advertising, language, articles

I have both an academic interest in SEO, and a desire to engage in the practice.

I want to understand the present and future of how people make decisions, and how they become who they become. This has always had to do with public/cultural narrative, and clearly in the past several hundred years, especially the 20th century, public/cultural narrative and decision-making has been overwhelmingly influenced by advertising.

Advertising today means something different than it did in the time of the Madmen (as the show studiously recognizes). The search engine is the method that we more and more use to imbibe, interact with, and hopefully criticize media, branding, information, community, whatever. So the mechanism of how this information comes to us is awesomely powerful and very interesting. And what it may do to our language (along with all the other weird things digitization may do to our language LOL) is interesting as well, as well as what it may do to our minds.

Although I can follow algorithms to some extent, I’m not a specialist. I don’t work for anything close to Google. But I can learn about and interact with this mechanism by entering the industry of SEO (search engine optimization). I think it’s one of the most interesting fields there is right now. It’s always both reacting to and affecting search engine methods (although Google doesn’t always like to admit this, I think). It seems to be a pretty complex system.

On this note, I’ve been reading a lot of SEO articles lately, trying to get a handle on the industry. I’ve listed some articles below, with some commentary. They’re pretty well publicized and several months old, so these aren’t dynamo links or anything, but they are certainly helping me out.

• Not From the Land of Unicorns

I came from the land of ‘A List Apart’ before entering SEO territory, from standards-based HTML/CSS. So the line I’d always kind of heard was ‘SEO is just good HTML’. Well, that’s partly true of course, but there’s lots more to it, and this article is pretty good at presenting an informed view about that.

• Pitfalls of International SEO

This one talks about international dimensions I hadn’t thought of at all that much. And one could draw some interesting conclusion about the relationship between SEO, linguistics, dialect, which is also something in which I’m pretty interested.

• Mobile Obsolescence?

This is a quick one that pretty much centers on the fact that mobile searchers are in a different context than desktop searchers, and therefore must be dealt with differently.

Google Authority

A satisfactory introduction to how google thinks about the trustworthiness and authority of sites. Which comes with this nifty mindmap. (You may want to download this one, as the shadowbox photoshowing script makes it difficult to see the lines in the mindmap). .

P.S. — I hope to try hard to not make this blog into another one of those blogs that are just out there to get publicized, and either directly or indirectly monetized. This is my space, for thinking, publicly. If I need a space to make me money I will try hard to do that, but this ain’t it. Interested versus disinterested inquiry, no? We’ll see how well the attempt fares.