Powering Content

Chapter 13. Content Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was my least favorite term until I learned that it could send all my hard work down the drain—if I ignored it, that is. From then on, our relationship has improved to a point where I can assure you that there has never been a more loyal friend to a content manager. Optimizing for search engines is, far from creating for robots, creating for humans. Humans who need, search, and discover. Curious humans, like you and me. Bots are just guides in this global information tour. The catch? They need to like you before curious humans can find you.

How Do You Get Bots to “Like” Your Content?

As simple as it sounds, making humans like your content is probably the safest way to appeal to bots, too. Search engines are increasingly trying to emulate human behavior, attitudes, and responses. Search engineers (yes, they exist) are trying to anticipate our judgment, coming up with strange algorithms to imitate our reasoning. Do we trust a source if more people are linking to it? Does longer content seem more reputable to us? Can we expect a site that has published quality content in the past to maintain that high level in the future? Does using lots of terms from the relevant jargon mean the author knows what he is talking about?

All these questions are central in SEO, which is just a fancy way to say “making it easy to find you.” Chapter 3 demonstrates how this is particularly important when we are ...