Writing for the mighty SEO
“SEO” stands for “Search Engine Optimization,” which is apparently one of the main keys to Google rankings.
I’m lousy at it, and so I decided to install a plugin that supposedly assists in that endeavor. One of my main problems is that, for reasons so far unknown, Google doesn’t quite recognize me. If you search for “thenewneo blog” it does show the URL for my blog, but underneath the listing it says: “No information is available for this page.” When I click on “learn why,” it doesn’t yield any information I can use. As far as I know, I don’t have any code on my blog that blocks Google trawlers from learning about the blog, but Google acts as though I do.
And the plugin didn’t help, either, although it did provide some rather amusing writing tips. I reminds me of when I was in high school in New York, and teachers used to teach entire courses with the Regents exams in mind. In the case of Google, you’re supposed to write your posts with Google in mind, which means you focus on things like keywords and images.
Fat chance.
Here are some of the things the plugin is trying to help me with on a previous post:
–Images: No images appear on this page. Add some!
–Keyphrase in introduction: Your keyphrase or its synonyms do not appear in the first paragraph. Make sure the topic is clear immediately.
–Keyphrase in SEO title: For the best SEO results write the exact match of your keyphrase in the SEO title, and put the keyphrase at the beginning of the title.
–Keyphrase density: The focus keyphrase was found 0 times. That’s less than the recommended minimum of 2 times for a text of this length. Focus on your keyphrase!
–SEO title width: The SEO title is wider than the viewable limit. Try to make it shorter.
My favorites are these:
–Flesch reading ease: The copy scores 46.2 in the test, which is considered difficult to read. Try to make shorter sentences, using less difficult words to improve readability.
–Subheading distribution: You are not using any subheadings, although your text is rather long. Try and add some subheadings.
–Sentence length: 30% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.
–Passive voice: You’re using enough active voice. That’s great!
–Consecutive sentences: There is enough variety in your sentences. That’s great!
–Paragraph length: None of the paragraphs are too long. Great job!
–Transition words: Well done!
Can a bot be considered perky and condescending? I certainly hear that tone of voice, and it doesn’t make me want to obey.
And I’d like to add a correction to its grammar. “None of the paragraphs are too long” should be “is too long.”
Obviously, I have no plans to dumb down my writing as the SEO scoring would prefer. Why images supposedly are so great I have no idea, but maybe it’s just what people like. As far as I’m concerned, unless I’m showing an image for a special reason, images are just another way to slow the site down.
By the way, if anyone has a clue why Google seems blocked from describing my site, please let me know. It’s not political; plenty of blogs on the right have Google descriptions that are just fine.
Hey, Neo!
You’re blocking indexing in your “robots.txt” file. Your file reads:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
That tells Google (and other well-behaved search engines) that they can’t index anything below the “/“ directory on your site, which is everything. Try changing the “Disallow” section to something like:
Disallow: /admin
That should fix it right up!
(Edit) Here’s the file: https://www.thenewneo.com/robots.txt
They’re saying you have an entry in your robots.txt file that’s preventing them from reading the page. Their help page (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7489871) tries to explain what that means, how to confirm that it’s the problem, and how to fix it. If you click on “This is my site” and then “The page is blocked by robots.txt,” you’ll see a long article explaining how to fix it. It seems like the key thing to do is get set up on Search Console (https://search.google.com/search-console), which will let you find problems and see information about how much traffic comes from Google.
Tim; Luke:
I had checked that yesterday, and didn’t realize what the slash was for. Thanks!
I don’t know how that got in there, but I’m afraid to touch it. I know next to nothing about code. But it seems I should remove that slash.
What does adding “/admin” tell it to do?
Slash / is the top level in Unix file systems.
Conceptually, your articles are the next level down. And comments are the level below.
If you put /admin the search engines will avoid that directory (if it even exists) but WILL access the articles and comments.
OMG, you must have installed the Yoast SEO plugin. I use that on my site for reasons other than making sure I please Google and hate its stupid “directives.”
Those directives, to my knowledge, have not changed in the 10 years I’ve been using it, even thought Google has gone through countless updates to its almighty algorithm for SEO. Google’s latest seems to want you to write for what your readers want, and as far as I’m concerned, you do that!
When I read advice to use shorter sentences, I think of the great writers who did not do so. Lincoln is among them. Here is the final sentence of his first inaugural address:
“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
It’s really more poetry than prose, and it’s hyperbolic to say the least. But it does what it was meant to do: strike a note of unity (take that, Biden). I defy an editor to improve on that by rephrasing it and cutting it into shorter sentences.
@ Neo > “Obviously, I have no plans to dumb down my writing as the SEO scoring would prefer. Why images supposedly are so great I have no idea, but maybe it’s just what people like. As far as I’m concerned, unless I’m showing an image for a special reason, images are just another way to slow the site down.”
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
And don’t bother with the subheadings or shortening the sentences either.
We like you just the way you are….
And PLEASE don’t start linking to Tweets, but especially without then copying the substance under discussion.
I have found reading both Twitchy and Not the Bee that if I let the site load the tweets itself the system slows down to the speed of a turtle crawling through molasses spread over quicksand.
If I block the loading, I have to click the link and go off to another tab to read the tweet (sometimes I do, usually I don’t).
Everyone on the Right hates Twitter and they keep using it anyway!!
@ Neo > “Can a bot be considered perky and condescending? I certainly hear that tone of voice, and it doesn’t make me want to obey.”
I learned as early as grade-school that the threat of getting a gold star for doing some academic task was a sure-fire way to make me avoid doing it, even if it was something I would either enjoy or do well. I haven’t changed my behavior.
A couple of our kids, while in middle school, never got any of the librarian’s “star reader” awards, which was odd, because they were seldom without a book in hand.
Turns out, they just didn’t like the authorized list of suggested titles for age-appropriate material, and that’s all the librarian was counting.
I wasn’t too impressed with the list either, but at least back in the day the offerings were neither political indoctrination nor pornography.
FWIW, one of them read things like the unabridged “Hunchback” and “Count of Monte Cristo.” All of them finished “Lord of the Rings” before high school, although the youngest finally admitted to me years later that he skipped a lot of the slow sections, like Tom Bombadill. Well, his loss!
I went looking for the music “Just the Way You Are” to accompany my comment and found that this video by Bruno Mars had a really inventive graphic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjhCEhWiKXk
“What does adding the ‘/admin’ tell it to do?”
Actually, don’t do that. It looks like you’ve got a tag subdirectory there. What I thought it would do would be to prohibit the search engine indexer from going to the administration section on the site, but because of the way you’re configured that wouldn’t work.
What you can do, though, is change the “Disallow:” to “Allow:” and that gives the indexing robot permission to crawl the entire site. You can also rename the “robots.txt” file to something like “robots.txt.bak” so that the indexing engine doesn’t find the file it’s looking for and just assumes it’s safe to index by default.
You won’t break anything by messing with the file. The robots exclusion standard was put in place back in the nineties (1994, if I remember correctly) to prevent now-defunct search engines like Lycos and AltaVista from either burying single machine web servers with too much traffic, or driving individual web pages out of monthly bandwidth allowances.
You’ve got my email address. Feel free to drop me a line there if there’s anything I can do to help.
I used to be able search for some of my comments on this blog, but zip these days.
I’ll be interested to check how well that works when robots.txt file is adjusted.
Re: AI and style checkers.
I used to have to turn off M$Word’s checkers because they were so hilariously bad. Now I leave them on because, although they’re frequently a minor nuisance, they do tend to catch some mistakes I actually make. No, I will not make my sentences shorter just for the supposedly ignorant masses. (Victor Hugo once had a famous exchange with his editor about a 750 word sentence. Even I might wince at that.) Likewise I put commas after introductory phrases only when it feels right, not after even a single word as they insist. I’m given to neologisms like buzznym (an acronym that is equivalent to a buzzword), so I resist their efforts to fossilize the language.
Much of their SEO advice is consciously tilted towards those who consume (I won’t say read) their information solely from their phones. Pfui! You have to know the audience you are aiming for. It’s a losing game to try to sell Rolls Royces like they are Honda Civics. We ain’t all cut out to be McDonalds. Some of us aim to be gourmet chefs.
The writing hints sound like those dratted Grammarly ads. Personally, I spent many years learning to write lucidly and I will not be patronized by a ‘bot!
I like the way that you write. You write well, for a very literate audience. If you switched to writing to 9th graders, you may ultimately lose many of your better commenters.
I do try, on occasion, to write for a less literate audience, and ultimately fail miserably. I blame much of it on maybe 6 years of Latin in HS and college. And, then, of course, law school. Worst thing ever for writing simplistically. For those who haven’t survived the experience – it teaches you the ability to read and understand half page long paragraphs wandering all over the place.
Your Google “hit” is looking better now…
https://bit.ly/3BTn0tT
}}} And I’d like to add a correction to its grammar. “None of the paragraphs are too long” should be “is too long.”
Actually, not sure of that one. By the implication of “not one”, yes, it should be singular and thus “is”.
The feel to me, however, is that the implied subject is plural via the prepositional clause.
I note that the Cambridge dictionary definition of the word “none” offers an example that allows for both options (emphasis mine):
=====
not one (of a group of people or things), or not any:
None of my children has/have blonde hair.
=====
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/none
Additional examples, also:
More examples
We’ve got five accounts of what happened and none of them agree.
not “Agrees”
😉
Ah. Don’t always trust M-W these days, they’ve gone so woke, but will let them explain better, despite that overall dissatisfaction with them:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/video/is-none-singular-or-plural
There is a transcript there, if you don’t want to watch a video telling you what can be conveyed in text. Or watch the vid if “tl;dr”.
😉
I believe that “not any” is as suitable an interpretation of the original topic as your choice of “not one”, hence plural is also acceptable.
Erasmus:
Progress!
Neo:
DuckDuckGo also now has you as the top two results for “The New Neo”, so you’ve definitely made something better!