Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of those 21st century skills that you should know something about. To understand it, you must first recognize some of the logistics of the internet.

• There are 9 billion websites using 316 million domains.
• Every day, the Internet grows by over 3 million blog posts, 500 million Tweets, and 95 million Instagram shares.
• People looking for those websites ask Google, and that leads to Google processing 40,000 searches per second (3.5 billion per day).

In other words, there is no way that humans can “index” the web like they used to do in 1995. There’s not even a way for search providers, whether Yahoo, Bing or Google, to have complex code to look up search in real time. I’m going to use Google in this explanation, but they all work the same. What happens is that Google has “web crawlers” (computer programs or bots) that are constantly “surfing” the internet and reporting back what they find to Google’s “librarian” computer which indexes the sites in a search database.

The crawlers follow links, mentions, shares and likes, because these show user engagement. What is relevant in a search is high engagement sites. The crawlers are mainly looking at words. Things like Flash, animations, images without alternative tags or captions are mostly ignored. The crawlers also look at the code on the site, whether it is mobile friendly, and whether there is information about indexing it inside that code; things like tags, categories and meta-tags make less work for Google and the crawlers.

Once the crawlers report back to a search datacenter, the search engine indexes what the crawler found, Google indexing about 20 billion web pages per day. Currently, the engine looks for reputation, links, uniqueness and newness. Websites that have stayed the same over a long period of time show low engagement. Also, content that is a copy of another website hurts the “newer” of the copies. The engine also looks at time spent on the website (time longer spent is good). The tricky thing about SEO is that Google is changing the rules all the time to make sure it gives the best results, but also, so it cannot be “gamed.” For example, in earlier incarnations, Google would measure click/share engagement as most important, leading to companies hiring people to click their website or like them. There’s also this famous video of a Chinese “click” farm or this scene from the television show Silicon Valley. Google has to change its algorithm because they want to return web searches that are useful to users and not just useful to the content providers (and besides, content providers can just pay Google some money, and they will push your search result to the top).

TL;DR. What does this have to do with writing? If the medium of the future is the web, part of writing for the web is trying to attract readers amid the mass of content on the internet. This class isn’t about coding, so we won’t cover that part. Also, we don’t have time to look at ways to generate followers, likes, and shares (but, hopefully, you get the idea and you might work towards that in the future). What I do want you to consider are a few writing strategies:

1. Repeat your primary search terms throughout your writing. In the Bora Bora Sample, note that the authors repeat Bora Bora 13 times in 565 words. Island is repeated 9 times. The website is the fourth most popular after the Four Seasons Bora Bora resort (they have the reputation and money to increase clicks), Wikipedia, and a tourism website that has more engagement links (i.e., social media) as well as repeating Tahiti in their content which the Sample does not. Nevertheless, the content on the website is sparse, but it is able to rank fourth.
2. Search the internet for websites that you want your content to be associated with and look for repeated words and words similar to keywords. Do not copy content, but do copy common words and phrases similar to your content.
3. Search engines are smart, and they know synonyms, but the idea here is to look beyond simple keyword matching and think about intent—in other words, it’s not just matching a word but matching the content to what you think people want. E.g., Bora Bora could use “island paradise,” “resort,” “unplug,” “off the grid ,” all things you might imagine people are searching for that would reveal the Bora Bora website.
4. Find ways to make users stay. In writing, that sometimes means longer pieces (I know, I already told you shorter is better). Newer websites are moving to a single page design with lots of scrolling so that users have to spend more time reading through the website rather than clicking a bunch of stuff. Note that this is counter to a website trying to make money. If I have a lot of ads I want you to see, I want lots of clicks and lots of clutter, but neither helps in the search results except for the things you click on. Lots of clicking on ads makes Amazon go up while your content goes down in the search ratings.
5. If you have an image, add an Alt Tag to it (WordPress and most website platforms allow you to do this easily). Remember, the crawler is looking for words in your code, so put more keywords in the code.
6. Titles are key. We all like inventive, fun, crafty titles, but the crawler will look at your H1, H2, H3 tags first as a way to categorize your data. “Fun in the Sun” might be a good essay title, but if you want people to find your content, then be more descriptive in your title on the web: “San Diego in August is a Great Vacation.” Save the wit for the body of your content.