EOCAWKI: Optimize This

As someone who relied on personal relationships with my friends in the media and was accustomed to a high degree of autonomy and creative license in my writing, I confess that the advent of social media sometimes took me out of my “comfort zone" at work.  It’s not that I don’t use social media personally, but I found it harder to adapt to the restrictions it imposed on a professional level. For example, I like nice tight prose but simply could not see how 140 characters could possibly be enough to convey anything meaningful, much less explain a complex matter.  

One of the hardest things to get used to was the requirement to submit much of my work to the “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimization” group for review before it was published or distributed. I certainly understood the need to make sure that our material could be found online easily, but it felt to me a bit like the quality of prose took a backseat to whether it was searchable.  Very often, what I thought was a clever or compelling word or phrase was altered or eliminated in favor of something much more run-of-the-mill but more “searchable.” Since I really liked coming up with funny or unusual ways to say things, it bothered me a bit that that particular skill did not seem to have as much value as it used to have. Yet, since SEO was the goal, I did try to consider it in my writing. I thought perhaps the easiest way to do that would be to deliberately use terms that someone is most likely to search for. But that didn’t pan out.  According to Google, (Who else??) the top 10 search terms last year were:

1. Powerball

2. Prince

3. Hurricane Matthew

4. Pokémon Go

5. Slither.io

6. Olympics

7. David Bowie

8. Trump

9. Election

10. Hillary Clinton

Also high on the list were “Gmail”, “Craigslist”, “Amazon”, “Yahoo”, and “Porn.”  

Since I worked exclusively in the financial services field, weaving those particular terms into a typical press release in a way that made some sense would have required a good deal more creativity than I have. And I don’t think I’d have gotten away with it in any case. So, I decided to retire instead and haven’t looked back. Now I can forget about being searchable and focus on things that are important, like picking the right Powerball numbers or playing Pokémon Go.  Or maybe I’ll sit here and write this stuff and post it online where no one can find it. Then I’ll go swim some laps. After all the 2020 Tokyo Olympics are just three years away.