Three weeks ago, at work, one of my superiors from the neighbouring company shared his secrets to creating a successful website.
S/he’d looked over my shoulder, and wondered why the website I was working on wasn’t getting any hits. S/he looked at the list of posts that I’d seen, and s/he saw that the SEO for lots of them weren’t green. S/he then proceeded to tell me how s/he did it.
It turns out that this person had like, five blogs, and not all of them generate original content. S/he put the images s/he has up onto Pinterest, follows everyone and anyone, and soon gets followers. S/he doesn’t do Facebook, because the algorithm make it too difficult for new content to reach people, but s/he uses Pinterest to get a following and traffic. When I looked at his/her post, I also realised that he puts the keyword he wants Google to search in the headline, the first header, second header, and even the first sentence in the body of the text.
S/he then prattled on about how this is one should get traffic, but it angered me. S/he has reduced blogging on the internet to a numbers game. Yes, I know at the end of the day, it’s about getting eyeballs to look at your posts, but I felt like a certain code of ethics had been violated. There is no sincerity to this method at all. Blogging is always about sharing what you can about the world, and like-minded people joining in. This is ruined, all because someone like him/her chose to game the system.
This is normal in the online world. Everyone wants to know how many hits you have or how many people follow you, because that is how much money they would pay you to advertise. Spamming keywords is lame, because it means you’ll probably get a lot of spam traffic, or an audience that doesn’t really know why you’re here. If this were in 2004/5, when blogging first started, it would be easier. It would have been easier in 2008 or even up to 2010, but now, there are so many blogs vying for everyone’s attention that getting a readers is difficult. I get that it’s insanely tough nowadays, but anything that involves spamming is a no-no for me, because it violates the integrity of my personal blogs.
There is something mechanical about this, all for a few bucks. It isn’t right.
Sadly, this is what I have to end up doing at work. There isn’t any heart in blogging if we’re aggregating the most popular keywords.
Featured image by Jacob Bøtter