I’m a compulsive editor, it’s true. Given the slightest chance to correct misused text, I’ll grab it. No offense to the writer: it just makes me feel so much better. Like picking up litter is sometimes compulsive, and you feast on the unsullied landscape when you’re done.
So, having built my client’s website, I cleaned up the text as usual, inserting SEO bits where appropriate. Then my client asked, “Are these corrections for SEO or for grammar?”
The answer is both. It’s not very commonly recognized that clarity of language and optimized content are one and the same. But consider: Google’s spiders may be digital automatons, but they are crafted by humans and bear their likeness. The clearer the content in human terms, the more search-engine friendly it is.
For a long time, we joked about the SEO mongers repeating keywords insanely often throughout their content, dishing the bait with shameless disregard for the human reader. We wrote out long strings of meta-keywords with every possible declension, spelling, and mis-spelling. We sought to outwit the search engine arachnids.
In the end, though, SEO is no more or less than skillful, targeted delivery of data through clean communications. Just like editing.