How SEO transforms writing

Every time we write we write to someone. This is true whether that someone is somebody else or just us in a later instantiation, when, with a different intention and a different demeanor, we return upon the text to revise it, to read it again – like strangers. This presence of the other that reads has been made even more obvious in the digital age. Now, there’s no more writing for oneself, if there ever was one.

Source: The Platypus Directive

Let’s look at it this way. Even when the privacy settings on your social media platforms are turned to ‘Private,’ we must not overlook the fact that ‘privacy’ is highly deceiving. We should have learned this lesson already. Remember ‘Like’ that doesn’t mean ‘enjoy’? ‘Friend’ that doesn’t mean ‘pal’? ‘Tweet’ that involves no bird? They’re all part of the patois of the day and we kind of understand where everything really stands in the picture. We only pretend to use the word ‘friend’ in its original meaning. We play the game of arbitrariness rather well. We pay it back to the source.

Your text is read by an algorithm

But this is only semantics. What I mean to say about digital writing is that when you write on your blog, on Facebook, on Twitter, on reddit, on any other digital platform, you cannot save yourself from the gaze of the other. The other is there all the time. Considering what I said earlier, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. All’s old and boringly familiar. But what’s new is that the other doesn’t come about as an actual reader, a person you might be able to identify in a crowd. The primary reader of your text is an algorithm. It is the machine that does the crunching of numbers, the perusing of texts, and, of course, the ascertaining of meaning.

This awakens the contemporary writer to an interesting reality. Not only are they writing to produce content, they also write to produce audience. In other words, they become entrepreneurs who pitch their product to a market. But this pitching is made to please first and foremost the algorithms that run the show.

Source: Lisa Kurt

It is commonly said among SEO specialists that the value of your text doesn’t matter if you’re invisible. Indeed, in the logic of the digital universe, one makes sense only insofar as one is reachable. But reachability is established through algorithms running in the background. They decide what is and what isn’t interesting, what is and what isn’t professional. Google has gone so far as to regulate language. Poorly written texts, which, let’s face it, have been bothering us big time, are kept at bay by Google algorithms that comb through content in search for mistakes. Of course, this doesn’t mean you’re in a one-mistake-and-you’re-out situation. It takes a little more than just a missed comma for Google to give you the boot.

Conform or remain invisible

But grammar isn’t everything in this game. When it comes to correctness, algorithms are far more sensitive than the occasional grumpy grammarian stomping their feet at the sight of a disagreement between a noun and a verb. Since they are logico-mathematical entities that function on the premise that the input is always valid (i.e. within predetermined parameters), it becomes understandable why an algorithm reacts bitterly when it encounters weird or unacceptable formulations.

At the end of the day, in order for mathematics to work we need to renounce the idea that the distinction between natural objects is relevant. 1+1=2. But what is the first 1 and what is the second 1? What do they designate in the real world? And what does the final result mean, if anything? 1+1 may very well be one apple and one orange, but who cares? We dismiss the very possibility of this distinction to matter. On the other hand, and also because of how mathematics works, we can’t perform an operation such as   ҉   + 1, simply because   ҉   doesn’t belong in the class of calculable elements designated by mathematics. It is not a number. So unless we give it a numerical value, it cannot play this game.

By association, we can think of the   ҉   in the above proposition as the equivalent of a sentence that doesn’t match the patterns written into the software. (I’m not going to go into what can be done to accommodate eccentricities. Rules that break rules exist everywhere, and so do algorithms that allow for abnormal propositions.)

But the point? The point is this: algorithms (and I’m talking about the ones designed to control textual matters) shape the outlook of content. The writer who is a user of such algorithms will find, sooner or later, that he/she must conform to the algorithm if they want to cross the threshold drawn by these invisible robots between writing and display.

Because display is what matters. Not the display of letters on a screen, but the display of content made accessible to the other.

SEO and clairvoyance

Algorithms don’t just automate assent (by pointing out to forthcoming audiences the worthiness of a given text). They also anticipate the writer’s next move. Since conforming to the algorithm is the only way about, the algorithm, through its prescriptive properties, makes the appearance of a text foreseeable. Once you get your head around SEO matters you understand why a URL looks the way it looks, why some keywords appear insistently throughout the text, why titles have to be this long and this many, why some parts have to be highlighted, why links matter, and why there is a need for social media visibility.

Source: Tactix Marketing

Search engines search the internet for content. They do so by mining information present in the HTML script. HTML, whose role is to order the chaos of the digital world, precedes content. It is there before the text. And this is another way of putting the question of precedence.

Let’s be frank, SEO is all about pleasing the search engine, which establishes worthiness via authority. It’s precisely the notion of authority that’s the most intriguing, because consensus is the function of a statistical result.

Content optimized for the search engine is exactly what its name indicates: an effort to answer the pressure exercised by the search engine, i.e. by software designed to crunch the numbers no matter what. So that a groundbreaking piece of epistemology, the best novel of this generation, the most illuminating analysis, the best solution to a million problems, amounts to very little if the search engine doesn’t perceive it to be worth pitching. In other words, it will remain invisible.

The viral aspect of content

In order for all of the above to become detectable, visibility has to grow exponentially. And with this statement we slide into the territory of viral content. Spreading about depends on factors external to content, but which writers can stimulate by including in their content elements likely to cause contagion. The first and foremost of these factors, maybe the only one that truly counts, is none other than out good old friend, the algorithm. Because it’s the algorithm that discovers the text in the first place. Growth of popularity depends on how other users share content. While there seems to be agency here (when I choose what to post online I am communicating a personal decision), the expression of this agency is made through a piece of software.

Source: Forbes

It’s the Like button I’m talking about here. It makes apparent one fundamental thing about software: that when we use it we don’t bring our free will to light. On the contrary, we admit to our conformity to the algorithm. When we choose anything, we help the software bring its function to fruition. We are an element in the system, a cogwheel in the apparatus, an operative factor in the code.

Then there’s the even more mundane realization that only the already-popular becomes more popular. That’s because the algorithm takes shortcuts. Once a piece of content is deemed worthy of interest, a search engine will push that piece up in its ranking system. That’s what happens when we come across certain results when we search for a keyword: why some results come first, while others trail behind, in pages so distant they’re the guarantee of total failure.

With all this in sight, it’s clear, I hope, that the writer who cares about the fate of their content will have to bend to the new rules. Make sure to repeat a keyword but not too many times. Make sure to leave snares for the search engine, to catch the spiders that crawl the web. Make sure to check your text for mistakes. Make sure to send reminders, to share, to encourage interaction with your content, to catch the eye of those who can boost your traffic. We all do that. We all do SEO, whether professionally or just out of instinct. Not because of a suddenly awakened entrepreneurial spirit in us, but because the algorithm demands it. It does.

So write well!

The space(ness) of writing

Writing-as-space is a lucky metaphor; but one that makes apparent the combinatoric nature of inscriptions. It brings about the notion of site, but site as self-contradiction (not as conscious construction but as the result of luck).

To quote Foucault again, to create a network with him, in the sense that he must have had in mind when he talked about the nature of modern space:

“The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.”

My question now is: can I see writing behind this definition of space? Is writing “the space in which we live”?

In all appearance, yes: writing is the space in which we live. If this was not apparent after the invention of the press, it has categorically become apparent after the growth of the digital sphere. The digital sphere, itself a space: a space not because it has geographical coordinates but precisely because it is virtual. The virtual nature of the digital is nothing but a technological restatement of the virtual nature of writing tout court.

Of zeros and ones

In this space that is vastly virtual (and therefore real), writing is primarily a means of creating connections and mixing complexities. Here, in the digital universe, writing appears as a juxtaposition of digits. I am not so much interested in the digits (the famous downgrading of letters in relation to numbers) as I am in the juxtaposition that articulates them. The series of 0’s and 1’s that make up the structure of digital texts is capable of creating meaning out of the very operation of mixing and matching.

These 0’s and 1’s, in their glorious simplicity, are suspect companions. Taken separately, they represent the exact opposite of each other. 0 means closed, while 1 means open. With 1, a circuit becomes active; with 0, it becomes inactive (it is said to be either on or off). When seen at their most fundamental, these 0’s and 1’s are, really, instances of life and death. The putting of them together embodies, in one of the many possible ways, Foucault’s assertion concerning heterotopic structures: the fact that they are such that their elements “are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.”

It is only through the combinatoric function of the digital discourse that 0 and 1 are brought into a state of coexistence. This is what brings about the scandal of meaning, a scandal that governs any semantic instance. See Ferdinand de Saussure’s signs, which are purely arbitrary creations, unlikely bedfellows, just like digits forced to stay together. See the algebraic signs that stand for addition and subtraction (+ and –). See the logical operators that enable the establishment of truth (true and false, yes and no). All of the above are matters of language, and most importantly, matters of writable language.

The binary code used by computers allocates a sequence of bits to every function or operation possible in the computer’s refined and complicated brain. A bit is in itself defined as an either/or situation. A bit (short for ‘binary digit’) is precisely the articulation of this proximity of 0 and 1. Based on this primary distinction between the two values, a magical juxtaposition ensues, one that makes many things possible. One that makes everything possible. Everything that can be worked out by the digital brain.

Counter-site

Writing is, as shown at least by the case of 0’s and 1’s, a space of arbitrariness, where meaning occurs at the conjunction between basic bits (of information, of logic, of computation, of truth). Things that are put together are corralled into signification by force. It is the force of arbitrariness, or of entropy, that makes it possible for writing to turn up at all.

But writing isn’t just a meeting space. It is a site that contradicts its own siteness. It is, in Foucault’s words, a “counter-site.”

Let’s try to explain.

The logic of space is similar to the logic of signification, at least in the Saussurean sense, which doesn’t allow for simultaneity. A sign is a sign insofar as it can be told apart from another sign. (Let’s leave it at denotation and ignore connotation, for the sake of the argument.) In other words, signification tolerates juxtaposition but doesn’t do well with overlapping: signs can stand side by side but not one above the other. The same applies to a space, in the traditional, Leibnizian sense, of “that which results from places taken together” (a precursor to Foucault’s definition of space as connectivity). In order to have space, the world needs places; the network needs nods; planet Earth needs continents linked together by masses of water (or maybe vice-versa, if we were to look for an aquatic reason to geography). But most importantly, in order to have space the world needs places distinguishable from each other.

The overlapping of masses of earth can only lead to geological scandal: to earthquakes and all the catastrophes that come with it. Note, though, that even when it takes place, the overlap is not permanent; at some point, the two masses will return to their initial position, and the earth will go back to its original lack of ambiguity. The overlapping of written signs can only lead to semantic scandal: homography. If two words are spelled identically and yet mean a different thing, they can only mean what they mean depending on context. Without the context (the putting of texts together), there would be either gobbledygook or perplexity.

Language does its best to avoid this state of bafflement. But writing is not bound by the same constraint. On the contrary, writing is precisely the intoxication of language. Writing is the place where language is mocked, where it is made to mean.

The negation of space, the negation of writing

In this process of creation of meaning writing acts out the function of heterotopias, defined by Foucault as

“[sites] that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect.”

Heterotopias negate the right of places to be what they have been designated to be. They negate the geological right of two masses of earth to staying beside each other, never over one another. They negate spatiality in the sense of calling into question its relation to distinctiveness, to uniqueness. Hence the example I mentioned last week, of the church, which is not one but many spaces. It is not completely public, nor completely private, but a part-public-part-private conglomerate.

But isn’t that what writing is as well?

Writing is language, in the sense that it would not be possible if it hadn’t always already been inherent in the code of language itself. But at the same time, it is also non-language, in the sense that writing transforms language, so as to render it representable as a series of signs, as a bit string. The 0 and 1 of digital writing is present here again. Life and death, on and off, present and absent, open and closed, writing and language: it’s here again, there again. But it is in writing that this ambiguous distinction/confusion is made possible. It is only writing that relativizes the solidity of language, its apparent non-ambiguity, in order to make itself apparent.