Quick thought from my journal today:
I hate SEO. It’s…. smarmy. Weak. It rewards uncreative writing by encouraging writing for SEO robots. It’s ugly and inelegant. If you wrote a book in SEO style, your publisher would blackball you. It’s…. awful.
Which isn’t to say I won’t write for pay, obviously, nor that I won’t write stuff on SEO-hungry sites. But… I’ve tried writing to the “must include this phrase 3 times” style guide, and, well, it sucks. The writing sucks, and how I feel, in my gut, sucks.
I don’t mind selling my soul to create documentation that makes it easier to use stuff, even when it’s used in sales. But I do mind writing for soulless robots crawling the web for keywords, especially since they sure don’t pay nearly enough for me to debase my writing that way.