An Internet friend pointed out to me that my blog was rather anti-SEO—that is, very unoptimized for search engines. Indeed, this is true. Search engines more easily index and point people towards certain sorts of content. Many popular websites, which may not be of particularly high quality, try to "game" (or optimize) on these metrics.

Suppose you make a website that has

• Many pages on many topics
• Rather short articles that load quickly
• Key words provided in meta data ¹

Such a website may consistently hit top search results. (If you do any sort of tech, web programing work, you are probably aware of some sites that do this). But these sites might SUCK. They may seem hastily written (or even machine generated), just redisplaying information found and presented better elsewhere,

Maybe to look up one thing really quickly, these sites might be OK, but overally they are unpleasant to use and ugly. Searching the official manual/documentation for whatever tech you're using would be better in most usecases.

Yet sites like the one above often appear at the top of search results.

The Google favored sites

Many companies design products to please Google. Much of Content Creation is aimed at producing lots of thing in some form search engines like (whether Google's, YouTubes, etc) for the purposes of monetizing some niche.

For example, in the world of technology, many people choose to use Medium. Now, I haven't written for Medium myself, but I've read articles on Medium.

Lots of things are annoying about Medium to the "end-user".

• Popups/invitations to join
• Intrusive links and other frills to other content
• Not owning/exercising full control over your content and how it is presented
• Limited features (not specifically sure of Medium's limitations, but if you're hard-coding HTML or something you're going to have full control)

Medium makes money from their site and have much more scale than me, so I'm not being a "hater" here. I'm just pointing out that Google will favor a "social" type content-generation model like that used by Medium over a rather than a go-as-I-feel-like-it blog like my own, which is primarily shared through word of mouth or private communication.

On the other hand, you can find many "old-style" websites that are very pleasant to use and have a strong "personal touch". In terms of just... providing useful or interesting information, these sites are just as good, if not better than a big site like Medium.

Yet they often lack SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and so they are far less known. They additionally lack many of the "social" features—integrations into big sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Leveraging Social Media and Bypassing Medium

My own strategy is to make use of social media how I see fit—e.g. sharing links to friends and colleagues—social media platforms are increasingly the "marketplace" or common space in which we are made to meet one another.

However, I try to keep my writings and other files in a less centralized place; that's why I use git, markdown, and other tools to make my sites easy to download, redistribute, and so on if needed. Facebook may very well be around for a while, but if I lose access to my account, would I also want to lose access to lots of work/effort I have put into that?

Decentralizing information, making copies, and other techniques provide a more robust approach to controlling not just how our words may be shared, but also as a guard against libel, censorship, and other actions we are vulnerable towards when using social media platforms.