The sixth age of web copy
Unless you've been paying attention, you might think that web copy is just normal copy that happens to be online. But as we'll see, the medium has had a quick evolution under intense pressure from the search providers. As soon as search engine spiders started crawling the web and picking up words and phrases from websites' copy, website owners realised that by careful study and manipulation, their pages could appear higher up in the results, improving their chances of being clicked. But at what cost? Let's start at the beginning.
Age 1. The Information Superhighway
Who remembers when the internet was thus called? Connections were dial-up and slow; people got excited when they hit 56 Kbps and ISDN at 128 Kbps gave you motion sickness. Compared to today, when the average household with broadband reaches 2,000 Kbps, data transfer was slow and expensive, so images and other large files were kept to a minimum and copy ruled the earth. The main users were academia, scientific bodies and government. Businesses certainly used it, but the idea of effective B2C websites was still in its infancy.
Age 2. I Came, I Saw, I Spidered
The arrival of the mainstream search engines gave the net a great big shake. At last users could start to find information they were looking for, rather than following hyperlinks and being pointed to web pages in other ways. Combined with the reaching of a critical mass of potential customers, this is when the web as an advertising and selling medium became viable.
Age 3. Spam, spam, spam
Initially, it was a messy time. Web developers discovered that if they could include words that were often searched for (such as stars of CD or screen, usually with the promise of titillating pictures) in their web copy, they were more likely to turn up in results. Whether visitors would be happy with what they found did not concern them, as like all spammers know, 1% of a million hits is well worth the wager. Other tricks would be fonts made one pixel high or coloured the same as the background, with the proper website visible, a seemingly genius move that would fool the spiders (which read the code) but not the user (who read the visible). Of course, we now know that it was a foolish model, simply because everyone was doing it and that meant searches for the well-known topics were heavily diluted. It also led people to distrust search engines, and many went to the wall.
Age 4. Common sense strikes back
At last the search engines started getting proactive. Instead of databasing everything their spiders found, they started to get selective, and punished obvious spam with lower rankings or exclusion. Google spidered deeply but ranked according to popularity from inbound links rather than an easily abused relevance. All seemed to be going well. So did search improve?
Age 5. Indefinite articles
The growth of the SEO industry and the ubiquity of optimisation show to a great extent that the techniques work, and a balance has been struck between giving useful information and being searchable in relation to the competition. But all is not rosy in the SEO garden. The accepted rules on keyword density, word counts, headings, anchored links and meta data are so well established that 300-word articles have gained a ubiquity of their own, particularly on e-commerce sites. Churned-out copy that is ultra-orthdox SEO in form is what greets searchers to many a website. It is wallpaper, copy for copy's sake, and as a sales channel, it fails. Companies are being convinced that being clicked is all that matters, and indeed the hits might follow, but when it comes to the hits converting into sales ... well, we're almost taking a leap back to the third age again. I'm going to say it: Articles have become the new spam.
The Sixth Age. Present and future
So here we are. For much of the web, the fifth age is a happy place to be. But it's the kind of paradise that comes with being oblivious to lurking dangers and ignorant of opportunities. SEO is now the absolute minimum requirement for a website to be found via search engines (see On SEO). But who ever became successful by doing the absolute minimum? It is now time to start taking web copy seriously – a return to the Information Superhighway, if you like. Being found online was only ever half the job. Being found, liked, used and recommended it true optimisation, and for that you need a great presence in terms of design, usability and copywriting. Smart SEO companies have always known this. And so have their clients.
C.H. 5/8/2010