I’m new to WordPress as I mentioned here. When I installed it though CPanel, it came with a lot of optional plug-ins. One was a free version of Yoast SEO. The free version has some very useful features but overall I’m finding that SEO is annoying and lowering my desire to blog. Adhering to inflexible external readability and style standards is no way to write. Yeost does helpfully remind me to write a meta-description, sets the URL slug, and checks to be sure I’ve used my keyphrase. Those features are nice. It also checks my writing for readability though, which is where we often disagree. If I’ve adhered to their recommendations I get a green smiley face as I write. If I start to deviate, I get an orange neutral face symbol. Ignoring the recommendations results in a red frown. The red, orange, and green traffic signal colors are also shown in my article list just to really trigger any latent OCD tendencies I might have.

While it’s nice to not be in a knowledge vacuum, I’m finding it’s a double-edged sword. I’m chasing after green lights instead of writing the way I want. Article too short? Make sure it’s 300 words. Used a writing device like a repeated sentence structure? That will cost points. Long sentences are also a non-starter, and transition words are mandatory. Too many words between headers? That will also cost points. I am required to put one header every couple of paragraphs to earn my green smiley. Passive voice can also trigger the orange stare of disapproval, but the grammar checks aren’t always correct. I refuse to shuffle around a perfectly good active voice sentence to please a computer. Overall I feel like it cramps my style and sucks away a lot of the fun in writing. The end result is that SEO is annoying enough to make me avoid blogging. (See what I did there? Another keyphrase to make Yeost happy.)

Why optimize if I dislike it?

The purpose of my blog isn’t to build readership. It’s to write, following my own agenda, much in the style of the 20th century Internet. Maybe people will come and read, maybe not. In the spirit of Zen, I hold no expectations. However, if I don’t make at least some sacrifices to the Google oligarchy, I may as well just journal. SEO is mandatory for me to have any chance of someone reading a post. Back in the day we had humans swapping links to drive traffic. Nowadays, pingbacks are merely an invitation to have my little VM swarmed by bots. Social media is not terribly useful either, since you have to have followers in the first place to survive the algorithms.

So as I write I’m stuck monitoring the little traffic light colors. Is it green? Cool. Orange? Better go break up that nice sentence I just carefully constructed into sixth-grade bite size chunks. Is it red? Bleh, might as well just walk away, especially if I’ve been writing for a while and liked the article. At some point I’ll either get used to the constraints or just uninstall Yeost. However, in the meanwhile just wanted to put it out there that genuflecting to Google through SEO is seriously annoying.