Why it's vital to write with search in mind

In my world things hunt in packs. I'll get a question from a client one day about a particular topic, something new that I've not needed to brief a client on before, and then within four or five days the same thing will have come up on a couple more occasions with other people. 

(As an aside, there are all sorts of theories for this phenomenon. One of them is the Law of Attraction.) 

Anyway, the latest one to crop up in almost every conversation I'm having at the moment is the need to write web copy with search in mind. From a technical perspective this plays out in the way you structure the code of your website to make it easy for Google and other search engines to index your site correctly.

But my topic for today is the thought processes involved in ensuring that your copy doesn't try to reinvent the language that people will use when searching for a subject. 

Webreality's working on a major project at present with a very big client with a huge team of content editors working on a large number of sites with thousands of content pages. In helping them migrate to a new content strategy where much of the content served will derive dynamically from their new site's search technology, the biggest challenge we will face is coaching their users to think first and foremost about how a piece of content will be found before they even start adding it via the content management system.

Gerry McGovern has written on this topic and has some excellent real life anecdotes that illustrate the need to write as users think rather in a way that fits the self-image of the publishing organisation. One of his most memorable posts on the subject is here. "Climate change" is the official terminology of most governments, but most people search for "global warming." Airlines used to prefer "low fares" until it became evident from Google's data that customers search for "cheap flights."

And it was one of Gerry's recent posts that brought the topic back into focus in the light of the current swine flu outbreak. The EU have been trying to "re-brand" swine flu as "novel flu virus." Now, we know that bureaucracies tend to expend a lot of energy in trying to change the way people think, but ponder the irresponsibility in the web age of trying to change the name of a virus that threatens the world after the world has universally adopted a particular name for the virus. A good way to prevent your citizens finding the latest information about how to reduce the pandemic risk. 

Gerry sums it up with, "Search is the greatest laboratory of human behavior that has ever existed. When words such as "swine flu" go wild on the Web, you must use those words because otherwise you will not be found. If you are not found then you are not useful."