How Search Engines Change the Way we Read and Write
Created on Thursday, 14 April 2011 20:04 Published Date Written by Super User Hits: 624
We are intimately linked to our surroundings and this includes the technology we use. Technology is a tool and just like any tool it affects the way we do things just as it affects the reason why we do them. It is not inconceivable to believe that had we not had opposable thumbs the tools we would have invented, from the hammer to the ballpoint pen would have been conceptually different.
The reason I am writing all this is because I have a pet hate. I totally detest numbered lists of things which somehow will help you achieve something. You know the sort: Ten Things You Should Do When You Are Marketing a Website, Six SEO Tips to Help your Website be Seen this Christmas, and Six Facebook Social Media Trends and SEO.
It’s not that the information contained in these useful articles is not right but by numbering the steps in such a concise way they somehow suggest that there is a magic recipe with an exact number of ingredients you need to be aware of in order to somehow ‘get things right’. That part I detest because it is intellectually demeaning to each of us who work online and market our websites through online marketing and SEO techniques and who know just how fluid the situation can be sometimes. So, why use them?
Well… you see when it comes to creating content for a website one of the prime objectives is to have this content found, which means it has to be able to attract readers through organic search engine placement. For better or worse, when it comes to looking for advice, tips and online marketing help on the web numbered lists appearing on the search engines results pages (SERPs) seem to draw the eye (and visitors).
Maybe it’s human nature. The same kind of irrational optimism which keeps us buying the lottery ticket when we know that the odds of winning are so slim as to be almost non-existent. Numbered lists appeal to us because we hope that someone, somewhere has somehow cracked it and internet marketing success needs no more than two ingredients from row A and one ingredient from row B all well stirred and heated over a low fire.
Because they feature so prominently in search engines and because so many people click on them it becomes a vicious circle. They proliferate all over the web, increasing in number and drawing attention and the more attention they draw the more people write about them.
Ideally information has to be in a format which allows you to think. Bullet points and numbered lists really are only used to back things up a little, create the kind of organisational structure we need to better visualise the information we have just drawn from the text before it.
As it is just the other day I came upon a blog which was all full of numbered lists: 10 things to make you happy, three things you need to know before you get up in the morning and six things to help you make money on the web. It all gets a little ridiculous and, now, sadly necessary perpetuating a way of writing and organising information which is, inevitably, changing the way we are reading.
I do not know if this is bad per se. It could be argued that when it comes to factual writing where the information it contains is the only validating point numbered lists help us read more, faster and retain it better. It could well be in which case I suppose there are benefits. If I start seeing numbered lists cropping up in the writings of my favourite science fiction author that’s when I will start worrying.
