Research

My current research interests include various areas of rhetoric and composition (broadly construed), especially regarding the following:

theories of electracy
visual rhetoric
new media
environmental rhetoric
the application of systems theory to general systems of writing

Writing for Spiders

Using the Example of Gainesville Apartments

This is part one of a series of mini-articles about writing for the world wide web. We will be using Trimark Properties, a leading Gainesville developer, as a case study throughout this series. Trimark's core business is the development and management of Gainesville apartments and other Gainesville rentals.

In today's competitive business world, new medias are changing the face of how companies do their business. Companies are increasingly turning to the Internet to reach potential clients, future employees, investors, and to educate and maintain their current customer base. Whether a company's focus is product development or rental apartment management or even business services such as accounting, the Internet is increasingly becoming a pivotal (if not critical) part of the strategic business plan in every industry.

Technical writers trained ten to twenty years ago would be surprised to find that there is a new, emerging "client" for the pieces that they are hired to write. In the past, technical writers were writing for people. In the new millennium, a new customer has emerged: the search engine spider. In order to open new doorways for career and consultancy positions, technical writers should gain at least a rudimentary understanding of how to write for the spiders which are determining the traffic flow for the Internet.

What is a Search Engine Spider?
A search engine spider is a program, written by a search engine such as Google or Yahoo!, which is sent out to "spider" the interlinked files that make up the world wide web. The spider bounces from link to link, reading words on the page and taking "notes" which are housed in databases. Later, when a web user types in a keyword phrase, such as "Gainesville apartments", into Google, a separate portion of the Google program reads through the notes taken by the spiders (which are notated in the database) and then presents a list of pages which the spider believes are written about the topic of "Gainesville apartments". In this example, "Gainesville apartments" is called a keyword phrase. These list of web pages about Gainesville apartments are sorted based upon a numerical score given to them by the search engine; the score is the result of a proprietary algorithm. The algorithm determines the order in which the links will be listed in the output search engine result pages or SERPs. The algorithmic score given to a webpage for a keyword term is determined by the spiders, as they read a company's webpage as well as the pages which are linking to that page or domain.

How Spiders differ From People.
Spiders do not have the same ideas about context that people do. The words "it, he, she, they" and other ___ pronouns do not equal the noun to which they refer, when the spider sees them. In technical writing, we learn that it can be disadvantageous to write repetitively, to use the same noun repeatedly. Spiders would simply measure two instances of the keyword being used, where a human would see redundancy and poor writing skill. Additionally, spiders read two terms as unique that a human would believe are contextually equal, such as "Gainesville apartments" and "apartments in Gainesville".

As articles are increasingly cross-published in web form, it is important to balance the needs of the human reader with the needs of the search engine spider. Truly, a business can not be successful without both clients (the humans and the spiders) being taken into account. When a technical writer knows that his work will be published on the web, he should work with the marketing director for the company and determine which keyword phrases the human customer is likely to use, in reference to the subject matter, when using the Internet search engines. For instance, if the technical writer was commissioned to write for Trimark Properties, he should consider which terms the end user might use. Since Trimark's core business is the rental of apartments in Gainesville Florida, walking distance to UF classes, the technical writer and marketing director might decide that the main keywords should be Gainesville Apartments, apartments in Gainesville, Florida, and apartments in Gainesville near UF. In a separate article, we will examine how keyword popularity (the frequency that a term is used by the market, within the search engines) can be researched. The technical writer should then focus on using natural writing to include these terms, without high redundancy that would be unattractive to the customer, so that the spider and the human customer can both understand what the page is about.

Writing For Spiders: Gainesville Apartments Example