· 23 December 2019 ·

[Ongoing site work, and visual evidence that Willy can’t SEO]

Head Up: I’m making some peripheral changes on the blog, to deliver better descriptive information to search engines. You may or may not notice. The purpose of this SEO project is to give my posts a better chance to show up as useful results when people hunt for Oxfordian or Shakespearean content. The game’s worth the candle.

Go Home Willy: The software I’m using includes tutorial videos. One video explained the criteria for the coloured bullets denoting the quality of optimization on a page. Green bullets good, red bullets bad, then it ended with a surprise cameo by my bad penny. The illustration lacked context. My caption provides some.

“If you had any writing experience,
William, this wouldn’t be so difficult.”

Subterranean Optimization Blues: The time-consuming part of the job is that I’m trying to shoehorn after-the-fact improvements into four years’ worth of existing posts, while keeping the site live and not bolloxing anything up. I’m not changing the text, but it’s a slog all the same. SEO is much easier to incorporate as new posts are written. It’s also something of a mystery cult, because the software can only attempt to predict what matters to the algorithms. Google gives no words but mum.

Best Case Scenario: I hope your only inconvenience during my distraction is the absence of new posts, for which I apologise. Time spent on Tech is time I don’t have for Art. Once all the old pages are tweaked, things should return to whatever passes for normal around here. I’ll put any relevant updates on Twitter, which you can find in the sidebar at right (desktop) or below (mobile).

Observation: Writing for the internet is so complicated. The only tech worries I used to have were Cecils with fireplaces.

VERO NIHIL VERIUS