The new barely average design website went live last week. So far, the reaction’s been really great. Clients and friends have gotten in touch, saying how much they like it, etc. But there’s a problem that the new site doesn’t solve — and it’s a big problem.

The Internet is increasingly dominated by the search engines of Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. No one really gets anywhere new without first looking for it on one of these sites, so, if you’re hoping to be discovered by new prospects, search engine optimisation (SEO) is incredibly important.

Now, there are two ways to do it. One is to just write pages and pages of stuff, hope your sentences use the right word combinations and that people link to you, so your site gains in relevance. It’s the organic way, the honest way, the correct way.

The problem is that very few people actually do it this way, and if you want to place well for competive keywords, like ‘website design’ or ‘html email design,’ you’re kind of bound to overdo things just to compete with the existing over-achievers who dominate the all-important first page of the search results.

This is where SEO gets dodgy and starts to feel cheap. Instead of writing copy that expresses what you’re trying to communicate in a style that reflects you best, one has to think in terms of keywords and then construct sentences around them. One has to think of link titles that may not be useful or are repetitive, but point to a page that you need to rank well. One has to create additional pages that you really could do without. It really kills the flow of writing and it really makes the process horribly unenjoyable.

And that’s what I’m doing right now — unenjoyable work. Thinking of sentences and paragraphs that include the terms; website design, html email design, web development, corporate design, etc. and finding redundant ways to link all these pages together.

All so that Google and its brethren can come round and notice that we use these words and phrases a lot, and deduce that we must be important in these categories.