SEO writing with purpose: Is there ANY Good News in This Current Controversy?

In the midst of the rain and fog that is the on-going controversy within the SEO community surrounding the current changes in search engine policies and procedures, one has to ask: is there any ray of sunshine, any silver-lining? What (if any) is the good news in all of this? This is the question that people all over the world have been asking for some time.

They continually read about the complaints from search engine execs who are getting sick and tired of getting nothing but paid results generated in the SEO fashion, and they are wondering what it all means.

First of all, given all of the complaints pouring into the corporate offices of Google, Yahoo, Excite and others, is it any wonder that changes have been made? They were bound to come sooner or later. And it is understandable. The paid advertisements and pay-per-click links were getting too outrageous. Also, the users were tired of having to wade through tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of search results only to find that nothing “ranked” was what they actually were looking for. The “Network” mantra (“I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore”) grew loud enough that the execs had to finally act. And act they did. They needed to show their users that their complaints were not falling on deaf ears. So they made a few rapid (some read radical) changes in their policies and procedures to make sure that their users can readily find the information that they are actually looking for.

What worries the SEO community in all this is that, practically speaking, there will no longer be a need for making sure that articles have a certain number of keywords, highlighted and bolded properly so that crawlers can spot them more easily. But is this a bad thing? Is this not, in fact, the silver lining of the SEO cloud?

If you can’t hear it yet, then perk your ears up soon, because there will be a sigh of relief across the world-wide writing community when this news sinks in, because, for all writers, and especially for those who were never fit at it in the first place, the good news is this: word density will not matter. You will no longer have to swim through the bog of figuring out when and where and how often to place words and phrases the correct number of times. You will no longer need to dexterously memorize where the bold and headings buttons are. And you will no longer need to cry yourself to sleep as you wrestle with the bane-of-your-existence weird combinations of words that you have most graciously been given by your concerned, but not always completely understanding client. Now…If that isn’t good news, then I don’t know what is.