I recently installed some search engine optimization plugins on the WordPress back end of this site. In the main, these are fairly simple tools with straightforward benefits. However, even in the first day of having them installed on my site, I recognized that there are some significant potential pitfalls in even having these tools present on my site. When every post has beneath it a tool evaluating the search engine efficiency of a given post, there is a significant danger of writing content to the search engines, instead of writing content to your audience.

Optimally, of course, the two would be one and the same, but the challenge for any search algorithm is to filter noise while finding good content. For a user, this means that the temptation to focus on being found can begin to trump the need to write good content as good content, for its own sake. When a site hits this point, the quality of its articles goes downhill in a hurry – and unfortunately, if the writers have become sufficiently skilled at playing the SEO game, their articles may not decrease in rank. Then it is the users that suffer.

The problem is that algorithms can only analyze signals, and accordingly they can be fooled. The last decade and a half of internet search engine history are a long, unarguable record of one simple truth: whenever search engines get better at filtering spam, spammers get better at using the search engines’ algorithms to get their content in front of users.

Unlike email spam, a great deal of website spam isn’t really illegal or false. It’s simply badly written – but badly written in such a way as to effectively game the search engines. Motives for this vary, but usually have to do with advertising revenue or general business profits. Nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes, but it can get you in trouble in a hurry when it compromises your approach to content, and it leaves users with a bad taste in their mouths. They will come to dislike you and your site – not an optimal outcome. (Quick: how many people actually like about.com, and how many of you wish you never had to see a terrible article from that abominable sump in your search results again?)

The real danger in having an SEO tool staring me in the face is the temptation to constantly second-guess myself while writing, to think about the ways I can make the post searchable, rather than the ways I can make the post valuable. There is nothing wrong with using the tool; there is everything wrong with being used by the tool. The best way to take advantage of SEO analysis tools is to use them to tweak the post when you’re done. Ignore it during the process of writing the post; use it as an editorial tool and not a director.

If there are small, simple ways to make a post or a page more searchable, why not? If there are ways to provide more meaningful descriptions for the search engine to display, why not? But the moment that the SEO tool dictates content, rather than simply helping optimize the content you would already be creating, you’ve got a problem.