Dumbing it down for really smart robots

I'm reading a lot about SEO. Search Engine Optimization. Frankly, I don't like what I read.

It seems that in order to entice those really smart search engine robots, spiders and wanderers into giving your web pages good ranking in search engine results, you have to dumb it all down. You have to break all the good rules of writing.

SEO copywriting "secrets" advise you to search and find your most popular keywords and then pepper them, heavily, very heavily, throughout your copy. It seems that being redundant and repetitive is resourceful.

I have to tell you now, this is the arrow piercing this writer's heart. Redundant and repetitive are the stuff of first-grade primers. See Dick and Jane. See Jane run. See Dick run. See Dick and Jane run. That's good SEO copy, mind you.

As a professional writer for some 30-odd years, fine tuning my craft has been in the opposite direction. I look at words for their individual meaning and the emotion they extract. When I notice I'm using the same word as description more than twice, I head to the Thesaurus to hunt down a better one. I look for ways to capture attention and the imagination, describe events that project the reader into the story like a time machine or the Federation Starship's transporter. Beam us up, Scotty, you've got to give us some more intelligent conversation.

Engaging readers is hard enough– they'd rather watch the latest episode of The Bachelorette or Wipe Out. As our daily media moves more into web space, will we dumb down our stories to appease the SEO robots? Or write to intrigue readers? How ironic that a really smart media can make us so dumb.