From SEO to Scriptwriting

Sorry for some silence. In August I got a job offer and come back to my favorite field – scriptwriting for animation, so it would be naturally to compare ideas lying in the base of SEO and storytelling these days. As I have written before, SEO is all about working with patterns – in fact keywords are nothing more than patterns people use while thinking about something.
There are several words that could express very close meaning but people prefer a certain set, and search engines are trained (especially now, with use of machine learning technologies) to identify and respond to these patterns with most relevant content.

In scriptwriting, I’d say even in storytelling in general, we also do a kind of optimization to our audience needs but we use more complex patterns, where not only words involved – here we’re working with images in the wide meaning of this word, including all channels of perception available for humans.

Yes, search engines go in this direction, too – last AI projects allow users to create images based on their search requests. And machines will always be better in working with patterns, so I’m sure AI would write scripts much better than scriptwriters but… there is one thing about the Internet that gives us creative people not only a hope but a solid foundation. This thing became a trend in modern movie industry. I’m talking about uniqueness, the thing opposite patterns.  

In the world where competition for the audience attention is so high it is not enough to meet the audience patterns but also be unique in this. And it’s obviously not about AI…

New SEO project, new CMS…

My last SEO project couldn’t be possible without learning new CMS (Content Management System). Yeah, that seems to be an interesting trend – diversification of CMS platforms. Almost every website I have worked on last year differs from the others with its CMS. This time it was CMS October, PHP-based, with lots of special files here and there. Yes, there is a nice admin dashboard, too, but it just assists you in navigating among the set of different templates, service files, and well-developed structure of folders. CMS October reminded me of old times Linux where you can do almost everything manipulating with… well… mostly text-based files.

The project was pretty big – we had three language versions and a pretty large catalogue of products. It was a factory producing polymer pipes and manholes for drainage systems. As you can see the lexicon differed a lot from my previous projects, but it just made the job more interesting.

  

Search Engines are the oldest Artificial Intelligent online services

Sometimes we simply need to shift our focus to see obvious but very important things. It happens to me yesterday after watching another SEO guru. I suddenly and clearly realized where I have met AI before during my life long experience of web content writing… Surely, it’s a search engine… It sounds so simple but it moves some keys inside my brain….

Well, as for me, SEO is a part of digital marketing – I do profound market research through search requests shaping so called semantic core or better to say market demand in the sector of interest. I believe that only clear understanding what potential customers want helps to tailor website content to be unique in satisfying users’ needs. I’m pretty sure we are in one boat with search engines developers on this.

The second part of my job as a Search Engine Optimization specialist is to communicate with search engines to give our target audience something unique, what exactly they need. Here is where search engine’s black box begins… What does a search engine rely on while evaluating website contents? We both seem to want the same – to provide the most relevant answer to a search request. Here is where machine learning comes out, either…

When we have something unique on a website, a machine just gives a corresponding page at the top after searching through its data base. I have checked it many times. It works well – Uh, I would be surprised if it didn’t. When our content is not unique, some other factors start playing... but again, the things unique for a given website give advantages. That’s one of reasons why so-called “long-tail” request strategy is a basic one for SEO – the longer search request, the more possibility to provide unique content.

I keep my SEO experiments and promise to share results here, in my blog. Thanks for reading! Stay in touch! 

  

When does SEO should actually start?

Every SEO expert knows that there are really hot keywords, for which people are even ready to fight for. I recently took a part in a real estate project with word “sale” in the title. It turns out to be a blessing for search engines, because name and the website address contain a very popular keyword, but… it was my first time to be banned in any place online, where I just tried to mention it. Yeah, that may sound funny – word “sale” is filtered by many anti-spam systems, not without reason, of course.

This example points out to a time when actually SEO should start. I believe that preliminary research of search requests should be performed before launching a website at all. In fact a SEO expert often has to fix problems created on earlier stages of a web project. Preliminary research would help to choose most efficient brand and domain names, which could be very helpful as we see.

SEO should be a part of the whole development process,
not just fixing something on the way... 

Why should writers not be afraid of AI progress?

WGA writers are on strike. There were some serious copyright issues questioning current regulations because of artificial intelligence services. A kind of a panic…

One of my contacts in Twitter, a well-known Producer and Screenplay Writer, posted that AI news made him so sad that he stopped writing another script and got a kind of writing block. Doubts…

While my recent talk with peers working with AI closely, they repeated several time, “we are living in the era of deep fake”. Even marketing professionals are not happy, either.

My last writing job involved lots of communication with ChatGPT, too. Now I can recognize lots of ChatGPT clichés in posts around the Internet. Stop. What?

Yes, my dear readers, lots of writers or just marking-related workers rushed to use ChatGPT for their purposes and almost flooded the online space with low-meaning texts generated by AI.

And after all the mentioned above, I tell you – that’s OK. There is no fear about the true writers’ future if…

an AI generated fire flower,
an illustration for my novel "The Second Herald"

Just before my last project, connected with extensive use of ChatGPT for SEO, I have had a pleasure in meditations digging out ideas that still thrill me with their depth. It’s not a joke. I do not boast any intellectual abilities here. Those ideas are not mine at all. They are just ideas. And that’s the key point. All I did is just meditating. That’s all.

Just as the Bible says: “Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known” (Jeremiah 33:3), we have a source for wisdom and knowledge much more powerful than any AI tool. 

For those who are not a believer, I also have some ground to base your hope upon. Any true writer takes one’s inspiration and ideas from… life… Real life has always been and will always be much richer any artificial thing which is just a small particle in the living stream, nothing more. So, my dear peers, we should not be afraid of upcoming AI era. It has even its advantages I hope to discuss here in my blog or in social networks.