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F Brinley Bruton
February 16th, 2006Speaking in Tongues
Last night at the French Quarter Town Hall, after the meeting, during the mingling, I was speaking with people in the crowd about Think New Orleans.
At some point, a woman made a statement about search engine optimization, and I found myself in another world, this world, the blogosphere.
Who is the woman and why is she speaking of SEO?
I said something skeptical about search engine optimization. She said that it must be important since someone had convinced her to spend money on it.
Why is it necessary, I wonder?
I asked her her name. It happens to be F Brinley Bruton, a peculiar name. I asked if she held the URL for her name. She said yes.
Then there’s nothing to it. All you need is for someone to link to you, you’ll be at the top of Google in a couple days. In fact, I’ll write a blog entry and link to you.
She seemed dismissive of my dismissiveness, but said she’d buy me a drink if I linked to her. Thus, this is my first paid endorsement, or rather, link, since it’s not really an endorsement. Ugh. Okay. I’ll read an article. Yup. Endorsement. Maybe it’s two drinks now? But, her coverage of women in Afghanistan is compelling.
F Brinley Bruton
Let me introduce you to the web site (not blog) of F Brinley Bruton. She is a London based freelance journalist with experience in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Make sure you add the www before her domain, because without it, you get a placeholder site.
If you start getting spam comments with F Brinley Bruton in the body, it is because she’s unwittingly hired someone to rub us all the wrong way.
The same folks who have posted all of her example articles as image based PDFs, perhaps? In doing so, the’ve made sure that the search engines cannot read the articles, they cannot be indexed, and they cannot be searched. To Google, they do not exist.
Of course, no one has anything text based to which they can link. There is no reason to link to the site. Time for a link to the two immutable laws of blogging, which applies to all web content.
If the articles were available as HTML, I could link to them from this blog entry. A PDFs, I’m not so inclined, and the search engines have no idea what I’m linking to anyway. Not to mention that the articles are hard to read. Too hard for me to read. So I read her articles elsewhere.
If you do want to read Brinley’s work, try reading this article, The Women of Afghanistan Find a Leader.
Joya, a women’s literacy and health worker, says that soon after arriving she began to chafe at the “undemocratic attitude” of those running the meeting. She asked for permission to speak.
“I criticise my countrymen for allowing the legitimacy and legality of this Loya Jirga to be questioned by the presence of those criminals who brought our country to this state,” read the transcripts of what she said. “It is a mistake to test those who have already been tested. They should be taken to the world court.”
Uproar ensued and Joya’s microphone was turned off. Some participants leapt from their seats and the call of “Allahu akbar” resounded through the tent. Those in charge demanded that Joya be expelled and punished, or at least that she apologise. She remained, did not apologise, and was called an infidel, a rude little girl and a communist.
Westerners might find it hard to understand how courageous her speech was. Without mentioning names, Joya had taken aim at the most powerful class of Loya Jirga participants: mujahedin and “holy warriors” revered for fighting and expelling the Soviets.
SnakE Oil
Search engine optimization is to contemporary web development what paint sealant is to auto sales. How cheeky that someone should first sell her an almost text free web site and then go on to sell her search engine optimization.
If you Google her name with misspellings, Google corrects. Google knows that its Bruton, not Burton.
Google knows who she is, but just like me, Google knows that her site is not the best place to go if you want to read her work.
Update: My Work Here Is Done
When I wrote this article, F Brinley Bruton’s new web site did not appear in the Google search results for her name, F Brinley Bruton. Now she appears as the first result. What’s more, when you search for Brinley Bruton, you’ll find her site is first, and this blog entry about her site is second.
She was told she’d have to comission these results. I am hoping she’ll now run from the charlians. SEO is silly. It makes us all unhappy. Google puts it plainly in their message about SEO to webmasters.
One of the commentors, real name unknown, referenced his recent post on this matter, which I’ll quote as a supporting voice. billoday.net in A Message to Those Who Push SEOs
Here it is: Have interesting, unique, and applicable content that will make people return and link to you. That’s it. But, you have to understand that while Google is multilingual, its primary language is the link. The link determines how important you are. Not only that, but the level of importance the linker has determines how important you are.The way to win is to be the most popular kid in your field. Do that by spending time on your actual web content, not just improving your Google rank. It may start a little slower, but in the end the payoff will be even bigger. And everyone benefits from that.
To my mind, the most effective form of currency these days is not the link, it’s the quote. Not because search engines will follow the quote to the source, but people will. The pull quote is way to get a person reading. I do want you to read Brinley’s piece on Jaya in Afganistan. It’s fascinating. Thus, I quote it.
You need people to read you first. Meaningful links come come only after a real person invests the time to read you. It has to be worth their while.
Hugh MacLeod quoted me, what he felt was the crux, in Human Condition 101. Oddly, this quip that caught his fancy “…must be important…”, is the one gauled me into saying that she’d get more mileage out of a sincere link from a blogger. I went on to say that I would be that blogger.
Ultimately, however, it’s not one or another well placed link that determines authority. It will the merit of Brinley’s writing, and the depth of her experience. I do hope she makes more of her work more accessible.
Update: Blogging’s ROI
At long last I’ve gotten around to updating this post with photographs of the payout.
F Brinley Bruton was good to her word. A drink for a link. Langiappe, too.
Two Manhattans at Oswald’s. As a journalist, F Brinley Bruton has this annoying habit of disarming a person and then interviewing them. We talked about me, until I arrested myself. I’d ask her questions, but then we’d be talking about me again.
After listening to Harry Anderson’s latest take on the French Quarter, and watching a little bit of magic, we went to Coop’s for a burgers and Abitas.
I made a fortune off this blog entry. Thank you F Brinley Bruton.
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Comments 
[...] http://blogometer.com/2006/02/16/f-brinley-bruton/ [...]
Hi Alan,
While I agree with the overall gist of your post, I think you have a few misconceptions about what SEO is and how it operates.
You quote billoday.net:
“Have interesting, unique, and applicable content that will make people return and link to you.”
However, that’s exactly what most of SEO already is. Any decent SEO specialist spends the bulk of their time helping their client build quality links to their site.
That’s accomplished through helping people to create websites that attract links, helping them find, contact, and network with other sites that are likely to link to them, and promoting the site through things like press releases and placement in niche directories.
Placing F. Brinley Bruton’s site at number 1 for her name was exceptionally easy because there’s almost no competition for that particular word. However, you’d find that getting her site to rank for something that might send some traffic to her site, such as “women in Afghanistan”, is likely to be considerably more challenging.
You’re absolutely right that there are charlatans out there that will sell services that are completely useless in achieving search engine placement. But you’re painting the industry with too broad a brush.
Google’s ranking algorithm is largely based on links, and a (good) SEO’s primarily focus is on helping their clients to get the best possible links from the most relevant and reputable sources (the rest of the time is spent doings like tracking down the relevant keywords that will send traffic to the site, fixing the fact that the non-”www” version of her URL doesn’t link to her site, and things like that).
If you’ve got a really amazing site that’s attracting a lot of attention on its own, then you probably don’t need SEO. However, many good sites languish in obscurity because no one knows about them, and thus no one links to them. SEO can help get the ball rolling.
Finally, you can see from the following search that Google does indeed process PDF files, including a few of F. Brinley Bruton’s:
http://www.google.com/search?q=F.+Brinley+Bruton+filetype%3Apdf
The reason the PDFs on her site hadn’t been indexed yet is that she had no links to her site. In fact, before you linked to her, it’s unlikely that Google even knew her site existed.
Again, I agree with much of what you said - if you want to do well in the search engines, you have to create something people will be interested in. You’re absolutely correct on that point. This is just a defense of an industry that I think is often misunderstood and unfairly maligned because of the presence of (perhaps more than) a few bad apples.
Esoos
The PDFs are folly. They are image based. They cannot be indexed. I am aware of the fact that text PDFs are both indexed and converted to HTML by search engines, and I checked that Brinley’s articles were not PDF text.
I’m going to double down on my assertion that the PDFs are folly. The PDFs of Brinley’s articles are image based PDFs. They each contain a scanned image of print version of the article. They are not text based. Google cannot read them. Text as images is as evil in PDF as it is in HTML.
Explaining the importance of text, the importance of relevant content, the importance of updating frequently, are all things that that I do for my customers. My understanding of these matters come from reading the works of folks, like yourself, who give it some careful consideration. The basic message, the two immutable laws of blogging, noted above, is usually the point that I drive home.
I see the web as a conversation, not a network of links. I am blogger after all.
Esoos, you might want to note how I’m eager to beg advice from the SEO experts when need be.
I can imagine that larger firms or firms that sell their wares on their web sites are quite rightly obsessed with rankings. The rest of us should simply create honest content and throw ourselves at the mercy of the Long Tail.
I’m still of the mindset that the best way to get linked is to get read.
I still think it cheeky that a designer would create a site that was invisible to search engines, then go on to flog SEO.
We might agree that the first thing Brinley should to to make her site more appealing to search engines is to post her articles as text. Seeing that this was not the case, I assumed she’s dealing with a bad apple.
[...] I updated the F Brinley Bruton blog entry a few days ago. If you recall, F Brinley Bruton was where I learned about SEO and met Esoos Bobnar. Posted by Alan Gutierrez Filed in Blogging, Aside [...]
Nice photo and story. Your blog always educates me in some way, technical or topical. Am scanning and organizing pix all day as it it finally raining here and I don’t have to feel guilty about not being outside today. Weird how nice MN weather can do that to me. Must be something in that to do with The Enemy of the Good–I haven’t forgotten, just not sure what I want to say yet. Forgive any recent flippancy, please. I chalk it up to gardening at night, well, digging at dusk, and cheap wine from the new trans neighbors.
Finally raining here after two months. The city’s pumps are hurting for it.
I learn a lot from my blog myself. Esoos has put me onto the importance of search engine optimization. I’m reading his blog and articles. Optimization makes it sound like programming, but it’s really a lot like the way newspapers optimize an article to get read by people, choosing the right headlines, placing it in the right context.