I thought about using the title “What Hemingway taught me about Blogging” but it probably wouldn’t do my Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) much good. (Note how I managed to slip the bulk of the title into the first line. Get used to it, you’ll be seeing it several more times before you get to the end of the page. That’s SEO for you.)

On top of that, he didn’t actually teach me anything about blogging. He taught me lessons about writing, bullfighting and firearms safety, but he’s useless on blogging. Not his fault of course, as it didn’t exist in his day. Even Nostradamus is strangely silent on SEO, despite his claims to see into the future.

My spell-checker just picked up Nostradamus and suggested Stradivarius. I can’t help thinking that the world of violins would be a different place if spell-checkers ran the world.

So, in my customary bumbling way I will now shelve the Hemingway reference for later use (it was going to be a post about land ownership) and move on to SEO.

It’s a rare day when I turn on the computer at work, read the spam, and don’t find at least one offer to improve my place in Google’s rankings by someone claiming to be (a) highly effective and (b) reasonably priced.  I’d take them more seriously if most of them could actually write grammatical English. Call me old-fashioned and curmudgeonly if you want, but if someone is asking for money to improve my written work (albeit by merely inserting key words and links) I’d like to think that they are reasonably competent.

While I’m struggling to work out whether “optimisation” or “optimization” is going to bring better results they are serving up gems of jargon and sentences that look like they’ve used a translation service.

Kindly revert back if you are interested, then we can send you more detail about package/action with special Offer. I look forward to your positive mail.

Still, they write better than the representative of the Libyan Government who got in touch this morning to offer me…

…I suppose he really was from the Libyan Government, and not just spam, I mean he said he was, but the fact he used a gmail account makes me slightly suspicious that he might not be telling the truth.