Search engine optimisation (SEO) has a bad name in some circles. Reputedly, any article with a slant favorable to SEO submitted to Digg is immediately squashed by the “Bury Brigade“.

SEO, of itself is not a bad thing. There, I’ve said it. If you create a web site, you want visitors, and you want them to be coming for the right reasons. SEO can help in achieving that goal. It doesn’t have to involve link farms or cloaking or spam blogs or any of the other annoying and ultimately pointless activities that have made it so unpopular.

Here’s something I realised the other day: if you consider the entire web as a great big social network, then Google, Yahoo, et. al. are its search facility and keywords are just tags. The appearance of your pages in search listings can also be thought of as a form of syndication. Maybe that’s why the Digg crowd are so down on SEO: it’s seen as like digging your own articles, so it goes against their ethos.

But the internet as a whole isn’t like Digg: indeed if it were, Digg itself would soon die. We can’t wait around for others to submit our pages for us. Traffic requires promotion, unless you are lucky enough to get in the news for some other reason.

Let’s drop the horrid TLA (Three-Letter Acronym) for a start and give it a name that’ll align it with accessibility and usability (which everyone agrees are good things): lovability. (Admittedly, to become lovable in this sense you have to be something of a tart, but what the hey.) Who could object to lovability? Every site needs to be loved, doesn’t it?

I had occasion recently to search on Digg, and was surprised to see that one of the words on the search string that was matched was the definite article, “the”. Try it. Even for the word “the” on its own, you’ll get matches. It even matches with other useful words like “these”.

This is surprisingly dumb for one of the most visited sites on the Internet. There are two reasons to strip out very common words like “the” and, uh, “and”: first the results are unlikely to be meaningful and second by removing them before doing a search you reduce the load on your (in this case, very busy) server. Load is evidently a problem, as Digg’s search is also liable to return nothing more than a helpful message saying:

Digg is experiencing a high volume of traffic right now. Please try your search again later.

I’m not the only one who finds Digg’s search unimpressive. It’s slightly ironic that a site whose purpose is to pass judgement on other sites - albeit collectively - is so flawed in one of its fundamentals. (Sensibly I tested my own site search before posting this… and — whoops — found a bug. Fixed now!)