In working with websites, I find having to understand my grammar is a key factor. Nobody likes misspelled words or sentences that run too long or don’t make sense. I’ve been spending time going through my sites trying to find and fix those lines that meet that criteria.

But there is another factor I have to consider – SEO. Search Engine Optimization is something most web masters strive for. They want to see their name in lights (Search Engine lights, that is). To be able to top a search means more views. That, in turn, can bring more opportunity and even $$.

So now the real question is: where is the fine line? There are words that crop up (Tumblr, Blubrry) that are not spelled correct. I also have to think about saturation of keywords. Webmaster is a keyword – Google counts how many times webmaster is in a site. Google then reports back that webmaster is a keyword you should focus on. Adding words like webmaster (and their variants) and making it look appeasing is a real task – that is, if you content focuses on getting webmasters to come to your site.

Want to add another angle? How bout we take in viewer retention: The user is only on the site for an average of 2 seconds. You have 2 sentences to explain you, your site and your article. Period. Don’t do that – they’re gone. That is where Grammar comes in more than SEO.

Of course, doth could turn thine speaking into Ye Olde English! Hearty words shall evoke the emotion! Now Everyone – DRINK!

All this to think about and you still have to put your style into an article. For writing everyday articles, it’s a consideration, but you should focus more on your style. If this is an “About” page or something that is going to be a major part of your site, then you need to really focus on SEO, then Grammar. The only exception is the first paragraph: This defines the rest of the article. Therefore, following grammatic rules is the best bet.

Grammar or SEO? They both have advantage. However, the better the site crawls, the more people will see if you correctly spelled Webmaster. Welcome to my world…

The news out of AOL about logging what customers are searching is quite disturbing. I am strongly against search companies keeping records of what people are searching. That data is something that could be stolen, and if stolen could harm many people. I see this as the perfect time to mention the project started up over at XiTechnology in recent months. We are developing a search engine system using Open Source technologies to provide users with the comfort of knowing that their searches will not be saved anywhere. The project named iOpenSeek is an ad-free system available for searching the internet. I mean, isn’t that what you do on a search engine? Currently we are developing our own web spider to index our information. The source code for the spider will be available upon release in the fall for review and debugging. We are accepting donations to help cover the rather insane costs of hardware to purchase the servers to run our system on. This is a project we believe strongly in because of the risk in using some of the other search engines online today. Its our goal to protect our users, and provide them with a place to search freely. Our website is www.iopenseek.com. Updated news will be available on the site in the next coming weeks. If you believe in search engine freedom then this could be what you are looking for.

-mn