Lost Word of the Day - Pleonasm

pleonasm - use of unnecessary or redundant words, e.g. "see with one's own eyes" 

I am guilty of pleonasm. When I only have 400 words written and my client is asking for 650, they're going to get a couple of "very"s and an "a lot" or two. I know it's very high school'ish of me to take that approach, but this is mostly limited to content that will likely never be read by humans. It's just word fodder to make Google put a certain web page at the top of the list in its search results. This process is called SEO.

SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization" and is the process of building web traffic from natural listings on search engines. This means if you search for pink nail polish your result will probably look something like this:

As you can see, the words PINK, NAIL, and POLISH are highlighted all over the page. This means Google derived its results and ranked them based on what it considers most relevant on that page to the user. So websites that effectively use the term "pink nail polish" (or something close to that) in the text on their page will rank higher than ones that don't. Why is this important? Because it helps to eliminate the need for paid adverting. Here's a video that explains it pretty well.

Don't you feel smarter? And now you know a little more about what I do in my job as a writer.