Humanities & Social Sciences, Vol 9, No 12 (2016)

Search Engine Optimized Texts: Communicative, Pragmatic and Linguistic Aspects

Fyodor Nikolaev

Abstract


This article describes some linguistic and communicative-pragmatic peculiarities of English SEO-optimized texts and defines the place of this type of texts in the genre structure of advertising discourse.

The article is based on the results of the comparative analysis of the two corpora. The target corpus contained SEO-optimized texts selected from the main pages of the websites of large retail companies; the referential corpus consisted of texts of ads from the web pages of periodicals. The results of the corpus data analysis allow to conclude that, as a genre variation of the advertising discourse the SEO- text is characterized by several features unusual for historically formed "prototypical" advertising text: the extremely high number of nouns in relation to the total number of verbs, a low percentage of the lexical variability, a high number of adjectives in the superlative degree which implement evaluation tactics of "self-glorification" not typical of modern dynamics of advertising texts.