How do you keep your writings digitally accessible for as long as possible?

[zompist]

In my financial situation, that's unfortunately about as likely as me commissioning the building of a big pyramid and housing the writings at the center of it.

You could try and optimize the keywords for the algorithm by yourself. I don't know how to do that. It might take some research. If you're not looking for perfect results, I don't think it will be impossibly difficult.

It depends on what keywords you want to appear for.

For fun I looked up "conlang" and "creating a language". I'm on the first page for both, with no SEO or advertising at all. I'm amused or maybe irked that this wikihow page on conlanging uses the Verdurian alphabet as an example. No attribution, but at least it's well drawn.

On the other hand, I doubt it's cheap or easy to get to the top for "making money" or "wisdom for the ages."

So, my best advice: be an expert in something obscure.

[Raphael]

So, my best advice: be an expert in something obscure.

Hmmmm. I'm not really writing or thinking about one main topic. Or even about one main point. I've got a number of points on a number of topics.

Oddly enough, I've already written a kind of short "introduction" for my stuff, and it's mostly a list of reasons why people probably wouldn't be interested in reading it.

[Ares Land]

I missed this thread the first time around.

There are two approaches you can use:

First, put it up on the web and have it archived by the Internet Archive. They archive any web pages on request. Chances are the Internet Archive will be around for quite a while, possibly far beyond our regrettable deaths: it's very useful for research purposes and not that expensive, all things considered.

Second, have it published (epub or physical or both) and follow the appropriate procedure for legal deposit. If Wikipedia is correct on this, it involves sending copies both to the German National Library and to your Land's library. I don't know if they accept e-books but they probably do.
Legal deposit applies to all forms of publishing: traditional or self-publishing.

You can of course do both.

If you're curious the media of choice for digital archival is tape. Tape has a huge storage capacity and is pretty cheap (energy-wise and in other respects.) The one drawback is that retrieval is sequential: you have to physically spool the tape. Tape can last for decades; they copy archives on fresh tapes periodically. I think it happens every ten years or so, way earlier than the expected lifetime of the tape; technology improves faster than the tape degrades.
The solution to the format issue is clever: they store a description of the format and how to read it at the beginning of each tape.

[Raphael]

I missed this thread the first time around.

There are two approaches you can use:

First, put it up on the web and have it archived by the Internet Archive. They archive any web pages on request. Chances are the Internet Archive will be around for quite a while, possibly far beyond our regrettable deaths: it's very useful for research purposes and not that expensive, all things considered.

Second, have it published (epub or physical or both) and follow the appropriate procedure for legal deposit. If Wikipedia is correct on this, it involves sending copies both to the German National Library and to your Land's library. I don't know if they accept e-books but they probably do.
Legal deposit applies to all forms of publishing: traditional or self-publishing.

Thank you, I might go with that combination. I had the impression that you can also put lengthy individual pdfs on the Internet Archive on their own; is that true?

[Ares Land]

You probably know more about it than I do I didn't know that was an option. But it looks like you're right.

[rotting bones]

It depends on what keywords you want to appear for.

For fun I looked up "conlang" and "creating a language". I'm on the first page for both, with no SEO or advertising at all. I'm amused or maybe irked that this wikihow page on conlanging uses the Verdurian alphabet as an example. No attribution, but at least it's well drawn.

On the other hand, I doubt it's cheap or easy to get to the top for "making money" or "wisdom for the ages."

So, my best advice: be an expert in something obscure.

The PageRank algorithm originally gave high priority to pages that a lot of other pages pointed to. The later versions of Google's algorithm were probably trained on the original results.