Content for Humans and Robots
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‘SEO’ has become something of a buzzword for savvy bloggers. Unfortunately, bad SEO has also become the bane of the blogosphere. Keyword stuffed content that makes little sense, nonsensical titles and blogrolls filled with irrelevant links are the waste material of poorly performed SEO. So how can you write content for your blog that appeals both to search engine bots and humans?
Avoid Keyword Overload
There’s a distinct difference between writing something that is rich in keywords to writing something that’s stuffed with them. You don’t ever need to use the same word five times in a six word sentence. The bots will get the topic of a well written post with just a few usages of keyword and humans will get it to. Reread everything you write. If it doesn’t make sense or sound absolutely natural, don’t post it.
Keep Your Title Clear
As rather busy humans we have longer working hours, shorter sleeping hours and more to accomplish in a day. So we don’t have time to read a full article before knowing for sure that it’s on a topic we’re interested in. This is why so many of just skim titles in order to work out what a post is about before committing to reading it. So you can imagine that your post about frugal living really should have a title that gives the indication of that. Giving it a title about ‘car insurance,’ just because there’s more traffic for that word really isn’t going to go down very well. Of course this is an exaggerated example. But the point is that while there is no denying from a SEO standpoint that your keyword in the title is useful, don’t do so at the expense of the sense it makes to your readers.
SEO-Friendly Blog Plugins
As something of a follow on from the previous point, free Wordpress plugins such as the All-in-One SEO pack, enable you to set a meta title independently of your blog post title. This gives you the opportunity to put your keyword in the meta title for SEO purposes, but allows you to keep your blog post title, the one your readers will pay more attention to, catchy and clear.
Unique Content
SEO pros will reiterate the importance of unique content and so should your readers. If you want to comment on a story that’s already circling the web, make sure you add your own spin or standpoint. Simply regurgitating material that’s already out there on the Internet and easily available from another site gives people one less reason to visit yours. And there’s nothing quite as frustrating as going through your blog reader and realising that the hour you’ve just spent reading fifteen articles resulted in your reading the same one three times!
For me, SEO and quality content are one and the same thing. Quality and human friendly content shouldn’t be a bonus. It should be the focus of any good SEO campaign and taking small things like this into account can make all the difference.
[This is a guest post by Stacey Cavanagh from Manchester, UK. Stacey works in Online Marketing for Tecmark SEO Liverpool]
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I agree with the premise, but there is a fine line between ‘regurgitating content’ and having a slightly different take than someone else. I also think that simply “stuffing” keywords is not a good strategy. People can see through this when they visit the site and realize what is going on. The credibility that the site tries to build ends up falling apart.
Well Explained Article Stacey!! I completely agree with you. CONTENT is KING in SEO. As of I know we have been working on 3-6% of Keyword Density so I want your opinion here. What is the Keyword Density that you would recommend?!?
Amy
[...] Content for Humans and Robots (at Technacular.com): the guest post by Stacey Cavanagh of Tecmark.co.uk gives some useful tips on creating content for your blog that appeals both to search engine bots and humans. [...]