Write For People, Not Search Engines

While it is important to optimize the content of your blog posts  for search engines, and we’ll talk about this later, your main focus should always be writing for humans, not search engine bots and spiders.

Always look at what you write as if you were reading your own post the same way a new reader would.  Ask yourself what you would do if you arrived at page that promised you the information you’ve been searching a half-hour for, only to discover that the page you arrive at is nothing but a barely readable hodgepodge of keywords with almost no meaningful content.

I doubt that you would stay on that page for any length of time at all.  You can guarantee that your readers, or the people that might have been your readers aren’t going to take the time to decipher something meaningful out of  all the keyword-loading that you’ve done.  They’re going to head straight back to their favorite search tool and find a site that actually delivers the information they’re looking for.

Always try to keep these things in mind while you’re writing. Don’t repeat your keywords all over your blog posts to the point that they don’t make any make sense.  If you do, you run the risk of a page that looks like the one in the following illustration:

Notice how difficult it becomes to read what they are trying to tell you after the first few occurrences of their chosen keywords? (In this case “Aruba Caribbean.”)  It quickly becomes nearly impossible to see anything but the keywords themselves. They overwhelm any actual benefit of the content on the page and make reading difficult if not impossible.

Please Don’t Feed The Spiders!

Pages like the one above provide a lot of food for search engine spiders, but in this case, feeding the search engines is detracting from the reader’s experience.

This tactic might work for short-term search engine placement and you may get some extra traffic, but human beings won’t stay long if the content is obviously geared for search engine ranking. People have a short attention span and won’t waste it on junk.

Likewise, Search engines constantly check what they’ve indexed to see if the content is overly keyword heavy.  Pages that have obviously been padded are eventually penalized and pushed down in the rankings. Even if this tactic lands you in the top three results for your chosen keywords for a short time, it will eventually be banished to page thirty where it will do you no good at all.

We’ll go over the right way to optimize your blog posts and pages for search engines in the next chapter.  For now it’s much more important to know what not to do than what it is acceptable.  It’s a lot easier to crush a bad habit before it can develop than it is to retrain yourself after you’ve gotten used to doing things in a certain way.

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