Developing content that is both SEO and Human friendly

We concentrate to much on the idea that we have to rank well on search engines in order to get traffic to our websites. Why do I bring this into discussion ? Simply because search engines are offering so different results depending on where are you located when you perform a search, what is the time when you are searching or what type of domain do you have : .com, .net, .ro and so on and so forth. All these factors create inconsistencies in the results of search engines. That is why you need to keep in mind that your content is for PEOPLE to read and for search engines to rank it.

Concentrate on organic traffic

I’m a big supporter of the idea that if your content is good enough you’ll get traffic even if you don’t pay for any kind of service like PPC or paid banners (not implying that PPC is a waste of money and time – I’m just pointing out the benefits of creating quality content). The social networks can offer you a huge playground to web market your content for free. You just have to know how to do it.

But let’s get back to organic traffic. There are a few reasons that determined me to state the fact that organic traffic is the safest way to get traffic :

1. you can obtain relevant traffic because you decide what keywords to target and what type of content to create
2. the traffic is there to stay – if you know what to do you’ll always be in the first pages
3. if you get your traffic from paid services then probably you’ll lose the most of it once you stop paying for that service
4. if you receive traffic from organic searches and you see your bounce rate under 40% then this means you are doing a good job : this means that your traffic consists in people that find your web site’s content relevant to their searches

I’ll expand a little bit on this idea : getting traffic from organic searches. You see, being number one in Google when you perform a search doesn’t means that you are number one for all the searches performed on that keyword. Different country will show different results, different gmail user will show different results or different time moments will show different results. The fact that you receive traffic is shown in you Google analytics : there you can see where the traffic is coming from and in what quantities.

Often I see that I receive traffic from a certain keyword : I search that keyword and my website is nowhere to be found. This means that the ones that searched that keyword are in a different area zone and for them I’m ranking well. But the most important thing when you are getting traffic in an organic way is this : “there are people out there that consider your articles interesting and relevant to their searches”

Elements that matter for search engines

Even if you write for people you also need to write for search engines but learn how to keep a productive balance. There are so many things out there that are telling you how to write friendly SEO content when there isn’t that hard.

Here the most important places where you should use the main keyword you wish to target on a certain page :

1. title of the page – very important both for ranking and for making readers to click on your article
2. description metatag – important in ranking and making readers click because this element can be used as a great way to present an interesting summary to the readers
3. first paragraph of the article, few sentences in the middle of the article (keep it naturally) and the last paragraph
4. headlines
5. text of links
6. names of images or files that are on the page

Why keyword density is bad practice

How many times you heard about the fact that you need to have keyword density in your article and that you can go up to 8%. Search engines are becoming smarter : it doesn’t need to see a keyword density of 8% in order to know how to index your page. You can easily check this by placing an AdSense in different parts of an article and see what kind of ads shows you.

The big DON’T in keyword density has to do again with the human factor. Lets make a simple math. Most articles we can say it has 600 words. When you target a keyword on that page you actually target a group of lets say 3 words. How many groups of 3 words do we have in that article ? 600 : 3 = 200. Now lets see how much is 8% from 200 : 16. So you’ll have to use that group of 3 words 16 times in an article of 600 words. This means that approximately 1of 4 or 5 sentences contains those 3 words. I don’t think you can achieve that in a way that will not disturb the reader.

Bottom line is : don’t pay attention to keyword density. Use the basic elements to suggest the theme of your article and to also point out the keywords that you target.

Write for HUMANS – they are the ones that pay you

In case you missed this small, yet so important detail and you’ve concentrated your work on creating content only for search engines then you might wanna read this : HUMANS pay for your services – search engines only rank your content.

I, for example, have a .ro domain and I’m blogging mostly for other countries. I have almost no chance in ranking well in other places then my own country : maybe a .com domain could’ve been more helpful. And still I receive traffic from social networks, from my YouTube channel or my comments on other blogs.

I have to admit that when I started this blog I was concentrating mainly on search engines. I didn’t received comments on my articles until I realized that I have to provide informations that would appeal people to click on my article and read it.

Share what you think

If you have experiences on this or you wanna express your opinion feel free to do it in comments bellow. If you don’t agree with my opinions post : but in a civilized way.