Writing Content That Robots and Humans Love

Hi,
Effective search engine optimization rests on great content. Without content that pulls readers in and makes them want to stick around for awhile and come back later, your website won't be around for long. Yet, great content has to appeal to search engine robots just as it does humans. This a tricky balance to strike since you are trying to get the same block of text to please a mechanical robot while still remaining friendly and informative to a human mind.

Computers have come a long way, but they are still a far cry from the human mind. That's why writing great content for a search engine optimized website takes more than just great writing skills. Writers used to preparing entertaining articles for print magazines often struggle to comprehend how to write content for websites. This is because they understand the human audience very well but have no clue how to please the robot audience.

Writing for the Bots

Writing effective SEO content that speaks to the search engine robots is a matter of understanding what they are looking for. It's easy to curse the search engines for being too discriminatory and hard to understand, but they are actually rather simple to understand if you stop and think about it. They are not out to get you. They do not want to take you down. They have no sense of who you are or who the next guy is.

What a search engine robot wants is to please their customer. Just as you want to please your customers through your work online, the robots come to your website and scan the content because they want to please their own customers. Their customers just happen to be searchers looking for information online and in order to please them they must know what your website is about.

So, robots read your content not for knowledge, but for a basic understanding of what your site is about. They want to know how valuable your content is, what your niche is, and how much information you are offering your viewers. They collect a ton of information to determine these things and only a small portion if it actually comes directly from your website. The job on your site is to just determine what type of information is revealed and how much content is there.

If your content is tightly focused to one niche or subject with just one or two keywords targeted on each page, you should do very well writing for the bots. Just resist temptation to shove too many keywords in there because you will be slapped rather than embraced by the bots.

Writing for the Humans

Writing for humans is a bit easier. You know what your site is about and you make sure every word of content is tightly focused to deliver related information. You search out for questions your potential visitors are asking and make sure the answers are within your site. You make sure everything is easy to navigate so visitors easily find just what they are looking for.