Jun 7, 2009

 

Why Bloggers Should Write for People Not Search Engines


In the quest to improve their search engine ranking, many bloggers focus far too much on writing for the search engines. As a blogger, you must write with your readers in mind first and foremost. Your aim should be to entice and inspire your readers so you can encourage them to spread the word about your blog and become regular readers. By obsessing too much over SEO tactics, bloggers can lose sight of the bigger picture, eventually costing them their readership. That being said, SEO still plays a role in blogging but it should not be considered the be-all end-all of blogging.

Blogging is SOCIAL

Some of the most successful bloggers out there have paid absolutely no attention to SEO. That is because their success does not depend upon inane SEO tactics but on how readers respond to their material. The key to success in blogging is to write material that helps, provokes, or inspires readers and to get plenty of eyeballs on your content. When people like your writing, they will reference it in their blogs, vote for it on social media websites, twitter it, or spread your links through other means. In turn, this social media exposure will bring you the link juice you need to achieve higher rankings.

SEO Blogging Tips

SEO will mostly take care of itself if you focus your energies on providing value to your readers. Nonetheless, there are a few SEO basics you can follow in order to ensure that your blog is SEO-friendly. You need to take SEO into consideration to some extent since your blog will never get popular if your content cannot be found. Finding the happy medium between writing for the search engines and human readers is essential. You don’t want your writing to come across as being written for search engines but it should be SEO-friendly.

There really is no need to worry about the complexities of SEO if you are a blogger since search engines already love blogs. Incorporate a few target keywords in your blog posts and headlines but don’t go keyword crazy. Never forget that you are ultimately writing for people, not search engines. Some other things you can do to make your blog more SEO-friendly are to use ALT tags on your images, break up your post with header tags, and use smart permalinks.

Some bloggers may refrain from posting because they are worried that their blog posts are not perfectly optimized. There truly is no reason to fret about such matters as the key to success in blogging is to make your posts interesting and enticing to readers. Once you do that, the SEO benefits will come naturally.

Search engine spiders love content that is constantly updated so bloggers should try to post as frequently as possible. Otherwise, there isn’t too much you need to worry about when it comes to SEO in blogging. No matter how great your SEO strategies are your blog will never be successful if people don’t like it. Put people before search engines when you write your blog posts because it will pay off. When you provide maximum value to your readers, the SEO benefits will eventually come through social media exposure.

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