Good Writing vs Good SEO
The battle between creating genuine, thoughtful content and optimising your site for search engines can leave publishers with a conflict that’s tough to resolve. Too often the quality of content is compromised by the voice in your head telling you to add more keywords, more “free”s and more “how to”s.
Do we have to choose?
An article entitled “Writing User Friendly Content” published on UX Booth recently contains a solid list of considerations to take when writing for your human audience. But it doesn’t take into account our search bot friends. Or does it?
Google “SEO” and you’ll get over 200 million results. Everyone’s got an opinion and the number of miracle cures out there is reminiscent of the travelling medicine show era.
While SEO is undeniably a crucial factor in getting your voice heard, it’s a tool, not the holy grail. Although a lot of advice is valid, it’s important to maintain a sense of perspective regarding which practices to practise.
Of all the tips and tricks out there, there’s no substitute for writing helpful, informative, measured, researched,
compelling, readable content supported by succinct infographics, photos, videos, and more to make your point. It requires skill, thought, and time. You won’t [necessarily] get rich quick and it won’t cure what ails you. But as a long term SEO strategy you could do a lot worse.
I’ve whipped together a diagram to illustrate the importance of good content for good SEO.
These approaches are all linked. If your content is useful and compelling people will refer to your articles with links, relevant links directing quality traffic.
David Jackson’s article “The 10 Biggest SEO Myths Exposed” aims to dispell a lot of the myths around the shortcuts. Of the 200 million pages of advice out there, this is a good place to start.
The Good News
By focusing your attention on just one SEO technique you’ll lay a solid foundation on which the other techy tricks can be built.
The Bad News
It takes time, skill, and patience. Nothing worth having happens overnight.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
