It’s often said that the right way to write for your website is to write for ‘humans’ not search engines and I wholeheartedly agree.
In a perfect world this should be the only way to write for your website, but there are few scenarios where understanding how search engines work helps you write better copy. However, it’s easy to get carried away and blow out the humans altogether.
Keywords are central to getting traffic to your website and it could be argued that sensible keyword density — the amount of keywords on a single page — could apply to that goal of ‘writing for humans’ in that the same word or phrase repeated unnecessarily makes reading not only difficult but it’s bad use of language.
Headlines that explain what’s in the article work well for both humans and search engines. Tabloid-type puns don’t work well for humans and do nothing for search.
Link where it helps the user. If your link benefits the search engine and not your user, them you have done them a disservice, and the risk is unnecessary.
Bloggers typically tend to be good at this. Having the freedom to write an article at whatever length you want usually results in writing it at the length it needs to be, with the appropriate amount of keywords.
Not so good at this are the keyword ‘ninjas’ who think that social media exists only to get them to the top of the search engines. They speak in a bizarre kind of verbless dialogue that only search engines understand.
Sure, they’re up there scratching the underbelly of Google’s logo, but if humans don’t like what you’re writing, or should I say, don’t get any value from it, it’s not conducive to business.
And I don’t have to remind you that your customers are humans, not search engines.
So I say to all you ninjas out there. Speak English and use keywords sparingly.
Remember your customers are… human.
