You Hear It All The Time
I want to talk about how you always hear big name bloggers talking about writing for humans and not machines. I want to dispel this myth for the startup blog and explain that if you have a million people coming to your blog, you can write about almost anything remotely topic relevant. If you’re starting out, you better make sure the machines can find you. Besides, who do you think the machines listen to? Humans. But….if your topic is not popular enough from an SEO standpoint, what makes you think a human cares about it?
Is There A Difference?
In my opinion, no. Sure, you don’t want to word your titles or subtitles or paragraphs so they read like a keyword-stuffed nightmare but that’s an extreme. When we talk about search engines who do you think powers their results? That’s right, queries by humans. I think this bears repeating.
If you have a blog that gets 5-25,000 daily visitors then you can stop reading now. If you write something even remotely relevant your readers will see it. But that doesn’t mean they’ll like it. If you don’t get thousands of daily visitors then you better make sure that the terms you’re using get searched on and have a competition profile that allows you to rank for them.
Ultimately The Humans Rule
Whether you have a runaway success or not, your blog posts will only get read if they get found. The idea some big name bloggers have about writing for humans first is just nonsense. I agree you should keep your readers firmly in mind when writing posts for your blog. Even if all your other content is tightly focused from an SEO standpoint, what makes you think anybody will be interested in an article they find on your site during a visit if it’s about a subject nobody’s searching for?
For instance, you’re writing on your horseshoes (game) blog and want to write an article about making horseshoes. If you’ll check those with Google Keyword tool you’ll see making horseshoes is not a hot topic. If you decided that your readers might be interested that’s probably a mistake. If nobody’s searching for it why would your readers be interested in it?
The Exceptions
Of course there are exceptions. Especially with topics that are too new to have search data. Arguably, these topics would not be a good bet either. That’s where your knowledge of your niche should prevail.
What’s your take? Do you agree that a relatively new blog has to be more careful about SEO but that the big blogs shouldn’t ignore it? Let me hear from you on this.
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