Writing SEO Content for Two Audiences: Humans and Search Engines

Web content and SEO often go hand-in-hand, but the techniques that help develop great web content and efficient SEO strategies are often very different. To discuss this important topic, I asked Bernie Borges (@berniebay) of Find and Convert to tackle the issue. Thanks Bernie!

Website content needs to be written for two audiences: humans and search engines.

Of course, humans are the target audience that respond to marketer’s call to actions and ultimately convert into a customer. But, we must not ignore the search engines when writing website content.

Just how do you balance writing for humans and search engines? For that matter how do you write for search engines.

To answer both questions let’s start with writing for search engines.

To see how search engines actually “see” your content, just select “view source” in your browser. Viewing the source is a good reminder of how the search engines digest your web pages. They don’t see any of the visual aspects of your website.

The first concept to consider in writing content for search engines is to make the content available to search engines within the first 100 lines of code. If you have a bunch of code occupying real estate on your web page before your content appears, you start with a serious handicap.

Next, each page of content should have a clear and unique theme. Search engines identify the main theme of each page in three word phrases. If the name of your company is Henry Johnson LLC and you sell orthodontic dental supplies, you want the search engines to interpret the theme of your home page as “orthodontic dental supplies” not as “Henry Johnson LLC” (assuming you want to be found in search engines for orthodontic dental supplies).

Each web page should have several ingredients in place including:

• Clear title tags with a distinct theme such as “orthodontic dental supplies.”
• H1 and H2 tags which support the main theme of this page.
• Keyword density of the main theme of the page in the 5% range.
• Hyperlinks from the main theme of the page to other relevant pages.
• A human readable URL containing the main keywords from this page.

These suggestions above are SEO 101 guidelines. Here are some more advance guidelines for your SEO content strategy.

• Broaden your footprint on the web by writing relevant content in other places, e.g., guest blog posts (such as this), guest articles, white papers, press releases, etc.
• Write compelling content that others will link to such as industry-wide news, “best of” lists and generally any thought leadership or thought provoking content.
• Blog about your industry. Find non-marketing staff to write interesting blog content and write often. The more bloggers who write in your company the better.
• Respond to relevant blog posts with intelligent comments. Some blogs permit you to link back to your website.
• Recruit staff to use Twitter. Have them post links to good content. Some of the content can be yours but not all of it. Promote other’s relevant content, not just your own content.
• Link out to other relevant content. Show the search engines you care enough to share other good, relevant content by linking out to it.
• Upload PowerPoint presentations to Slideshare.net. Link it to your website.
• Link from your LinkedIn profile using keywords, not your company name.
• Create videos and optimize them for search engines. Video is great content for search engines to index.
• Create still photos and upload them to social websites with links back to your website.
• Create a new section in your website with the sole purpose of populating it with a lot of content. The purpose of this content is for search engines. This section doesn’t need to be in your menu navigation structure as long as there is a legitimate link from a footer or header and it’s located in the sitemap. Populate this section with unique pages of content of not less than 250 words each.
• Make sure you have a sitemap (for humans) and an XML sitemap (for search engines).

Now, let’s get back to writing for humans.

Write web page content in a flow according to how your website visitors will consume it efficiently. Write web pages with not more than about 500 words. Give visitors a reason to navigate to another page, eventually taking them to an action step.

The opposite of this approach is writing a long page of content with a call to action at the end. This is a common mistake. Often your visitors skim and don’t absorb a page with a lot of content. Break up long pages into multiple pages using the 500 word max guideline.

Link back to your home page from a keyword phrase that is the main theme. This actually serves both humans and search engines. The search engines give you more authority for the main theme when it’s linked to the home page. And, (human) visitors get reinforced that your website is about the main theme, e.g., “orthodontic dental supplies.”

In summary, writing SEO content best practices are an important part of an Internet marketing strategy. Remember that you have two audiences: humans and search engines. Writing for each audience requires a balance and awareness of the guidelines provided here.

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Comments

[Joe Pulizzi]

Thanks Bernie...really appreciate you putting this together. A couple really good reminders in here.

Joe

[Ben Curnett]

So many good tips in this post. I really like the bullet on your keeping keyword density of the main theme in the 5% range. Seems obvious, but I think a lot of website writing goes south on this point. Thanks.

[Bernie Borges]

I like to reinforce basic SEO guidelines every once in a while in the context of discussing more advanced strategies. We should never overlook the fundamentals.

[Steven Woods]

Joe, Bernie,
Good discussion, but I think you're missing one big category. I see a lot of people who are obviously writing for "retweetability" or whatever the appropriate word is. Things like Top 10 lists, etc. These are most likely to have humans link to, Digg, or tweet about (with long term search engine implications), but they don't really drive thought leadership.

This audience of "humans as path to search engines" seems to be the major category on many blogs. It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on that.

[san diego seo services]

Of course, humans are the target audience that respond to marketer’s call to actions and ultimately convert into a customer.And using SEO is a best choice it is a hard work.

by: ricka

[Doug - Velocity, B2B Marketing Agency]

Nice one. Good, solid common sense in an over-hyped area.

[Bernie Borges]

When people write content such as top 10 lists, if it is indeed a good list (and not crap) it can serve both the human audience and the search engines. Good content (such as top 10 lists) can attract external links while serving human visitors well.

[johnbarnald]

Generally search engine 1st visits the sites which are having good stuff and quality and humans are the end users right!!,for that reason the content must be simple and attractive to the users.

[Jean]

Great post, Bernie, thanks!

Question, though: What does 5% really look like from a writing perspective?

Curious to hear your thoughts -- and from others.

[Bernie Borges]

If you write a page of content with 300 words, you wouldn't want to have your main keyword phrase mentioned more than about 15 times. Even at this amount the phrase should be slightly varied, e.g., accounting software, accounting software company, accounting software solutions. Remember, this is a max guideline, not a minimum.

[santa barbara cosmetic dentist]

Very informative blog i agree that the write web page content in a flow according to how your website visitors will consume it efficiently,it is important. Keep it up!

by: florence

[Kishore]

Nice comments and it reinforces the fact that it is absolutely important to do the basics right....

[SEO]

SEO is important because the billion internet users around the world visit websites they are looking for through search engines. Good Article. Some explanation on Keywords wud had been great!

[SEO Services]

These Search engine optimization services are phenomenal , if you are acting in favor of web exposure but if its not helping out , the way to success is SEO .

[Website Design]

Great post ! Website designing and SEO services gives your website higher page rank on search engines like google with new content and websites tools .

[Vancouver web design]

Thanks for this post Bernie. Definitely great tips there. Question: why have pertinent content in the first 100 lines of your web page?

[Make Money on the Internet]

Internet marketing is indeed very different from traditional marketing. In the field of internet marketing the webmaster uses all possible means for promotion just for customer awareness and customer satisfaction .

[jeff paul forum]

I agree domain names are very important , these help bring preferable web traffic through attaining appropriate position on web search engines like Google and yahoo .

[Course]

Yes helpful material. Thank you.

[la habra dentist]

well in terms of converting traffic to sales it is best to target the readers of your site they are the ones that can convert to sales but without proper seo your site wont get into the top of serps. great read nice article.

[SEO Web Design]

good job
keep it coming

[Volker from Germany]

Hello,
ich bin gerade auf einer kleinen Reise quer durchs web. Nun bin ich also auf dieser tollen Homepage gelandet und muss sagen: Der Besuch hat sich gelohnt! Ich werde deine Seite auf jeden Fall wieder mal besuchen! Wenn du Lust hast, kannst du ja auch mal auf meiner Homepage vorbei schauen. Ich würde mich sehr freuen. Nun wünsche ich eine tolle Zeit!