After my WordPress SEO post earlier this week, loyal reader Brian Prows sent in some great points via email and I wanted to share them with you guys:
I’ve been using Scribe now for a few weeks and it has helped somewhat with SEO.
You’re going to find it challenging, however, writing posts with titles like “101 ways to Capture your Reader’s Interest.” Scribe wants prime keywords at the beginning of the title. So I’ve been cheating a bit by doing it that way in Thesis’ Title section for SEO and making the actual title different.
It’s curious that Brian Clark of Copyblogger pushes writing interesting titles first, then writing your content. The titles may not score high with Scribe.
I still use Traffic Travis from Affilorama and Google’s keyword tool to find highly-searched keyword phrases, which I sprinkle throughout a post while trying to SEO each post for one keyword phrase.
Sometimes, it’s quite challenging. Yesterday, I was cleaning up an older post trying to SEO for “health information.” The first Scribe analysis concluded I inserted “health information” too many times. After I removed and/or changed a lot of “health information” phrases (“medical information, “health tools,” etc. , Scribe reported I word-stuffed “health” as a keyword.
Scribe is helpful to some extent, but writing interesting, compelling posts, as you’ve always pointed out, will increase readership over counting keyword density and worrying about SERP’s.
All definitely true. This is why it is important for me to stress that the blog SEO post is just an experiment that I will focus a bit on in the following weeks. Hopefully I will collect some useful data and tips that I can then share with you, so everyone learns something.
Forget SEO, focus on readers
But Brian Prows is completely correct that it is not SEO that should be the primary focus. My post “forget SEO, focus on readers” is still very valid and is the recommended way of building a readership.
If you focus completely on SEO, you will not be able to make the connection with your visitors. Writing great content, scannable articles with magnetic headlines is what will create the connection and turn your visitors into loyal readers.
And as Brian mentions, some of the Scribe SEO rules go against the valuable content and relationship building. The plugin is very mechanic and mathematically built and you basically have to follow its formula to score 100% SEO optimized blog post. And we all know that authenticity grows readers and not generically optimized work.
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My strategy in terms of SEO and reader optimization is to write the post as I would for readers, then use SEO tools to see if there is a better way to optimize it for maximum exposure. That way regular readers are happy, and search engines are guiding new readers to the article which makes me happy.
This is exactly what I do as well: readers first, SEO second.
But in the end, if it’s really well written for readers, search engines are going to pick up on it and rank it well.
Might just take longer.
Also, most themes are already seo friendly so you really dont need that much adjustment other than the title tag. Writing for your readers is your best bet, but still have a good mix of seo in there as well. Your readers will always know where your blog’s at, but what if the search engines are gone tomorrow?
I really not see it either or – though I do sometimes use all-in-one or thesis or to use an alternative title. But its really not hard – most readers won’t click thru unless they know what the post is about – if you use your keywords in the title – Google will notice as well.
You can use alternative titles to have a good SEO title and a magnetic headline
You can write great content which mentions a keyword in the title, the first paragraph and at the end
You can write content that is scannable – Google doesn’t care how many lists or paragraph tags you use.
I don’t see the conflict – its just people think that writing for SEO is really different from writing for people – its not
The point is more about having to add the keyword phrase several times in the content itself and also add several links and other small bits and pieces. All that makes you too focused on SEO and not too much on your readers. For new bloggers, it might be hard to find the balance here, so best to stay away from SEO stuff until you are confident with writing valuable posts and until you have built a solid readership.
I agree with you Lis,
So many people think there is a major difference between writing for readers and writing for SEO, and actually writing for readers is good for SEO!
After spending some time with Scribe, I realized that I don’t have to follow all it’s instructions, and it would be better idea to use it like a tool that help you on getting fast information about your article, and help on deciding what is the best for it before publishing it online!
Also some times calculations we make doesn’t work for some reason! So, I really don’t mind to publish a post even if it’s not 100% SEO optimized!
Thanks for the info
I’ve been wondering if Scribe scans your actual post title or SEO title – anyone know?
The SEO title from “SEO details and additional style” custom fields in Thesis.
Thanks for sharing your technique. Before start to write content for blog post, I generally research the keywords from word tracker then I analyze that keyword. After I finish analyzing these keywords then I go through visitors, I mean who is going to read my blog. According to that I write content.
My strategy towards SEO is to write everything about a niche which a viewer look for , nice post.
nice post, also like your Thesis skin. find place to design my PPC LP like this.