Reader comment: counting keyword density and worrying about SERP’s

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.