Writing for People, Not Search Engines.

Not long ago I was able to hear a brilliant presentation on Search Engine Optimization given at my local chapter of the American Advertising Federation. There, in a room full of local marketers and media reps, Marshall Simmonds (@mdsimmonds) gave a great overview of the various things he has learned and taught clients in his experience in this field, which is about as long as anyone’s experience in this field can get.

He touched on a few good points with titles, keywords, alt-text descriptions and such. The single most important thing that I think he said, was that the actual text of the article was one of the last things that you should worry about in thinking about the search engines. Why would this be the case? Haven’t we been taught for years that search engines look for keywords and rank you page based on that? Yes, but that isn’t necessarily the most important thing about your content. Your content is made for people, not bots.

People are who read content. They are your audience. It doesn’t matter if you are a news outlet, or a business publishing content about your industry. If your content is written for bots, real people won’t find it as engaging, entertaining and informative and are less likely to share it. In this social age of the Internet it is important to make your content sharable. I tell all my clients and I work with my copywriting team to make sure that we have keywords and phrases where we can, but it must be readable and be written first for the audience, second for the bots. If you don’t, then only bots will be likely to buy your products or services, and last I checked, Google bots don’t make a lot of purchases.

This post originally appeared on the Star Moose Blog.