Who Do You Blog For? Write For Both Machines and Readers.
A dilemma for bloggers: Do you write for Google, and use lots of keywords to attract the attention of both Google and those who are browsing search results, or do you write for your regular readers, using conversational or intriguing titles, like “Dancing with the bears while camping“.
Many people write for the machines: ie. Google, Yahoo and others, phrasing their titles to have maximum keywords to better their chances of being picked up by search engines. These are the delightful people who use the word “cellphone” 7 times in each paragraph, or who use titles like “Camping in Yellowstone Park, feeding bears and watching Old Faithful while drinking Diet Coke in my Timberland Tent” for a post about their weekend camping trip.
I have always maintained that I write this blog for the readers. You are the reason I am here, and were you not reading this, I would have no reason to continue. That being said, I love my Google traffic, and especially my deep long tail keywords, which right now on this rather nascent blog account for half of all my search traffic.
Whenever possible, it is best to write for both, as this post on Brian’s site talks about. But sometimes, you know have the perfect title that your readers will love, but it is not very keyword rich.
Enter the All in One SEO pack. This is the latest addition to my site and has earned a place on my award winning WordPress plug-ins page. This little gem will optimize your titles, pull meta tags and descriptions for you and who knows what else. But, the thing I love is it lets you pick the title for your post.
The plugin in action:
In this post you are reading, the title up at the top of the page is Who Do You Blog For? Write For Both Machines and Readers. I feel this is a good, conversation oriented title for this post. In other words, I think someone reading through the site would find it of interest. BUT, if you look at the titlebar of your browser, you see that the real title of this entry is WordPress Plugin Lets You Write for Both Readers and Search Engines. Now, I think that is a boring title, but it is a bit more descriptive of the information is contained in this post. It is a good Social Media title, it is a good Google title.
Write for the audience you want
Now with this little plugin, I can write for both my Audience and Google and The Social Sites. A true win-win for everyone!
This is one of my pet peeves when I read an article and it is stuffed with keywords and doesn’t sound natural
@ Natron- I agree completely.
I recommend this plugin, it’s really useful.
To me readers are definitely what I write for, since thats the main point of blogging (even if you write for search engines you are hoping to get readers through the search engine). I also use the all in one seo pack and it is a great way to help with the search engines, while not changing a thing for the readers.
Hmm, now that is a neat idea. Different title tag than headline tag. Thanks for sharing.
great idea…thanks.
GL HOFFMAN
Minneapolis
http://blogs.jobdig.com/wwds
what would dad say
I’ve been struggling with writing all of my posts, and couldn’t quite put my finger on why–but this is it. It’s the desire to write something that’s going to please the reader and quench the thirst of the GoogleBot!