Write for People First, Then Search Engines

4 tips to write for humans and rank for SEO

When you are writing content, it’s important to remember that your primary audience is humans. You should be optimizing for your human readers, you don’t want to make it difficult for them to understand your content.

Humans can’t read every word with everything in bold, or section headers all uppercase. Every word doesn’t need to be the exact same length. And don’t think that just because your content is long that you have written a good piece of content.

It’s great to have lots of people visit your site, but a better goal is to help them. Ever read a blog post and wish you could talk back to the writer? I hope so! These days lots of people try to rank high on search engines, but the most important thing is to be clear, concise, and helpful.

It’s no longer enough to optimize for search engines. It’s also necessary to write web content that appeals directly to humans, using clear structure and simple language.

The web audience has changed. Nowadays, you’re not just optimizing for search. You’re optimizing to persuade people to read your content. And you need clear structure and simple language to do that well.

Search engines used to be the primary way that new pages were found. If you built a page that was optimized for search engines, chances are it carried good rankings with the major search engines. These days, search engine optimization is a requirement but not sufficient in and of itself. A must-have is writing content that humans will read first, then search engines.

Here are some thoughts about how writers can start writing better web content by understanding the way search engines work now-a-days.

You need to have a clear idea about what your ideal reader looks like and what they want.

Who is your ideal reader? What does your reader want and need? What’s in it for them to read what you’re going to give them.

The first step to writing something people want to read is to figure out who those people are. Whether you’re writing fiction, non-fiction, poetry or a cookbook, you need to know what sort of person you’re writing for.

A lot of writers don’t know who their audience is. I can tell straight away when someone is writing for the right readers, and when they’re writing to impress themselves and to be the boss of their writing.

And one more tip — don’t mention just any business owner or any company. For example, if you write an article about how to attract clients with email marketing, do not just mention all the people and companies in general. Come up with a few examples of real businesses that are into email marketing and get results. Show them how a business succeeds with the help of this method outdoing other businesses without this method.

If you’re writing about a specific topic, first identify who will be reading your essays. After identifying and focusing on this target audience, try to find out everything there is to know about them (if you don’t already know).

Include your keyword WITHOUT making it look like you are trying too hard.

There are two ways to make your headlines more SEO-friendly. The first way is to play with the length of your headline until you find a good balance — kind of like the Goldilocks principle.

Too short, and Google doesn’t know what you’re talking about and ranks you low; too long, and you start to lose eyeballs. But just right, and Google will start sending traffic your way and social shares will flow in.

However, what’s more important is your meta description. Rather than just being a piece of copy designed to act as a teaser, this little snippet of text is actually the most significant place you can use your chosen keyword or phrase without it appearing spammy.

That is, use the same keyword in your meta description as you do in your title tag. But here’s where ‘keyword stuffing’ can come into play — a term used when search engines realized that people were on the lookout for maximizing the number of times their chosen keyword appeared. So how many times should Google show this keyword up? Too much and it can look spammy, too little and the reader may not see it.

Begin with an arresting opening.

One of the most important things you do as a writer is write your introduction. Anyone can write a perfectly adequate essay, paper, or story if they have an engaging beginning. But marketable writing requires original thinking, and that almost always begins with an arresting opening.

We all want our writing to be read. You could use humour or great stories or an elegant turn of phrase. Or you could make it inconceivable that your reader would not finish reading some particular section. I usually start with a spectacular claim, like ‘Mark Zuckerberg did not invent Facebook.’

One way you can do that is by quoting a certain person at the beginning. A quote has the power to seize and hold your readers’ attention, and to make them think, ‘I’ve got to read this. There’s something here I need to know.’ People also want to see the source of a quote. It feels like you’re letting them in on something private, as if it’s been told in confidence for their ears alone.

Here are several ways to make your introduction stand out:

1. Start by sharing a personal experience that tells the reader why they should continue reading.
2. It’s no secret that a surprising or shocking statement is more likely to get the reader’s attention.
3. If you can make the audience laugh or be shocked, they will be more interested in what you have to say.
4. If you’re not sure how to start your next blog post, you might try finding a statistic that is interesting.

Read the article, remove things that are not usable for you, and only keep the parts of the post that will be useful.

No one likes clutter. So why clutter your blog post titles or descriptions with information that does not pertain to your reader? The first thing you should get rid off in all of your post media is the introduction blurb that only contains information for search engines.

According to Rand, 75% of the user’s attention should be targeted at the content or title of your post. He continues to argue that most people will read the search query for a given title so most of the description should be targeted toward what users want to read.

So don’t put SEO keywords in your post media. They are also annoying to read. Put people first-and give them the information they are looking for!

Blog post headlines and descriptions should speak to your ideal audience, not the overall audience or search engines.

Recap:

1. You need to have a clear idea about what your ideal reader looks like and what they want.
2. Include your keyword WITHOUT making it look like you are trying too hard.
3. Begin with an arresting opening.
4. Read the article, remove things that are not usable for you, and only keep the parts of the post that will be useful.

Thanks for reading :)