Writing For Readers And Writing For Search Bots – It is a balancing act

When you start doing search engine optimization (SEO) it’s very easy to forget about your audience and to only focus on search engines. But, that would be a huge mistake. We do SEO so that our audience can find us. But it should be done along with providing excellent, valuable, and usable content that your audience relates to.

Skip the Keyword Stuffing – it’s so early-2000s

Let’s say you want to write about men’s wallets because you have a good deal on them. So, you decide to write an article about the versatility of men’s wallets. This will allow you to demonstrate the wallets you want to share, and you want your audience to buy. Your keyword is “men’s wallets” so you put that in the title, headings, and within the first 100 words of the body content.

It’s important to use the term men’s wallets but you don’t want to use that term more than 2 percent of the total content.

Calculate Keyword Density

It’s super easy to calculate the keyword density.

You count the number of times the keyword has been used and count the number of words in the content. Then you divide the number of times you used the keyword by the number of words in the content you’re analyzing. Multiply that by 100 to get the percentage.

Let’s do some math: if you use the keyword 10 times in a 600-word article you have a keyword density of 10 divided by 600 = .01666 x 100 = 1.67 keyword density. You want to keep your keyword density below 2 percent, so this is a good number.

Check Your Headlines

You want to use your keywords in your headlines. Ultimately, you want the keyword to appear in the first three words. But, it needs to sound right too. Men’s Wallets: Versatile, Carefree & Stylish. This is a great title. It lets you know that the article is going to show that men’s wallets are of those three qualities. The keyword “mens wallets” is going to be part of the URL yoursite.com/menswallets and not the entire title.

Use Keyword Synonyms

One tactic to stay under the two percent keyword density is to use other similar words outside of your title tags, headers, and subheadings. Using synonyms is a great choice because you can talk about the topic, without overusing the keywords making the content look strange. You might want to use words like billfold, pocketbook, or another word that describes the same thing that the word wallet does.

Know Your Audience

I know we keep saying this, but your content is for your audience, not for search engines. You want to use the available tools to get more eyes on your content. But you don’t want to create content only for search engines. Every piece of content you create should be interesting, useful, and effective for your audience.

Therefore, always write for your audience first.

Your audience is the most important part of your business. They are who your products, services, and content is for, so the content needs to be created for them too. When you put your audience first, the rest will be almost natural.