When You Are Writing A Post…Do You Forget Who You Are Writing For?
You’ve heard all the SEO tips…
“Place keywords in your post titles.”
“Use h1 and h2 tags here, there, and everywhere.”
“Make sure that blah, blah, blah, SEO trick, blah, blah etc…”
Now, I am not discounting the fact that SEO is important to ranking your posts, and pages, and your blog altogether, but I have seen numerous bloggers forgetting one important detail when they are writing.
The human being on the other end of the post!
If you are writing an article, and conveying valuable information, keep in mind that it is humans that have emotions and the ability to have their lives affected by what you write. Humans are the ones who make comments, interact, purchase advertising and affiliate products through your blogging.
Search engines don’t.
Also keep in mind that Search Engines are in business to make a profit (you mean they make money off of all of this Page Rank stuff?). And quite frankly, search engine traffic only accounts for a small amount of the total traffic on the web.
Humans will have their own individual criteria when judging the value and “Diggability” of your posts. They also will not return to your blog if they feel you write junk…or if they feel that you fail to understand the audience you are writing for.
Search engines will, if your “junk” post has great keywords, keep sending traffic to that badly received post, possibly spreading a wildfire of bad attention to your blog.
Search engines use an algorithm that only judges your post for their search results.
Humans use their judgment and emotion to rate your posts and comment on them. If you write a great quality post, you can get more productive traffic from the viral effect than you could from the search engines.
In closing, when you sit down to write your next post, focus more on the fact that it isn’t Mr. Google that cares what you write or will take action on what you said…it’s Mr./Mrs. Jones.
Kevin | April 13th, 2008 at 9:06 am #
You bring up some interesting points Joseph. SEO is important however you need to remember that you are writing for the reader and not the search engine (though you caannot disregard the traffic you get from ‘bad posts’ through keywords).
I have to completely disagree with this statement though :
The biggest source of traffic for 99% of websites on the net is search engine traffic. Infact, for some blogs and websites it will account for more than 80%.
SEO and keywords is not something bloggers should get too worried about. It can get you more traffic but if your righting high quality posts of a decent length it will contain all the relevant keywords to your topic anyways
Joseph Ratliff (Post Author) | April 13th, 2008 at 10:17 am #
Hi Kevin!
Hmmm, SEO traffic only accounts for 8% of my traffic, the other 92% is a combination of social marketing, viral marketing, and direct type in traffic.
And, I highly doubt that I am in the 1% category of websites.
So, I disagree with the “99%” that you quote.
I will do some research, and find very specific numbers, and add them to the comment here.
Kevin | April 13th, 2008 at 10:28 am #
8% is very very low however it’s probably still your number one source of traffic (ie. stumbleupon gives you 3%, digg 2% etc).
Although your blog has been online for about 2 years, you have less than 100 subscribers so your majority of traffic is going to come from social marketing, commenting etc. As your site grows you will get more people linking to you therefore search engine rankings should increase.
Im in a similar position with my own blog system0, I have less than 100 subscribers and most traffic is coming from either this blog or from commentating on others. Until you increase the number of incoming links to your blog you will not get as much search engine traffic as you should.
Joseph Ratliff (Post Author) | April 13th, 2008 at 11:05 am #
My blog does have a percentage of social traffic (Digg, Stumbleupon, etc..), you are very correct.
I had not decided to focus on social marketing until recently. The majority of my traffic is in the “direct”, or referral category, which comes from a variety of sources, including blog commenting and links to my site.
But I still have to debate something…
Here is quote from Jack Humphrey’s Social Power Linking 2005 version, page 7:
“The internet is a BIG place and more traffic is shared between regular websites in one day than is passed through all the search engines in a year.”
So…I learned that about three years ago…before I even created a blog (I was a late bird to the blogging train)…and have always focused in that direction myself.
Just thought I would provide where my mindset about search traffic vs. total internet traffic was adopted from.
Kevin | April 13th, 2008 at 11:13 am #
I don’t know where he got that stat from but I have no reason to believe it isn’t true. However, I believe that the % of traffic flowing between websites and the % of traffic a website receives from search engines are two different things so it isn’t fair to compare them.
Joseph Ratliff (Post Author) | April 13th, 2008 at 11:21 am #
Kevin,
The word “traffic” is in both “traffic between websites” and “% of traffic received from search engines” isn’t it?
My point with my debated quote from your first comment, was that the search engines are not the only source of traffic on the web…and when analyzed in the “big picture”, really only represent a portion of the total possible traffic pool available.
Human beings sharing links between sites, and virally with each other offline, or from Digg/Stumbleupon/del.icio.us etc… represent most of the total traffic (total being my operative word).
Kevin | April 13th, 2008 at 11:42 am #
Well your original comment was ‘And quite frankly, search engine traffic only accounts for a small amount of the total traffic on the web.’
Im not sure if Jack Humphrey’s statement that traffic between websites is larger is true or not (I see no reason to believe that it isn’t) however there is not way that search engine traffic represents a small amount of total traffic on the web.
When you break it down there are 3 ways someone can find your site
1. Via a search engine like Google
2. From a link on another website
3. Someone typing in your domain name directly
Popular sites and brands will get a lot of traffic from method 3 however this will be less for other sites. Even if you get a lot of traffic from referrers the ‘average site’ will still get most of it’s traffic from google etc (ie. google traffic is likely to be higher than traffic from any particular site).
I think you are downplaying the effects of traffic from search engines becaue your blog only gets 8% of it’s traffic from it. Not only is the traffic from search engines free, it can sometimes be the difference between a sites success and failure.
For example, I failed to optimise my old poker discussion forums and saw smaller sites with less content getting more traffic and consequently, they grew at a faster rate than my site.
Joseph Ratliff (Post Author) | April 13th, 2008 at 12:08 pm #
Kevin,
Nope, I actually wasn’t thinking of my site at all when writing this post. I just used that as a bad example when you brought it up in your comment.
I am also not downplaying SEO traffic, it is important, just not the “end all” of traffic…and I have seen first hand many bloggers that have failed because they were more concerned with the latest of Google’s algorithm than what they were writing to their audience, and lost the voice of their blog altogether.
You should optimize your site for Search Engines, I agree.
You should not write for them. The Search Engines don’t read, judge, link, virally spread links, tell their best friends (a great source of traffic), and have their lives affected by your material.
The Search Engines don’t care to support your blog with donations to Paypal, or by Digging your posts, PlugIMing them etc…
So…I guess if I could summarize my whole point:
“SEO your blog, gain what free traffic you can from that, but focus on writing to your human audience, and don’t ever let SEO cloud that vision.”
Joseph Ratliff (Post Author) | April 13th, 2008 at 12:13 pm #
Correction, I used my site when you brought up sites in general, not my site specifically.
Kevin | April 13th, 2008 at 12:15 pm #
I think we are arguing the same point now
Yes I agree, you need to write for the reader and not the search engines. SE traffic should never be underestimated though
Joseph Ratliff (Post Author) | April 13th, 2008 at 12:19 pm #
Kevin,
I guess my main point, writing for humans vs. writing for SE’s, got lost in my division of traffic.
I am going to find out what percentage of total traffic each of the major three search engines owns…and add them up…and comment on the source and numbers here.
Joseph Ratliff (Post Author) | April 13th, 2008 at 12:38 pm #
I have another interesting addition to this “SEO traffic vs. Total Traffic” debate that I forgot about.
One actually influences the other.
Since incoming quality links add to SEO value on a site, then SEO traffic gets bonus…and the reverse could also be true…as better PageRank is obtained with quality links.
But if you think about “Did the chicken or the egg come first?” Hmmm…
Did the links or SEO come first?
Joseph Ratliff (Post Author) | April 13th, 2008 at 1:31 pm #
Well…after some preliminary research, I have not found the total traffic per day, week, year, anything. All I can get is total users…but no way to tell how much traffic 1.319 Billion users worldwide (from http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm) generate.
If we can find that, then we can take the number of unique visitors from Google, MSN, and Yahoo, along with others combined…and compare.
superjason | April 13th, 2008 at 4:37 pm #
Agreed. It’s certainly a balancing act. If you spend all of your time optimizing, you won’t have time to write anything decent.
Joseph Ratliff (Post Author) | April 13th, 2008 at 5:01 pm #
Absolutely correct superjason!
avenue girl | April 14th, 2008 at 8:37 am #
Nice blog! And thanks for all the great tips
James | April 15th, 2008 at 3:02 am #
Excellent, it provides tips for staying on the post subjects,
Some time way of posting may go down words, and users not willing to read the post no longer.
Thanks for sharing.
Joseph Ratliff (Post Author) | April 16th, 2008 at 9:01 pm #
I read an offline article once that had this sentence in it:
“Internet Marketing is an easy business to start, internet marketing is. If you work an internet marketing business, you are sure to reap the rewards that internet marketing can provide.”
And this author wasn’t even trying to optimize for the SE’s.
Go figure.