Man or Machine

Creating content for humans vs. for Google

I have been reading a lot about SEO lately and it really struck me that a lot of experts advice about creating content that will appeal to Google and optimising for keywords that will provide a better ranking for your blog.

This idea totally shifts the posture of the writer towards optimising for the search engine, which is against the true purpose of writing, which is actually to communicate an idea to another human being

So I would suggest letting go of the idea of creating content for some invisible machine and keep humans in mind while writing. If someone is really serious on organic search results, then I’m sure trying to guess what Google’s crawler might think is not a good way forward.

Continued efforts to optimise content for Google, messes up with the mind of the writer and drives you in a totally different direction than the original intention of the blog. For example, you might:

• think of a title and description that will look better on search results
• figure out what your target audience might be searching for and try to use that as a title
• locate phrases in the content with the required keywords, that you could link to your website, to increase backlinks etc …

Instead of optimising for search engine, I think it is an extremely good strategy to optimise your content for your target audience, because otherwise even if your content is found on Google, if it is not appealing to the person who is visiting your content then the whole point of the article goes down the drain.

I’m not suggesting that every writer is doing this but Google is definitely in the back on the head for serious content creators.

I’m not against SEO, but I think there is a fine balance between what comes first and it certainly helps to be aware of where to draw the line

Photo by Jens Johnsson on Unsplash