Writing for Humans and Search Engines

The other day I read a blog post that made me stop and think 'now that is quality content.' What made it thought-provoking is that the author, Jane Copeland, said that she hears the same, “dubiously meaningless things” about SEO constantly repeated by conference speakers. She was referring to the oft-doled-out advice, “Write good content”, which is lapped up by the audience without challenge and usually with a knowing nod.

Jane’s point was that newbies are not stupid – they do not set out to write rubbish. Experts should be more specific when giving this advice. So, what is good content?

Writing for Humans

Google recommends writing for humans, not search engines. This is good advice and it means writing the most compelling English to achieve the desired outcome (usually to sell or to inform). However, without further detail, this becomes “dubiously meaningless” advice. If there were no search engines, websites would resemble brochures that were largely pictorial or full of marketing puffery.

There’s the rub. You have to write for humans and search engines, but in equal measures. Potential buyers use search engines at some or all stages of the buying process – sometimes this can be within a single browsing session.

The Buying Process

You don’t have any control over search engine algorithms but you do have control over your website. You have to plan the site content, markup, navigation and architecture. For now, let’s look at the content.

The typical buying process goes like this:

Purchase Stage	Conscious Thought Process	Subconscious Process
Problem recognition	The consumer perceives a need and becomes motivated to solve a problem.	Motivation
Information gathering	The consumer searches for information required to make a purchase decision.	Perception
Alternative evaluation	The consumer compares various brands and products.	Attitude formation
Purchase decision	The consumer decides which item to purchase.	Integration
Post-purchase evaluation	The consumer evaluates their purchase decision.	Learning

By recognising human purchase behaviour, you should write parts of the website using the words that people use during those stages when they use a search engine. Keep marketing puffery to a minimum, because people don’t use such language in their search queries.

Stay up-to-date with the jargon and features of your industry and be attuned to the needs of users. For example, if your website sells digital cameras and the new models have image stabilisers, you would use text such as the example below:

Purchase Stage	Sample website content
Problem recognition	“This long-zoom camera is perfect for people whose photos are always blurred, as it has an image stabiliser.” (for a reader with unsteady hands who takes blurred photos)
Information gathering	“12 Megapixel KX-1234 SLR camera” (with lengthy, descriptive text and feature lists including phrases such as “image stabiliser” and references to shaky hands and blurred images)
Alternative evaluation	(Offer reviews of many cameras and include feature comparison tables with a column for “Image Stabiliser”.)
Purchase decision	(Display the price, user reviews, ratings)
Post-purchase evaluation

If you create relevant, convincing content for some of these stages, you will attract and retain readership with the help of search engines. Although every stage is important, you should pay particular attention to the purchase decision stage so that the reader will notice a “Buy Now” button or an affiliate link and place an order. After all, you need the website to earn its keep.

Writing for Search Engines

Ten years ago the early SEOs used to write repetitive text that was terrible to read but worked well for ranking. Popular engines such as AltaVista had simple algorithms that counted the incidence of phrases on a page and then gave prominence to the page containing the most occurrences.

Here is a recent example of a page that is trying to rank for the term “Best SEO firm” (bolding ours):

If at all you have to hire the services of a professional, then make sure that you hire services of the best SEO firm operating in your city. You will be spending money for this, and you must get the best worth for your money. There will be many SEO firms in operation and you will not find much difficulty in finding out the best SEO firm to do the work for you. (snip) To find the best SEO firm, you will have to check out various aspects of the firm. (snip) Best SEO firm must make sure that the site is designed according to major search engine norms. Attaining a high rank in all major search engines is the priority of all online business sites, and the best SEO firm must help you in doing exactly this. Make sure to periodically check out the quality and quantity of work done on your online business site. This will keep you updated on the work that is being done on your online business site. You just have to make sure that you hire the services of the best SEO firm.

Such content was obnoxious even in the early years, so it was a common trick to display the text in a colour that was the same as the background. Today such mind-numbing, repetitive, ungrammatical content will not work for Google and users alike. Google uses a technique known as Latent Semantic Analysis – LSA (SEOs also refer to it as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI).

In simple terms, LSI enables the search engine to classify the relevancy of a page with human-like skills. For example, a page about search engines will not show in a search for car or marine engines. Similarly, Google “knows” that a search for “blinds” is not about blind people and a search for “blind resources” is not about window coverings.

Note that each page is a search engine magnet. Think of your website as individual pages – if you offer five services, don’t write five paragraphs on one page! Write five pages, each optimised for that service.

If you write in a natural manner for your audience, you won’t need to worry about LSI. Do not count phrase occurrences or be distracted by keyword-density percentages. But be sure to include your valuable phrases and use them only when appropriate to the context.

I once optimised an office furniture retailer’s online catalogue by inserting the word “chair” after the model names, because it was completely absent from thousands of pages! The catalogue had pictures of chairs with fanciful model names, dimensions, weight, colours, etc., but never the word “chair”.

Finding Fresh Content

Business sites tend to remain static. Just as a printed brochure is designed during a marketing project and then forgotten until there is a need to change it, a website runs the same risk. Fresh content causes search engine spiders to come back frequently and human visitors will appreciate it too. This isn’t easy for a small business.

Make it a part of someone’s job description to update the site’s content regularly. This could be a page about a new product, a sales promotion, a press release, a speech by a corporate executive, and so on.

An information site should hire great writers, so that their articles will encourage readers to bookmark the site and keep coming back. A forum will attract user-generated content (UGC), but forums need good moderators to keep spam out and keep discussions on-topic.

Originality

Original content means that there is no copy of that content online. It is not possible for 100 travel sites to say “Canberra is the capital of Australia” in 100 different ways, but when you copy entire paragraphs from another site, it is trivial for the search engines to notice it. If you are working on a site that was authored by someone else, assume the presence of a copy somewhere, until proven otherwise.

Even if your site is the original, an online copy made by someone else with or without permission needs to be found and something needs to be done about it. Multi-national companies face a strong temptation to copy large tracts of the parent company’s website. If you work on such a project, get approval to build largely unique versions for each country.

Copyscape.com is a good place for finding duplicate sites. Always make it a point to check your URL there and see if it can find a copy. If it cannot, find a unique sentence in your material and search for it as a phrase in Google. Copyscape finds a copy of APCmag.com in Poland, below.  
Although partial paraphrasing appears to be fair game, rewriting sentence-for-sentence is plagiarism and it can be picked up easily, if not by the original author, by search engine algorithms. Performing research does not mean you should plagiarise. If you commission a third party to write for you, be sure that the contract has a clause that insists on original material to be supplied.

Writing to Make Money

Not everyone builds websites to advertise their own business or to promote some cause. Many people build websites to make money. So do conventional online businesses, but I am referring to websites that either promote someone else’s products or they are virtual cash machines.

Affiliate marketing is a subject in its own right, so I will skim its surface here and focus on the written content. An affiliate is a commission agent of a merchant. For example, I can feature a catalogue of digital cameras on my own website, but the “Buy Now” link takes the customer to the merchant’s site. If the transaction is completed, I will receive a commission.

Remembering our earlier caution about duplicate content, an affiliate site that simply reproduces the merchant’s catalogue will not rank high in the organic search results. I made this mistake three years ago when I was making more than $1000 a day in commissions and Google suddenly introduced its filters for sites with duplicate content. Now I am lucky if I make $50 in a month.

You need to create unique content, such as a review you have written yourself. Unless you are a professional journalist, you won’t have access to the latest products before their general release, so the next best thing is to review your own purchases or to make friends with a retailer who might lend you a few items to review. By allowing readers to add their opinions or forum posts, you get UGC, all of which makes your site free of duplicate content.

Another way to make money is to build a hobby site featuring a single topic, say, Fiji. Google AdSense consists of JavaScript code you can place on your web pages and you will see text, image or video ads about the same topic. This is known as contextual advertising. If a visitor clicks an ad, you get a few cents commission and sometimes it can be a few dollars per click.

Your website about Fiji would attract Google ads related to Fiji – most probably air travel, cruises or accommodation. Your keyword research might tell you that more people search for Fiji cruises than they do for scuba diving in Fiji. So you write about the former topic. Your next dilemma is whether to write so well that your visitors will devour every word and not click any ads – or write so badly that they might click an ad to escape the site! There is no easy answer, but I suspect that an informative site with a lot of fresh content will attract more visitors (and a few ad clickers) than one with boring, static content.



A book review is a search engine magnet and an opportunity to place affiliate links and contextual ads.