What’s the most important thing you can do with your blog:
- Have great search results or have great readers?
- Have quality posts or go for quantity only?
- Worry about the spiders or worry about your readers?
Depending on who you speak with in the blogging community, you’re likely to get varied results. Some will tell you a blog is solely for results.
You should post as many posts as you can, putting all your focus on keywords that will ultimately get you lots of results within the search engines. Focus on attraction for Google’s spiders, writing out each post in the most search engine friendly way possible.
Some will tell you a blog is for your readers. You can get anyone over to your blog the first time, but its how many stick with your blog that matters most. Because if a reader doesn’t like what they read, and sees its written solely for search engine results, there will be little to hold them there or drive them back again and again.
“Don’t worry about the quality; get as many posts up as you can, as fast as you can with as much emphasis on keywords as possible. Grammar doesn’t matter,” says a SEO blogging expert.
“Don’t worry about search; write the best quality content you can focusing in on what you’re readers ultimately want to visit you for again and again,” says a readers oriented blogging expert.
But which is correct? Which is the right path for you? I myself believe in the writing for readers approach. Here’s why. Quality is winning out over quantity. Readers are winning out over spiders.
Dig Deeper: The Myth About Outsourcing Blog Writing
Let’s look at Google.
Since Google’s inception, they have had one goal in mind; to build a great user experience. As technology changes, they continue to modify their algorithms to give the user more of what they want … great results. The end user doesn’t want to wade through spammy results to find what they were looking for. They want great sites that offer them valid information they can use. In other words, they want quality.
So when push comes to shove, if a site pushes as much content – quantity – as it can into the search results without regard to how well its written – quality – Google will tag them and start shutting them out of potential search results.
What about potential readers? If this post, for example, was focused in on the keyword “blog writing” and I wrote about blog writing results and blog writing processes and told you how blog writing could change the way you do business and blog writing …
You get the point. Readers don’t want to read content that purely focuses on keywording because, well, its boring. And its difficult to read. Why spend your time reading something that isn’t fun to read and doesn’t help you along the way?
Dig Deeper: How To Blog About Your Customers
You can write for spiders all day long. And getting into the search results is important as you are trying to grow your business. But if Google devalues your website because you don’t match their criteria for “quality content”, your results will quickly disappear anyway.
What worked in the past will not necessarily work in the future. Google’s algorithms change all the time. And one thing is for sure; quality is king in Google’s eye. If you want results, focus on quality.
Write for your readers. Readers = users. And if they’re happy, ultimately you will get the results you are looking for.