SEO is the trend of the moment in the online business communities. And quite rightly so, if you ask me. Given how the internet has entirely revolutionised the way we use our recreational time and conduct business, any serious company can hardly ignore SEO now. But there’s a whole community of people becoming disillusioned with SEO. Bad SEO, to be quite specific.

Badly carried out SEO has a habit of essentially polluting content on the internet and it’s quite understandable that people will become frustrated with that. After all, nobody gets any joy from a website full of copycat, badly written and over keyword stuffed content that provides the end-user with nothing other than a headache!

But SEO does not have to kill your content. In fact, quite the opposite.  Good SEO goes hand in hand with good content. Here’s how to make sure your SEO and content enhance one another.

1. Write for HUMANS!

As much as we want to ‘impress’ the Google crawlers, concentrating too much on keyword craziness will kill your content. Yes, by all means, use your keyword in your content. But all the crawlers need to know is what your content is about. They’re pretty bright, the Google bots. Say something to them a few times and they get that this is your topic. Say it too many times, however, and they get a little bit peeved with your repetitiveness and your human readers get miffed as well. Resulting in what? A spam penalty, potential bad press and a whole host of readers who will not be returning to your site. Ask yourself, before you post something on your website, ‘Would I want to read this?’ If the answer to that is ‘no,’ don’t post. What isn’t good enough for you is not good enough for your readers either. Your audience is fundamentally people.

2. Keep it unique!

This is something that cannot possibly be emphasised enough. Why would someone come to your site to read something they could go and check out on any of a million others? By the same token, why would a search engine choose your content page to display for a certain keyword when exactly the same topic is featured on a million other sites? In keeping your content unique, you give your readers something they simply cannot get elsewhere and you avoid duplicate content. People are happy. Crawlers are happy.

3. Avoid Pretentious Language!

Perhaps this is just a personal gripe of mine, but I hate over complicated language on blogs and websites. Your audience wants information or entertainment. Nobody wants to have to pull a dictionary out just to get through a paragraph of your latest article. A website should be a source of accessible, high quality information. It needn’t be as linguistically complex as an episode of Dawson’s Creek! It’s great that you have such an expansive vocabulary, but filling your content full of long words doesn’t impress people who simply want information quickly and easily. And in terms of SEO, think about what people actually search for. People tend to search in basic, straightforward language.  If someone is searching for information on good books, they’re probably more likely to search for ‘good books’ than for ‘tremendous manuscripts’. Keep is simple.

4. Keep it concise

Yes, for SEO benefit plenty of content is a good thing. But this isn’t to say that you should make 1000 words out of a two point piece of information. Get to the point concisely and informatively. Nobody wants to read four paragraphs of irrelevant tosh before they find out what the point in your article is. In doing this, you’ll lose a good number of readers before they even know what your point is. If your article is relevant and concise, you will find that your relevant keywords fit naturally into it. This makes for much better content. Keywords that look out-of-place and ruin the flow of an article make for very uncomfortable reading.

5. The human touch

Computers can generate articles in bulk in seconds these days. So why even bother getting a human to write one? Simply because of the human touch. A computer cannot recreate a personable voice. For most websites, a human voice to the article works well and adds an extra layer to the content. While a ‘human touch’ might not directly affect your search engine rankings, it can make the difference between people returning to your website and not bothering! This, again, relates back to bearing in mind that your audience is human!


These are just 5 ways in which you can ensure that SEO doesn’t kill your content. Is there anything worse than nonsensical websites that just repeat a stupid phrase over and over for the benefit of a bot? What’s the point in getting a website to the top of the search engines for your relevant keywords if, once people are on the site, they want to leave immediately? Any SEO campaign with poor quality content is simply a waste of time.

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