Good, Better, Best–Writing Content for Search Engine Optimization

A post on my personal blog regarding the practice I observed of an SEO firm creating blogs for no other apparent purpose than search engine optimization has caused enough controversy (i.e. at least one person has a different person than my own) to motivate me to expound on the matter. And thus I give you my opinion on good, better, and the best content for SEO purposes.
1. Good SEO content. Good content for SEO gets the job done. It contains the right keywords, links to the right places, gets links from the right places, and ultimately gets ranked and helps other sites and/or pages get ranked as well, if that is the objective.

Such appears, to me at least, to be the objective of the blogs I examined in my other post. They seem not to have been intended for human beings to read, but rather for search engines alone. I say “they seem” only because I don’t want to create an argument about whether that is what these specific blogs were created for or not, although I hold it out that they were obviously created for search engines alone. I defy anyone to read this post on “The Surrogacy Process” and tell me the author of this blog posted that because they’re simply interested in that topic and had no other purpose in mind.

Anyway, the point of this post is not whether these specific blogs were created exclusively with SEO in mind, but that there certainly are SEO professionals who create blogs such as these for SEO purposes, and that while the content on these blogs may qualify as “good” in the sense that it gets the job done, there is good content, better content, and the best content for SEO, and setting up what I would call “fake blogs” is merely good, and that perhaps only for the time being.

2. Better SEO content. The principle difference between good content for SEO and better content for SEO is that better content focuses on both the search engines as well as human beings. Focusing on both provides the following benefits:

a. Traffic that doesn’t bounce. People stick around to read content that is interesting. “Who cares, I’m only developing this content for the search engines,” you might say, “I could care less whether human beings spend any time on my site.” Well, read Proof Google is Using Behavioral Data in Rankings and see if you care after that. Pay attention specifically to the part about the bounce rate and time spent on site affecting rankings of sites that use Google Analytics.

b. More incoming links. People are more likely to link to content that is interesting, and I don’t think I need to explain to anyone that incoming links are generally a good thing for SEO.

c. More traffic. This is a result of point a above. Let’s say you’re an SEO firm and you have a blog you run for SEO purposes, and in your blog posts you link keyword text to the websites of your clients. If you write the content for humans, then humans might actually read the content and might actually click on the links. But if humans are bouncing then yes, you still get some SEO benefit, but wouldn’t the actual traffic be worth something as well?

Simply put, if you want to write better content, think about human beings first, and search engines second.

3. The best SEO content. The best content for SEO doesn’t pay attention to search engines at all. No, Matt Cutts didn’t pay me to say this. To understand the claim I just made, you have to understand how search engines make money and what “ideal search” is.

The very business model of search is tied to delivering to searchers what they want. I remember the first time I visited Google, back in 1999. I looked at the blank white screen with nothing but a logo and a search field and thought “How is this better than Yahoo!?” These days I rarely touch Yahoo!. Why? Because I have experienced a higher success rate searching on Google than Yahoo!, and if Google and continue to provide better results than the competition then I will continue to prefer it.

However, Google is far from achieving what I would call “ideal search”. I’d say Google does what I want it to about 40-50% of the time, and perhaps I’m even being generous. Much of the time when I search on Google I never find what I want, even though it’s out there. The problem is that Google just isn’t “intelligent” enough…yet. Despite thousands of employees, armies of PhDs, massive server farms, and billions of dollars, Google can’t begin to compete, in certain ways at least, with the human mind. Case in point, the “fake blogs” I have referred to. I know at a glance that they’re fake. They’re not real blogs with real content, they’re just for SEO. Google doesn’t know this, and so it will index those blogs, rank the content, and those blogs can pass their SEO juice on to the websites they link to. But if Google could hook up to my brain and borrow some of my meager intellect it would screen out such blogs and rank them so low in the SERPs as to be invisible and negligible.

Although Google may never achieve ideal search, what is certain is that they will continue to move in that direction. Today they may not see the difference between fake content and real content, content that is relevant to humans vs. content that humans are not interested in. But next year, or in two years or five, or ten, Google might have become quite good at it, to the point where it becomes much more difficult to write content for SEO purposes. It may get to the point where Google is frustratingly good at discovering content that is created for any SEO purpose whatsoever, and may ding it and rank higher that content that obviously has no SEO intentions. In fact, this does already happen to a certain extent, but only in those cases where the SEO intent is so blatant that I hardly feel it worth mentioning. But this is why the best content doesn’t care about SEO at all.

Does it really matter? The school administrators at Caltech became concerned one day about the lack of social interaction between the sexes in the student body. Such a high level of ignorance regarding activities such as dating could lead to lower rates of reproduction amongst engineers, scientists, and other intellectuals, ultimately lowering the chances of children being raised by such types. Statistics showed that such types were more likely to come from families where the parents were such types, but if such types didn’t reproduce then this could spell disaster for Caltech a few decades down the road. It was thus decided to have a school dance to stimulate the student body and promote dating.

Things didn’t go well at the dance. The male engineers sat on one side of the dance hall and the female engineers sat on the other while the music played to an empty dance floor. The administrators huddled together in consternation and finally came up with an idea. They announced a game. They instructed the male engineers to line up on one side of the dance hall and the female engineers on the other and then face each other. “Ok,” one administrator said, “Each time I clap to the beat of the music, move towards each other one-half the distance between each other until you reach each other.”

Immediately, all the engineers on both sides sat back down. The dance was an abysmal failure, and todays lower enrollment rates at Caltech are the result. Recently one of the students who attended the dance and now lives by himself at a research station in Antarctica was interviewed and asked why all the students had sat down and now participated when asked to move half the distance towards each other. His answer was rather simple. “If we always moved half the distance towards each other, then we’d never reach each other since any distance can always be divided into two parts to infinity. It just didn’t make sense.”

And thus we see that when dealing with engineers, statisticians, and those in our society who tend towards the mathematical side of things that it is always important, when relevant, to use the words “for all intents and purposes.”

Another way to say it is to ask “Is good content good enough?” Maybe it is. Maybe better content is overkill if good content gets the job done and achieves the objective. My opinion is that it’s worth creating better content in order to gain the benefits thereof, but I could be wrong. The benefits might not be worth the time and effort, and after all, those who produce good content can switch to writing better content whenever they want to if it becomes necessary, and perhaps it wouldn’t take too much time to catch up with those who have been producing better content all along.

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Disclaimer: My intent with this post isn’t to be a content snob. SEO is about results, and if two pieces of content get the same results then from an SEO perspective they’re the same. I might think one is written better and I might enjoy reading it more, but what does that have to do with SEO? I simply believe there are different levels of quality when it comes to content, and that higher quality content is and will be defined as such because it does produce better results.