Balancing Your SEO Strategy

In all walks of life, maintaining balance is the key to success. Running a successful blog or website is no different. 

Too much SEO and you could end up with poor, unimaginative writing.  Too much SEO and you may turn off your human readers.  Moreso, too much SEO and you could end up getting penalized by Google.  Balancing your SEO strategy is the key to success.

Have you ever followed a link and found a website that was nothing but ads and popups with no content?  It’s terrible!

At the same time, you don’t like finding a website that’s just a wall of text either.  And you definitely don’t want to try and read something that’s just complete keyword stuffing with no real sentence structure or sense to their writing.

The key is to find a balanced strategy.

Good blogging is not about keyword stuffing for SEO.  Good blogging is not about simply choosing keywords and filling your page with the same keyword phrases repeated over and over.  Good blogging is about excellent writing that is focused around a central topic.

Many people forget the difference in their efforts to write for the machines.  They forget that the machines aren’t interested in reading your material and interacting with you.  They forget that machines can’t give you quality feedback or purchase your products.  They forget that somewhere in the vast ocean of the internet there are human beings that will ultimately be reading your material.

Yes it’s true that if you focus specifically on SEO, you may rank a bit higher a few months earlier than you might have organically.  However, you gain those couple of months at the expense of having a loyal reader base.  In the grand scheme of things, you are likely trading the longevity and lifespan of your blog to get those couple of months.

Your bounce rate may soar due to the poor content.  You may lose returning readers.  And eventually, your blog may stagnate.  In the long run, you may simply be gaining rank a few months early at the expense of having your blog stagnate quickly.

As an additional risk, you may end up on the losing end of a Google algorithm change that torpedoes your blog.  Just ask the victims of the Panda update. 

Beyond just the risk of getting penalized and turning off your readers, you also risk dulling your own writing ability.  Every time you write a boring post just for SEO, you are losing the opportunity to be creative.  You are suffocating your own creative spark.

When that creative spark extinguishes, so does your blog.

Next time you write an article.  Try an exercise where you set aside your keyword list.  Clear your mind and think creatively!

Think of a story to tell your audience.

Find a way to relate something to your topic that adds a more personal touch.  Find a way to spark the imagination.

Make up a fairy tale with a lesson that relates to your topic.

Tell a life story for your audience.

Find a story in the news and write an opinion piece.

Find a comic strip and write a story around that.

Set aside your outlines, your lists, your keywords, link building strategies, title tags and just write something for fun.

Recapture that imaginative spark and put some balance back into your blog!

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About Richard  (243 Posts)

Richard is a full time professional, husband, father and blogger juggling all the responsibilities of life and running a blog. Richard enjoys writing about life and online money matters.