Write for Humans and Not for Search Engines
Why It Is Important To Focus On Your Human Visitors and Not Search Engine Bots?
In the very early days of the Internet, the content industry was quite a bit like the Wild West. At that time, specific rules had not been established and the people who could sling out the most keywords in their content were getting the bulk of the Internet visitor traffic.
Website owners who were trying to create usable resources on the Internet started to get frustrated because the search engines were falling prey to keyword stuffing and were sending traffic to content mills and similar websites instead of legitimate experts.
In response to the outcries, along with many other search engine algorithm updates, Google released the Panda Update update. This update helped to weed out websites that were using keyword stuffing to drive traffic and helped legitimate websites to drive more visitors and thereby increase revenue.
In 2012, Google released a follow-up to Panda called the Penguin update. As effective as Panda was at pushing traffic to the proper websites, one of the main reasons for the Penguin update was to weed out websites were still utilizing keyword placement in lieu of good content.
The Penguin update has placed a strong emphasis on creating useful and relevant content as opposed to trying to attract search bots with lots and lots of keywords. The Penguin update has also started to severely punish websites that cut and paste content from other websites instead of generating their own content. It is imperative to never copy and create duplicate content!
The Penguin update puts the focus squarely on the most important visitor to your website: the human visitor and not on the search engine bots. The Penguin algorithm update is an important reason to start gearing your content more towards human readers rather than bots.
But another good reason for altering your content is because people want to read content that is useful to them and content that is written in good English. Content that is based on keywords tends to be difficult to read and often offers no value to the reader at all. But when the content is written to be informative and helpful, then that will help to keep existing traffic and attract new traffic as well.
Internet search engines are evolving on a day-by-day basis. But it has become obvious that the underlying theme to the new changes is the need for better content and content that is written in a manner that makes sense to human readers.
If you want to get your website to show up higher in the new Google search results pages, then you need to provide content that is valuable and useful to human readers. If you want to retain your current traffic and entice new traffic to visit your site, then you will need your content to be easy to read and useful to all of your human readers.
Have you been a victim of the Panda update or the Penguin Update?
