Why Writing for SEO Sucks, I Write for People
I really love writing stuff people like. What I like even more is speaking to people about stuff they like or should be liking. Crazy fast internet and social media has made the virtual world the real world for many people. Years ago search engines, (not the library) became the go to place for instant updated information. It only made sense to follow the lead and write stuff to get people's attention on search engines. tweaking words, meta descriptions and titles became the exausting thing to do just to achieve the crown as king of your niche in search. Unfortunately scummy spammers always find ways to ruin good things by flooding many Google searches with garbage information so they can reak in big Adsense bucks.
Now that's not fair, this gets everyone pissed except for spammers of course. Google try their best to fight back with Penguin and Panda anti-spam updates but their efforts never seem to work. A few spammers get a sweet whoop-ass, but many innocent sites accidentally get hurt putting them out of business.
LINKS AS VOTES SUCK!!!
Google and Bing use the number of links poiting to your site as votes. Those votes say, hey!! these sites link to me so they think I'm worth like apple pie. Spammers just had a field day with this tactic. They simply bought links, join link and blog networks, use proxies to get around many site securities to get more links, join article directories to share dirt poor duplicate articles with backlinks, and as a result trick Google into putting them first in your search results. This is why links as votes suck, and this is what Google still rely on to rank pages. Links are so manipulated and I think Google would be better using social media shares, likes, retweets, and plus ones from real people as the new votes. From what I've seen they're not listening so far.
As a result search engines are forever changing the rules to the point where it's hard to keep up. Months and even years are wasted building good sites doing all the seo madness. Google makes liars out of the good guys in seo and this post on seomoz says it well. Writing original well optimized content for links is just not good enough anymore. To make it worst since small sites haven't built a recognized name yet, Google and Bing started gives big brands and businesses preferred treatment and ranking in the search results. This seriously pissed me off after doing SEO for six years and following all the rules to get decent ranking.
STOP THE SEO MADNESS!!!
The one thing I learned is to never forget the human factor. I've always written both for people and search engines, but I've gone back to my roots and started writing solely for people. My objective is to give readers what they asked for. I answer the damn question. I create a mouth-watering headline on every article and create short enough original fact based content. Surprisingly this tactic is working better because more readers are responding to our articles on Erookie before we even send them out to social media for sharing. I'm not writing to get linkbacks, I want real people to see it, read it, and share it through social media. That's one way to build an audience and natural (not search engine) traffic to your site
This is what brands do. They focus on the human factor immediately giving people what they're looking for. Funny enough it seems the search engines get wind of this and then give you more attention. Putting out brand signals and focusing on giving people priority over the search engines make the search engines give you more priority. Sounds really weird doesn't it? This could be compared to chasing a hard to get person in the dating game. When you pursue them hard, they ignore you or make it even harder. When you focus your attention on someone else nearly as important as they are then they give you the attention you deserve.
