Content Or SEO? Who Wins the Battle?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis ShareThis

You’ve likely heard the arguments before. Content vs. SEO.

On the one hand, you need to rank well in the search engines if you want to get traffic to your website. But on the other hand, if you focus too heavily on on site search engine optimization and you don’t write your content for your human site visitors, the people who do show up might end up leaving without making a purchase. Canned content is no fun to read.

The “content is king” crowd argue that content for your human readers is more important. I agree. It really is. But does that mean you shouldn’t optimize your website? And the SEO people put more emphasis on keywords and links.

Personally, I say you can have both. There’s no reason you can’t write great content and get the very best SEO in the process. It takes concentration, good research, and great writing skills. Don’t sacrifice anything!

July 30, 2009
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4 Comments
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Content Development

4 Responses to “Content Or SEO? Who Wins the Battle?”

Rick Allen says:

July 30, 2009 at 8:44 am

I agree this is a common question and I agree that you can have both. If you’re focusing on one more than the other you’re not doing your job as a web writer.
Nick Stamoulis says:

July 30, 2009 at 11:03 am

@ Rick Allen – Thanks for the comment and reading, it is amazing how many so called web writers never actually do their “job”
Grant Simmons says:

July 31, 2009 at 9:35 am

No matter how good an SEO writer, SEO content will never read exactly the same as non SEO content. Imposing word count, density and keyword inclusion can never maintain an authors exactly intent.

But it’s extremely easy to maintain the story, information, article or post core messaging if you’re a good SEO, experienced writer.

User experience is the key.

The ultimate goal is to write something that engages and interests the user, creating a desire to explore further, click a link, subscribe, download or submit a form, if SEO’d content doesn’t accomplish (at least one of) those goals, site owners have much bigger problems than badly SEO’d content.

A good discussion to be had.

Cheers
Nick Stamoulis says:

July 31, 2009 at 12:59 pm

@ Grant Simmons – Thanks for reading and your comment. User experience is always important…I always start with goals of a site before I ever think about on site optimization. There is nothing worst then getting a visitor to come to a website and then quickly leave…