by Irene Lizarraga

Created on: February 12, 2010   Last Updated: September 24, 2011

"If you want to succeed as an online writer, you need to learn to write SEO content". This is the opening sentence found in many guides, articles and courses about writing content for the web, and has helped create a unique style of writing for the Internet that tries to be as optimized as possible for Search Engines. However, there's a negative side to SEO content writing that isn't mentioned so often. The biggest danger of extremely SEO optimized content is that sometimes this optimization comes at the cost of human readers.

Many of the guidelines for SEO content writing involve percentages, such as making sure the keyword density is around 5%, "The targeted keywords must appear at least once on the first 100 words" and but forget about about how readable or enjoyable the content is for a human reader. Add to this the fact that sometimes the keyword list it's longer than the article itself and following those SEO content writing rules can make an article slow and difficult to read or understand. For example, to get a 5% keyword density on an article with 500 words the writer needs to include each keyword around 25 times. If the keyword list have several keywords that sound similar or use the same words, such as "Search Engine Optimisation", "Search Engine Optimization" "Optimization for Search Engines", the end result is an article that has Search Engines every 3 words and sounds unnatural. It's no longer like the author tries to talk with a human audience, content SEO writing gone wild can make articles look like written by a machine, for a machine.

Writing content with SEO in mind is an important skill for anybody who wants visitors to find their content. However, if your visitors struggle to understand what is written due to its unnatural SEO focused style, those extra visits won't mean anything. It's important to keep in mind that the real audience of a website is not the search engines, but human visitors that will read, buy from it, click on ads, subscribe to the newsletter or whatever goal you have set for the site. Letting SEO take control of your writing can make those users click the back button because even if the text has the information they wanted, they don't like how it's written. 

Another known issue with excessive SEO optimization is that Search Engines just don't like it. Search Engines want their results to be useful for their visitors, and so dislike websites that are designed to trick Search Engines into giving them more value than a human would. What are now the common guidelines for SEO optimized writing can tomorrow be grounds for removal from the listings. Is that a risk you want to take?

Writing content following strict SEO guidelines can also be a problem for the writer. Just imagine having to paint a masterpiece knowing that the exact proportions of each colour on the overall picture are set from the start. Words need to be added to fulfill the keyword density quota, sentences don't flow right because it's necessary to add specific keywords on it and interesting and useful information must be left aside because the article would, otherwise, be over the recommended 700 words per article and the keyword list took up half the space. If you want to keep your visitors happy and enjoy writing for the web, be careful about taking SEO content writing too far, and always make sure your writing is enjoyable for the people that are going to affect your bottom line instead.

Learn more about this author, Irene Lizarraga.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.