SEO: Natural Language is Your Friend

I recentley got an email from someone offering SEO services. I wasn’t really interested, but decided to check out their website anyway (no the email wasn’t spam).

Now I’ve worked with this mob before, but only for their pure web development skills. And low and behold, I check out their website, and it’s a textbook example of how to write for a search engine only, and forget that most humans are, er… human.

I won’t bother to repeat their site’s copy, except to say it read like it was more the output of an automated word picker. Either that or there was one angry monkey bashing a panel which only typed certain sorts of words: context be damned. While it’s always good to make sure your copy contains the right keywords, you should never write copy specifically just to jam in as many specific words as you can. It’s bad for a whole range of reasons.

Firstly, search engines just aren’t that dumb. They can parse paragraphs and look at content in context. Even your copy of Microsoft Word can analyse your writing and make suggestions (fragment: consider revising). So do you think the search engines haven’t clued in to what is being written in a natural style, and what is simply being placed there for their “benefit”? Take a look at Wikipedia. One reason it ranks so well is – apart from its huge link popularity – it’s chock full of (mostly) well written content that has been worked on by many people, edited and revised. Its content is peer reviewed, and most importantly, it’s been written by humans for humans.

Secondly, there’s the human factor. So you’ve written a sentence which doesn’t make sense because it’s a sentence which repeats the fact that it’s a sentence serving no point but to be a sentence (see what I did there?). Writing like that simply doesn’t read well, and is a major put-off to users. Even if you do get them to your website by writing in such a style, intentionally jamming in as much as you can, your users will not be so tolerant. At the end of the day, a confused user is not going to hang around. That’s why natural language is so important. If there’s no reason to put a word somewhere, don’t do it. And if you really want to put those keywords in, consider taking a break, then coming back and sitting down and actually writing some good copy. Natural language is not something that should be forced.