Human Optimized Web Copy - Let's Stop Writing For Robots

Human Optimized Web Copy - Let's Stop Writing For Robots

Author: Jack Busch

Read these first 50 words carefully. I want you to notice something about them - something that you won´t notice about the vast majority of the opening paragraphs you´ll encounter on the Internet. Still paying attention? Good. We´ve almost made it. Keep reading, these are the last ten words you have to read. There. We did it. Together, you and I have gone through 50 words of web content without slogging through a single pointless keyword. Feels good, doesn´t it? That´s because you´re a human.

These days, it seems that everyone knows a little something about search engine optimization. But just like heart surgery and day trading, a little bit of SEO knowledge put into practice is more likely to result in a bigger mess than you began with. Content managers who are just getting hip to pandering to the enigmatic algorithms of Google and the hive mind of social media will, with the best of intentions, demand that their writers cram their copy full of keywords and silly top 10 lists in order to get an artificially inflated ranking in the search results. To their credit, some of them get results. But ultimately, they miss the bigger picture: appealing to real live human beings.

I´m sure you know what I´m talking about. If you don´t, try this: Google a local restaurant along with a city name. Let´s try "Mike and Tony´s Pittsburgh." Ideally, you´d like to find the restaurant´s official website, with business hours, driving directions and a menu. But I guarantee that your first three or four hits are going to be garbage. They are going to be aggregator sites that have loaded their page with bolded, underlined and hyperlinked repetitions of keywords and Pittsburgh buried beneath a mountain of advertisements masquerading as relevant links. The people who made these sites don´t care if you find your way to the gyro shop or not - all they care about is tricking you into looking at their ads.

We can fight this travesty. Readers have already been voting with their eyes by looking elsewhere whenever they come across these shameless front sites. Search engine spiders are getting fed up with it, too, and are even beginning to penalize websites that use manipulative and deceptive practices in order to snag undeserved traffic.

But content writers have the greatest responsibility in making the Internet a place for humans, not robots. Don´t engage in the race to the bottom. Don´t sacrifice the readability of your web content for the sake of pleasing unsophisticated machines. Don´t alienate your regular customers for the chance to gain a few accidental clicks. Join the fight against soulless, mindless web copy by following this one simple rule: write what people want to read. A refreshing voice in the maelstrom of nonsense will distinguish you far more than adding to the cacophony that currently plagues the Internet.