SEO is Not a Dirty Word

Recently, HubPages staff have been warning Hubbers against writing for SEO. There's a lot of talk about the importance of "natural writing". I understand their motives, but frankly, that advice is just as dangerous in the other direction. Natural writing is rarely a good thing!

All professional writers craft their work. It's a very rare writer indeed who can put words on the page naturally, without any editing. For the vast majority, just putting words on the page will produce one of two things - over-long, rambling paragraphs or stark, colorless facts.

The very experienced writer carries all the "rules" in their head and may edit as they go along, so there's not much to do at the end - but we all need to edit, to ensure we give our readers the best possible experience.

The only difference with online writing is that we have a few more readers to consider - the search engines. And like it or not, they are VIP's! Because the hard fact is that if we don't please those 'readers', very few real people will ever see our beautifully crafted prose.

SEO - Search Engine Optimization - is just editing with the search engines in mind.

It seems crazy that HubPages is so against SEO, when its purpose is to ensure our Hubs rank highly in the search engines, which results in higher earnings for us and for the company.

But I think I know where they're coming from.

HubPages wants good content, not spam. Spammers don't care about content - they focus on SEO and nothing else. They find their keywords, cobble them together with a few lame sentences - or worse, steal someone else's sentences - then use questionable tactics to get their drivel ranked high in the SERPs. HubPages can't do much about that kind of spammer, except ban them when they find them.

But there is another kind of unintentional spammer - the naive newbie. The newbie has read a few blogs or watched a few videos about how to write for the internet and they're too new to tell good advice from bad. As a result, they enthusiastically over-optimize - they over-use keywords, over-quote other articles, over-link, over-everything.

That kind of Hubber can cause just as much damage as a spammer, so HubPages wants to discourage them. Their solution seems to be to discourage everyone from "writing for SEO". But that, frankly, is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The truth is, if you want to gain readership beyond the HubPages community, you must understand and implement SEO. It's not evil, it's just another tool, like your spell checker. Like any tool, you need to learn how to use it, and use it sensibly.

A good writer will strike a balance between writing for the search engines and writing for their readers. That way, you get new visitors from Google, but you also get recommendations, "Likes" and "+1's" from real people who've enjoyed your Hub - all of which have real value and drive your Hub even higher in the ranks.

SEO is bad when it leads you to create clunky, repetitive writing. Once you're aware of it, it's easy to spot, especially if the writer has chosen a "long tail" keyword (which is actually a key phrase made up of several words).

For instance, say your long tail keyword is "pale blue gurning widgets". If you've learned a bit about SEO, you'll think you have to use that keyword at every opportunity, and you'll use the entire phrase every time you refer to them. Whereas if you're writing for readers, you wouldn't use the whole phrase every time - you'd be more concerned to avoid repetition, so you'd use "they", "these products", "widgets" etc., to add variety.

Headings and sub-headings are a common place where these errors occur. Over-eager writers will shoehorn the keywords in more than once - "Le Creuset Cast Iron Pots - the best cast iron pots". Writers with no awareness of SEO may not mention their keywords in headings at all!

Both are wrong when writing online. If you over-use the whole phrase, you'll get penalized for "keyword stuffing". If you avoid using the phrase, you may not use it often enough for Google to notice.

This is just one example of where a little knowledge of SEO can be a dangerous thing - but that doesn't mean SEO is bad. Far from it. Understand it properly and it's an indispensable tool that can make a huge difference to your success online.