The days of SEO keyword stuffing are dead and gone, but optimizing your blogs is still worth the effort. The magic is in finding the balance between writing for humans while being understandable to robots.

When you create a blog, the goal should always be to engage with your target audience. You want them to leave satisfied or be curious enough to stay and ask for more. That takes knowledge about what they want and a conversational tone.

At the same time, it’s important to get that interesting article in front of the right people. Showing up for the wrong search queries doesn’t do you any good! That’s why SEO is so important.

But how do you fulfill both of those needs? Web crawlers (those things that are far too techy for me to explain but responsible for figuring out what your pages are about and who to show them to) speak in code. Humans don’t. So, how can you optimize without sounding weird?

In this post, we'll dive into the intricacies of crafting blog posts that are written for both people and bots and don’t sound weird.

Understanding the Role of Keywords

Keywords are phrases that people use in Google (or their preferred search engine) to find information and answer their questions. They can be as short and to-the-point as “food near me” or as long as “what to wear while hiking in the desert”.

**Fun Fact: the advancement of AI is leading to longer and more detailed search queries, with search engines generating answers they gather from articles, websites, and blogs posts!**

When you optimize your blog post, you make those keywords easy to find for web crawlers.

But first, you have to figure out what your focus keyword should be. To do that, you’ll have to do some research. There are several great tools that are easy to use. I recommend Moz and Semrush as starting points because they let you have a few rounds of keyword research for free each month. ;)

Check out this guide for more details on choosing your keywords.

Crafting Compelling Titles and Meta Descriptions

There are a few critical places that your keyword needs to live. First, let’s look at metatags and how to use them effectively.

While there are plenty of tags to learn about if you’re into coding, I’ll focus on the few that are critical from an SEO blogger’s point of view. Most website builders make optimizing these tags super simple as long as you know what the terms mean. So, for both of our sakes, we’ll keep this quick and easy.

Description
H1 (Title tag)

Your description tag should stay under 160 characters and use sentence case. Don’t keyword stuff. It’s lazy, ugly, and the bots hate it! You can use your search term in a way that makes sense. Be brief. Be concise.

Your H1 or title tag is what shows up in big letters on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Use your keyword here if you can, but only if it communicates what the post is truly about. It can be hard to fit longtail keywords into 60 characters in a way that makes sense, so don’t sweat it if you need to shorten it.

Example of Optimization

Let’s say your interior design business loves painting things red. I don’t know why… maybe you got a great deal on a pallet of red paint. Now, it’s a brand thing, I guess. Sometimes my imagination is weird… Anyway! Some keyword research shows that people are interested in whether or not red is a good color for their bedrooms, so you decide to answer their question.

www.yourbusinessname.com/blog/why-red-is-best-for-bedrooms is a great SEO title that uses a longtail keyword. Pairing it with a description like “Why red is the best color for your bedroom, no matter what people say | Interior design services in _your town_ | Veteran-Owned Business” could pique the interest of bots and humans alike. Although I would argue the point of this fictitious article, these are well-optimized meta-tags.

Other locations to include your keyword include…

Headlines
Image captions
First paragraph of text

Remember that you don’t have to use the exact phrase to communicate subject matter to bots. It’s okay to have slight alterations, especially when it comes to captions. You might showcase your favorite red bedroom and put “Bedroom Painted Red in _Your Town_”. That would still successfully demonstrate the consistency of your content’s subject matter.

Structuring Content for Readability and SEO

Now, on the human side of things, we need to talk about how your audience’s behavior is going to impact your SEO performance. It’s not all up to you, friends. Those bots are going to be watching to see how your readers react to your post.

If they click in, see that they’ve been duped by a catchy title and leave right away, that’s a red flag. It’s called the ‘Bounce Rate’ and we want to keep it low. The time a visitor spends on the page is really important. Getting them to stay longer is like getting a vote of confidence and signals to the bots that readers are getting what they searched for.

So how can you keep that bounce rate down?

Write your article for real people. Even with all you’ve learned about metatags and keyword research, at the end of the day you’re still trying to engage with humans. Speak their language.

Formatting Your Blog for Humans

We are creatures of habit. In recent years, our online activities have formed our engagement with words. Attention spans are short, we bounce around a lot, and we want our search to be satisfied sooner rather than later.

With that in mind, here are some things you can do to make your blogs easy to digest, scannable, and less likely to result in a bounce.

Use bullet points.
Use short paragraphs.
Use headers to guide your reader.
Use natural language, relevant to your audience.

The general rule of thumb is to keep paragraphs to 3-5 lines and include headers every 3-5 paragraphs. You can spread your headers out further when bullets are used, because the narrower text column provides white space to relieve the information input on the brain.

Optimization is Worth the Effort

Being found via a search engine can mean the difference between your mom being your only reader and being seen by a potential customer on the other side of the country. It may seem like a waste of time if you've never bothered to optimize. But if you want to tap into a whole new audience with the click of a button, you should pause before hitting publish.

Writing for Robots AND Humans: How to Optimize Blogs Without Sounding Weird