Someone wanted to know whether it was better to write for bots (search engines) or human readers. Their purpose seemed obviously to lean towards making a solid content-rich site. Because SEO is always a hot topic (because frankly most people are either too lazy or too dense to look beyond it for quality traffic sources), you’ll find a lot of information like this around (paraphrased):

“Write for search engines first to get rankings and traffic, and then start writing for readers to keep them.”

I had a total “duh” moment when I read that, thinking I must be on a total idiot binge lately on the webmaster front.

Actually, that suggestion is beyond stupid as far as content strategies go. Let’s break it down into to your two most basic options:

1. If you want to build an authority website or blog in a niche, and have a site with long-term potential, you write for the readers.
2. If you’re building sites only thinking about the short term quick buck (driving search traffic to sites loaded with high paying keywords), then you write for the bots.

If someone had the goal of number one above, but started off with the model of number two (as the forum “geniuses” suggested), the site might very well find itself doomed to failure. Why?

Because if the starting content (which is ranked well and the reason viewers are getting to the site) is nothing but SEO’d-to-death content for those rankings, those visitors aren’t going to come back. The only way to get visitors coming back (necessary if you want to build an authority site of any level) is to always write unique and interesting content for your readers.

Starting off with the wrong content strategy can seriously screw up the reputation of your site or blog even before it really gets going. Don’t make that mistake. Know what your ultimate site goals are from the beginning and tailor your content strategy to the right audience.

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1. Using the business blog to present company news, or the owner’s (or other high level executive’s) take on industry news issues.

2. Using the business blog as a way to educate the public, and more importantly your target market, about your products, services, etc.

3. Using the business blog as a tool to offer free industry information or articles, as a means of then driving Web traffic to other areas of your business site.

By creating a business blog for any of those reasons, you also have a free or inexpensive, yet powerful, PR tool. There are a variety of public relations benefits to business blogging, such as:

1. The ability to disseminate news.

2. The ability to quickly and directly gather feedback from your target audience.

3. The ability to build a company or personal reputation as an authority source in an industry or niche.

In order to best take advantage of the PR benefits of blogging (sometimes referred to as the marketing benefits of blogging), it’s important to keep the blog honest and ethical by industry standards. As much as blogging can be a PR benefit, it can also lead to negative publicity just as easily (such as if you were to release false information or just hype about a new product release), so always keep your business motives in mind when deciding to launch a business or corporate blog, and when deciding whether to blog yourself or hire a ghost writer as your business blogger.

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