Who would you rather make nice with – a person or a spider?
As far as I’m concerned, spiders are kind of creepy, whether you’re talking about a tiny beast a quarter inch across or a tarantula as big as a dinner plate. However, if you want to succeed in business today, even if you’re a confirmed arachnophobe, you’ll want to get on very good terms with at least one group of spiders: namely, the ones that “crawl” websites.
Providing meaty, actionable content in your blog is generally accepted as crucial to marketing success, but it’s not always easy to do. Not only do you have to carve out time to write, you also have to develop (or find) the content. Then you have to make nice with the spiders that will crawl your website looking for keywords they can use to index your site, and then you have to hope that you’ve done a good job of choosing your keywords and descriptive metadata so your ideal prospects will actually find and fall in love with you.
This naturally raises the question: Who should you write for? Should you put primary emphasis on the spiders that will index your site, or should you be more concerned with the actual humans who will read your content?
You can’t succeed if your marketing communications aren’t effective.
Here’s an easy way to deal with this potential dilemma: Instead of operating from an “either/or” perspective, think in terms of “both/and.” In other words, appeal to both your human readers as well as the web-crawling spiders. Here are some ways to do both:
- identify keywords that prospects are likely to use when searching for a solution that you know you can provide (see my Do-It-Yourself Resources page for a sample spreadsheet you can use to track your keywords)
- include these keywords in the meta data of your blog
- become so familiar with your keywords that you can easily incorporate them into the actual content that prospects will read
- after writing your first draft using your authentic voice, review it to see if you can add in any keywords without detracting from that natural, smooth-flowing style
- don’t include keywords at the expense of making your content hard to read; using grammatically awkward constructions just to include keywords will confuse and turn off your readers
**********************************************************************
So…What techniques have you found that enable you to be on good terms with humans and spiders both?
(By the way, thanks to Marty Gabel for posting the tarantula image in the Creative Commons section of Flickr.)
This entry was posted in marketing and tagged creativity, effectiveness. Bookmark the permalink.
Leave a Reply