If you missed it, I (Greg) wrote a post on ProBlogger that has nothing to do with personal finance. Instead it has to do with online content, which is obviously important to us. The post has inspired a bunch of comments, running about 50-50 in favor of my arguments. Not that that matters: it could run 1-99 and I’d still know I’m right. For some reason my response to the comments isn’t showing up, so here it is. Today’s regular blog post follows.

Thanks for the comments, both positive and negative. I maintain that writing SEO-consciously is putting the cart before the horse. Shouldn’t your web copy indicate who you are and what you’re selling, as concisely as possible, even if search engines had never existed?

If some phrase (“luxury 4-star hotel”, “all-night dry cleaner”, “convincingly fake identification cards”) is vital to and descriptive of your business, you don’t need to say it multiple times. Optimizing for search engines and optimizing for human eyes aren’t just divergent goals, they’re opposite goals. If a paragraph is optimized for search engines, which value repetition, then that same paragraph can’t possibly be optimized for humans, whose time is precious and who have better things to do than read the same phrases over and over again. SEO writing is inorganic and derivative, almost by definition. James Joyce himself couldn’t cram multiple occurrences of the same phrase throughout a copy block without it losing resonance.