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In a few recent conferences that Dave Coustan and I have attended together, whenever the topic of SEO comes up, he always mentions the human element. In other words, the reader. You need to make sure the content you're posting is "Fit for humans," as Dave says.
Thinking about it more, I jokingly refer to it as HRO, or Human Reader Optimization. It's the next step beyond SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Sure it's great that you've used SEO tactics to get somebody to your site, but is that landing page something they actually want to read. It might contain the keywords, but is it relevant and perhaps most of all interesting?
Google helped make this a bit more obvious (hopefully). Think back to Alta Vista, when 'relevant' meant a page that contained the most instances of a keyword, with Google relevant is partially calculated by what others (via links) think is relevant.
A while back I talked about the SEO strategy surrounding blogs and made some jokes/jabs about it. With blogs, the SEO strategy should start with, "Write good relevant content that people find interesting."
Newsroom vendors hype the SEO benefits of keyword-optimized press releases. Great, are they HRO? As a general web user, is a press release really what you want to read?
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Comments
Good post and points Josh.
Relevance has always been the correct way to market so why would it be different for the Internet. What good is it to have wrong people come to your web site. Sometimes we forget that Interactive marketing is still marketing.
Posted by: Harry Hallman | 02.11.08
Good post, Josh. Back to the future, indeed.
Posted by: Scott Baradell | 02.11.08
Great Josh. I think you should just expand the article to some other fields of the current "digital marketing" world.
What do you think, are other tools going the same way? As I see it, just too much is done by progammers. And then you have hundreds of them on the web putting out the "new marketing strategies". Like I would be giving out some programming strategies just because I did some web sites.
Blogging yes, but bloggin for humans? Hlogging? :-)
Social media yes, but social media for humans? SSmedia? :-)
Posted by: Dusan Vrban | 02.11.08
I think specialization might be part of the problem, i.e. everybody working in their silos. For example, the SEO expert's job is to get them to the site. Should they also be responsible for all copy, usability, workflow, etc?
Posted by: Josh Hallett | 02.11.08
Yes, interesting question. Lately I'm looking at our site and think: what are we doing? We're doing too much, we're not specialized. And that was even a question I got from one of my partners: how do you handle all this things?
Yet I think marketing/web/business consulting and project work is just too interdisciplinary to have only specialists.
And when we're talking about big companies, you need specialists to make a specific part. Yet most of the companies are small/medium sized. How do you help them? By sending them a costly SEO expert to get them people? No way. :-)
Got me, Josh! Keep on posting please. :-)
Posted by: Dusan Vrban | 02.11.08
Thanks a lot, Josh. Now you've started another new industry soon to be filled with HRO experts. That will be followed by all the HRO blogs we'll have to start reading. After that comed HRM. Then the conferences...
Posted by: Jay Ehret | 02.11.08
Hold on, I just discovered SEO software http://www.RaSof.com
by James Brausch and had begun to think I needed to acquire this for my plans to set up a virtual assistant site. The tags system is just now making sense to me so I need to conquer this hill before I attempt the next one. Thanks for the warning.
Posted by: Donna F Hammett-Tooker | 02.14.08