(Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes)

Nearly all writers concur: understand your audience. Then write to them.

Here’s a perspective on understanding your SEO audience, which occurred to me as I was reading a comment by Jan Geronimo concerning SEO.

Jan notes that a writer can’t be just a writer anymore, especially a writer who blogs. A writer has to be a writer, then has to be at least an amateur search engine weenie.

That’s no fun.

Nobody wants to be a weenie, so let’s think differently. Let’s think of a search engine as being a particularly stupid reader, like an editor for a prestigious publication. An editor who is less concerned with your brilliant, paradigm-shattering prose… than with making sure your margins are 1″ all the way around, the font is 12 point, the lines are double spaced, and you use accepted markup for bold, italic, etc.

That’s the search engine.

Since computers don’t have eyes, ears and legs, they can’t walk around and accumulate evidence of how the world really works. Without a hippocampus, they can’t get a feel for emotional context. All they have is ordered streams of characters, which we see as glyphs, but they see as sequences of 1s and 0s. Sucks for them.

So we have to help the computer along, and that’s where SEO comes into play.

Think about SEO as writing for a deaf, dumb and blind kid (who can’t even play pinball). Just like your editor, this kid isn’t going to process anything that doesn’t fit into it’s narrow pre-conceived structure of How The World Works. And since the computer heavily influences something you want (eyeballs), it must be catered to.

SEO is simply catering to the computer’s craving for structure. No more, no less.

If you’re in it for the long term, and have weak competition, or you just don’t care, you don’t need any special SEO juju. Just write your thing and it will eventually float to a level reflecting your personal popularity among readers. Your reputation will carry you in the long term.

If you have no reputation, or you want fast results, you’ll need to learn a few basic skills (conveniently outlined in “How to Really Publish a Blog Post” I might add; 75% discount for newsletter signup) to give the computer context it’s unable to acquire on it’s own.

By the way, all reputable SEO gurus assert “content is king.”

That feels ironic to me.

So write for readers first, and SEO second.

In the end, dealing with SEO is little different than preparing a manuscript for any other sort of publication, except it’s easier. Anyone who’s spent a full working day finalizing a draft for publication knows exactly what I mean. Five copies on heavy stock, double spaced, figures (originals only, please) floated back, captions numbered and listed separately, tables & captions floated similarly to figures, etc etc etc. ad nauseum, ad infinitum. Learning a little SEO magic, much of which can be dealt with as part of the writing process, is a small price to pay for freedom from the tyranny of FedEx’ing revisions.

It’s all a matter of perspective, and this one is mine.

Go visit Jan Geronimo at Writing to Exhale. You’ll learn something, I guarantee it.