Bloggers’ Target—Humans or Crawlers?
There’s something of an intense debate on this subject, here on the Net. And while it continues to provoke a lot of thinking, it has made me think too. In fact, I think that if one writes for fellow humans rather than SEs, sure you do build traffic and bring in the dream numbers of subscribers and back links from other sites which will give you a higher page rank.
From my experience, I would say that some blogs would need more search engine traffic than others. And this is only because of the kind of topics people are searching for on those blogs. And search engine traffic is crucial to fellow human bloggers, as this brings in the new and additional traffic. This only proves the need for writing for crawlers or search engines.
For professional bloggers, it’s best that they write for major search engines like google as this alone converts into almost instant revenue, particularly with the help of affiliate programs and advertising.
Though blog platforms come with an in-built blog platform, it automatically means that they are geared to perform the SEO function to perfection. Blogs not only link to each other naturally, they also interlink very well intra-sites and are constantly updated with fresh posts.
Bloggers, therefore, cannot choose to write either for fellow humans or for crawlers or search engines. Primarily because writing in this medium inherently means that there is a symbiotic relationship between writer and his medium. Therefore, Bloggers write for both—humans and bots.
Bloggers write for humans because they want to put across a point of view, a debate or an incident that will be professionally or socially useful and therefore serve as very good and content.
The flip side is that writing for humans is just the first step: now, computers or search engines need to take over and bring in the extra traffic and revenue. Search engines serve as online reference books for people looking for specific information. If a blog can satisfy this need, it becomes searchable in search engine listings, which is where all humans want their blogs to rank.
So, really, blogging is a craft, and search engines is technology working for us.
