Creating content for machines shouldn’t be taken literally – it simply means that creating content to improve your search engine rankings rather than making it more effective for your human readers. People often have this misconception that if they create content that caters to the whims and fancies of search engine algorithms they will be able to get better search engine rankings for their blog posts, articles and hopefully, business websites.
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. Search engine ranking algorithms are not paragons of accuracy. You still get search results that make no sense but enjoy higher listings nonetheless. The world can be unfair that way and you can do nothing about it. This is a reason why you still find people creating content that caters more to the machines and less to the humans. Does this sort of content help you get more business?
Depends on your targeting. If your business involves generating ad revenue then yes, sometimes this trick helps, but not always. If your business involves direct sales or promoting affiliate programs, then it doesn’t help much because your visitors don’t feel convinced, because the language is not convincing.
So what do you do? Do you create a mix of content – sometimes for the machines and sometimes for the humans? I’m neither against nor for. But being a content writer I am more in favor of writing and publishing content for your target audience – your prospective customers and clients. When it comes to your search engine rankings you cannot depend on one single factor. Even if you have exceptional content most of your target audience won’t be able to find it unless you have got yourself a way to spread it across the Internet or at least across the places where your target audience can be found. Ideally your search engine rankings depend on:
- The quality, quantity and size of your content
- The number of high quality incoming links
- Your authority as an author/expert
- Your level of engagement on social networking websites, especially on Google Plus if you want to target Google
- The age of your website
All these aspects have one underlying common factor – your content.
You will need some time to create a vibrant space for yourself on websites like Google Plus, Facebook and Twitter, and you can create this space by sharing highly useful and interesting content from all over the web but when it comes to getting targeted traffic to your own content, you have to build it brick by brick, and these bricks are made of your individual words.
Stop worrying about creating content for machines because even machines want content that is good for humans. They are far from it but most of the mainstream search engines are moving towards that direction. Sooner or later they will start ranking content that actually deserves to be ranked. Then all the manipulations that you have incorporated in order to make the machines happy will go down the drain and your time will be wasted. So it is better to think long-term, create high-quality human-friendly content so that by the time search engines learn to rank high quality content, you already have that content. This will be a massive advantage.