My advice: do what you want, but pick before you start writing. On my personal blog (Turning Left Against Traffic), I write for my own amusement and accept that many readers will wander away. On our corporate blog (The Methodology Blog), we write in compelling, yet plain English to draw readers and win business. In both cases, the market—not the writer—decides whether the words have merit.

In the meantime, the technology is hilariously immature. Google doesn’t understand anything about what it is reading, it merely matches keyword searches against keywords in pages (with a hefty dose of algorithm to filter out the fakers). You can get traffic through keyword stuffing and only draw in customers with a grade school reading level. You can also make a lot of money selling commodity junk via email spam. The question is not what works, but who you want to be.

All writing, from quill pens to twittering, can range from banal to articulate. Eventually, you will be judged by your audience. You just have to decide who you want your audience to be.

Next I re-read the article, looking for grammar and spelling errors, which in my case occur often. And at the same time I review the phrasing, and look for 1 – 2 places I can substitute a key word or phrase to improve SEO. I won’t key word stuff, that is just annoying, but usually I can insert a key phrase, improve the flow of the article, and score a few SEO points at the same time.

People start their search from intuition. In other words, how they frame a problem in their mind will affect which words they use to search for a solution.

It’s a concept deeply rooted in cognitive linguistics. I don’t know if Chris has read theories in linguistics, but he parrots one by Lakoff almost word for word: “by using their [your audience's] language you get significantly more engagement.”

In PR we have this sub-discipline called message development, which is grounded in the same concept of engagement.

Let me share a couple of quotes from people other than me:

“Think about what people are going to type…and talk about that”
Matt Cutts: Google

“Think about the words that people use to find you.” “Then, as a revolutionary new internet marketing strategy, actually write those words in your copy.” Ian Lurie: Author, Conversation Marketing

The entire concept that you would do anything but write so that your content is found by the largest audience possible is completely foreign to me.

By studying search engine data as it relates to your expertise, you identify what is important to your audience. More importantly, by using their language you get significantly more engagement. Like Matt Cutts says…use their language and increase your audience.

Keep in mind as well that Crap is Crap. If your blog post is nothing but keyword stuffing, it’s not going to drive search traffic and it’s going to have high bounce rates. This is not an either/or strategy.

Blogs should add to the conversation and not the noise.

Noise is low value content that is essentially bogging up Google’s results. Like it or not Google is a pretty poor search engine about 10-30% of the time and shows results that are completely worthless to your search. We have done some interesting tests that show you can do simple things to get listed on page one of Google with little effort. Many sites/companies exploit this and the outcome is poor search results, or “noise”.

I like a good signal to noise ratio. Google’s s/n ratio is surprisingly bad. That is why they are vulnerable to peer to peer search via sites like Twitter and Facebook.

What about the people wanting to become “experts” but are still writing mindless crap because they want a good search ranking. Balance and Sincerity!