“Write for people, not for search engines” - we’ve heard it over and over again.
On the other hand, if the search engines don’t know you exist, how are you supposed to drive traffic to your content?
I am sure many of us at one time or another were tempted to write the kind of content that has high search engine ranking, but becomes increasingly unreadable by real people.
Do you want to improve your search engine ranking and increase blog traffic generation?
Is there a better way to please both sides and still drive SEO traffic to your site?
I’ve always believed there was. Using a well optimized blog theme like Thesis and knowing and applying some basic SEO traffic generation principles as you write your blog posts will naturally improve your search engine ranking.
However, it does take a good amount of SEO knowledge to become good at it.
Fortunately for me (and thousands of other users, like Problogger.net), Brian Clark of Copyblogger.com has recently released Scribe SEO plugin - a WordPress plugin that analyzes your post at a click of a button and within seconds reports back on how you can improve your search engine ranking.
It’s like having an SEO expert as an editorial assistant in one.
Let’s look at the pros and cons of the plugin.
Pros:
1. Instead of starting with keywords that you want to rank for, Scribe takes a post that you’ve written for real people, analyzes it, and lets you know what your keywords are and how you can tweak your post to make it more search engine friendly.
2. It will tell you very specific things you could change, beside keywords, like whether your title and description are too long, and where you need to move your keyword closer to the beginning.
3. Scribe will suggest how many hyperlinks you will need to have and where you need to place them.
4. It will allow you to search engine optimize your older posts.
5. Scribe syncs beautifully with themes like Thesis, Headway, Hybrid, as well as All-in-One SEO plugin.
As much as I love the upsides of Scribe SEO Plugin, there are some downsides you need to know about:
CONS:
1. Over the past couple of months, I had to deal with a couple of “down times”. I understand that the creators are still ironing out some issues, but it does cause inconvenience.
2. Your copywriting skills will definitely be challenged trying to get your primary keywords to be first in your headline while still appealing to the readers.
3. If your target keywords are a bit obscure, Scribe might not recognize them as keywords at all, like what happens with me when I write about YourNetBiz. So you will have to ignore some of Scribe data and accept the lower score for those posts.
4. The true benefit of ranking high on search engines is to rank for the keywords that YOU CHOOSE and are PROFITABLE. Scribe will in no way help you with that. So even with the plugin - DO YOUR RESEARCH.
5. Scribe helps you with on-page SEO. Off-page SEO (like building links) is the other, I’d say even more important, side of SEO coin. Backlinks rule! So if you want for your optimized post to have a good chance of showing up on a search engine result page (SERP) and bringing traffic to your site, do your job and build links to each post.
Scribe SEO Marketing Takeaway:
I’ve been using Scribe for a couple of months now and I must say, I LOVE it.
I am not SEO illiterate by any means, but Scribe still surprises me time after time making suggestions that I otherwise would have missed.
I don’t always do everything Scribe SEO recommends, but the suggestions definitely helped to improve my blog search engine ranking and increase SEO traffic.
As a matter of fact, my blog is now ranking for many of my keywords - all after I started using the plugin.
Thumbs up from me.
If search engine ranking and traffic are something you would like to tap into more while still writing for real people, Scribe is definitely an option worth investing into. Click on the banner below to learn more and get your free copywriting report.
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