In a few recent conferences that Dave Coustan and I have attended together, whenever the topic of SEO comes up, he always mentions the human element. In other words, the reader. You need to make sure the content you’re posting is ‘Fit for humans’ as Dave says.

Thinking about it more, I jokingly refer to it as HRO, or Human Reader Optimization. It’s the next step beyond SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Sure it’s great that you’ve used SEO tactics to get somebody to your site, but is that landing page something they actually want to read. It might contain the keywords, but is it relevant and perhaps most of all interesting?

Google helped make this a bit more obvious (hopefully). Think back to Alta Vista, when ‘relevant’ meant a page that contained the most instances of a keyword, with Google relevant is partially calculated by what others (via links) think is relevant.

A while back I talked about the SEO strategy surrounding blogs and made some jokes/jabs about it. With blogs, the SEO strategy should start with, “Write good relevant content that people find interesting.”

Newsroom vendors hype the SEO benefits of keyword-optimized press releases. Great, are they HRO? As a general web user, is a press release really what you want to read?