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?

Earlier this month at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum I moderated a panel on B2B blogging. When you get a room full of marketers the conversation will sometimes turn to SEO and of course ROI. Mix the two and you have a lively conversation.

Yes we all know that Google loves blogs, but if your only reason for blogging is SEO, then you’re going to fail. Back in early 2006 I posted about a newspaper that wanted to start community blogging. I told them if the reasons were revenue or page views that things would fail. The primary purpose has to be conversation and community. If you do those two things right (and have your blog properly configured) then SEO and all the other benefits should follow.

During the panel the analogy I used was this:

If your fiance asks you why you love him/her and want to spend the rest of your life with them you shouldn’t say:

A. I’m looking for increased ROI thru shared living expenses.

B. You have a great network of (hot) friends, and partnering with you allows me to position myself favorably with them.

It should first and foremost be about love and compassion (with your fiance).