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Frequently the topic of whether you should write purely for visitors or consider search engines as well is discussed. The downside of writing for search engines is of course that your posts tend to be less natural and helpful as there’s an added emphasis on incorporating keywords into the content, especially at the beginning of articles.

When writing blog posts I personally always prefer to focus completely on generating content for visitors, as I find that cramming in keywords can hinder the thought process and disrupt the article.

In an ideal world you want to write articles which are engaging, interesting or informative, which as a consequence go on to generate incoming links and success with social media sites, but the problem is that if you totally neglect search engines you do run the risk of not achieving high rankings. In the UK Google controls 37% of all web traffic - that’s a huge proportion of potential visitors to be missing out on.

However, it doesn’t have to be a purely either/or situation: optimized content vs human-focused content. This is where delayed content optimization techniques come in:

Delayed content optimization is the art of revisiting articles to optimize them for search engines.

There are three main delayed content optimization techniques, aided initially by analytics research.

Start by digging through your blog or website analytics to see which articles are generating traffic and through which keywords. Armed with this information you can check out your rankings in Google to see where your individual pages are currently ranked. You can then decide which page rankings you should focus on improving, with this decision influenced by current page rankings and existing traffic.

For example, if you’re getting a lot of traffic from a certain keyword despite your web page being ranked in the lower half of the first page of Google’s search results this is most likely a highly searched keyword, and you can be confident that increasing its ranking will lead to a dramatic increase in traffic.

Similarly, focusing on improving a second or third placed ranking can be hugely beneficial, as previous studies have shown:

I can tell you that our site receives approximately 30k of visits on average per day from Google, just from keyword searches for Term X.

When we dropped to second slot on the SERP for Term X, we lost approx 18k of visits per day. So, there it is: the difference between the number one slot and the number two slot for a major keyword term comes to about a 60 % change in visits!

Now that you know what pages you’re going to focus on optimizing how do you go about improving their search engine rankings? It’s a three-step process:

1) Keyword Insertion

Keyword density isn’t as important as it used to be but it’s still an important indicator that search engines use to determine relevance. Revisit the articles you’re optimizing and try to incorporate the main keywords and keyword phrases into the first 100 words of the web page’s content.

2) Title Tag and Article Title Adjustments

The Title Tag is the main indicator that search engines use to determine the topic of web pages. When an article is first published you’ll generally want to keep the Title Tag identical to that of the title of the article, which is generally written to create interest and frequently these days to succeed on social media.

However, you don’t have to worry about social media with delayed content optimization as it’s already either succeeded or failed in this channel. Therefore you can adjust the both the title and Title Tag to feature the most important keywords more predominantly. For example:

‘10 Tips to Improve your Google AdSense Earnings’

… when optimized for ‘Google AdSense tips’ could become:

‘Google AdSense Tips: Improve your AdSense Earnings’

It’s not going to grab people’s attention on social media sites but that no longer matters. The headline is now still interesting enough to be clicked on and also much more likely to be ranked highly for ‘Google AdSense tips’.

3) Adding Internal Links

This is the most important aspect of the delayed content optimization strategy. First, download a Firefox add-on which displays the PageRank of web pages.

Next, browse your site or blog to discover high authority pages. Within many of these pages you’ll frequently find natural internal linking opportunities where you don’t even have to adjust the content. In other cases you’ll be able to make small adjustments to the content, allowing you to link to the pages you’re optimizing with your desired anchor text.

In Conclusion

You no longer have to weigh up the pros and cons of writing for search engines versus writing for visitors.

Utilize delayed content optimization techniques - the insertion of keywords and keyword phrases, adjustment of Title Tags and article titles, and internal linking - to achieve higher rankings for many of your pages in Google.

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