"We write for two audiences now, people and bots." I've said that numerous times, in lectures, in one-on-one sessions about social media, but I'm not going to say it anymore. It's not that it isn't true, it remains true, although perhaps to a lesser extent as social search continues to drive the online search experience.
I believe that when we even open the door to writing with the computer, not the reader in mind, we are risking something pretty profound. Give me a choice between losing the reader's attention and losing the computer's, I'll choose against the computer every time. Yes, even if it costs me page views.
When I worked at AOL, page views was the metric I lived and died for and it made more sense then. The internet was less cluttered. Even then it was the comments though that meant the most to me, whether they lifted me up or crushed my spirit. It was the human connection of a person reading and responding to my words, however trivial, that kept me plugging away through 7 years and over nearly 20,000 posts.
SEO-Search Engine Optimization is essentially the skill of capturing a greater share of the activity generated by the search engine spiders that crawl the interwebs in search of what is new and fresh and serve it back to you when you search. I know many skilled and smart people who have made their living in this. They know things I haven't yet begun to understand. They are adept technicians but they are not writers at least not by how I measure the standard. They are writing for bots first, people second.There's nothing wrong with that, that's the gig, but it's not being a writer.
My audience is always going to be the human audience. Yes I will shamelessly stuff tags and metadata into WordPress blog posts and I will use their little tools to judge my progress. I might even weight my headlines so that the meat is first. But I won't compromise the tenor and text of what I write and you shouldn't either.