When to SEO optimize a blog post?

[JonAmar]

Hi there,

Here's our situation: there are two people working on the blog.

person 1) writes the posts

person 2) SEO optimizes the posts

I know this is not ideal but it's the best we can do and it's a whole lot better than no blog.

I'm the fellow optimizing the posts. I've found that my best SEO efforts usually slightly undermine the readability of these posts -- not in an extreme way, I'm not going overboard with keywords or anything. Rather, things like a sexy & enticing article heading may have to be dummed down for search engines...

Because of this dumming down, I like to wait a couple of weeks to SEO optimize our posts, the logic being that we get the best of both worlds:

• a happy regular readership
• on topic articles that are clearly described for (and aligned to the terms used by) our search engine visitors

What I'm wondering is,

Generally: can you see any problems with this setup? would you do it differently?

Specifically: does Google (et al) punish this sort of backwards re-writing? and, does it somehow amount to less SEO mojo when done retroactively?

Thanks so much for your time!

Best,

Jon

[davebrown1975]

Personally in this case I would lay back off the level of SEO you are performing if its having a negative factor on the readability.

You want people to read these posts, enjoy reading them and get something of value from the posts and be encouraged to come back to your blog and even promoted it by linking back to it.

If your posts have the air of 'overcooked SEO' on them it may have a negative effect on your efforts.  Sure use some SEO when it comes to the titles, tags, headings etc but of all things make it valuable to the readers.

Regards

[BlastAM]

You should really optimize your blog posts before they are published live on the blog.  We have seen an optimized blog post start to show up in search results in less than 24 hours after posting it. If you optimize your post later it wont get crawled and updated as quickly but it will still get your updates. It seem that search engines see blogs as very time sensitive (kind of like news articles) and will crawl new posts faster.

I agree with David about the level of SEO you are performing on the posts.  You don't want to hurt the readability or persuasiveness of the blog posts. If you optimize it right it shouldn't seem forced or spammy. I would suggest to only target one or two keywords per blog post.  You should also get the original blog writer to help out by giving them a keyword or two before they write the post. Just give the writer some basic SEO instructions abouit usings a keyword in headers and various phrases and let them incorporate the keywords into their message. Then afterwards you shouldn't have to do as much, just some simple clean up to optimize the post. This is what we do and it has work out great.

[jsturgeon]

Hey Jon,

I agree with both David and Kayden--readability, emotional impact, and great content should take priority over the mechanical SEO-rewriting.

IMO, the best option here is to teach your copywriter the basics of writing with SEO considerations. Investing that time up front will save you the pain in the long-run of "re-cooking" his content. One suggestion would be to develop a checklist, or a system of some sort that helps your writer incorporate SEO best practices while writing the posts (think: synonyms for latent semantic indexing, rich anchor text, proper use of headings, etc.)

Teach a man to fish...