What do you think about when writing content for a blog article, press release or product page? Do you think about search engine optimization, or do you write for your human audience?

I've always recommended writing content for human eyeballs first, then optimizing it for the search engines. Yes, you're caught in a chicken or egg scenario; If you don't optimize, then people won't find your content, but if you do optimize, then people might find your content repetitive and not very engaging.

Now we have a new tool at our disposal to help guide your content writing towards optimization. Inbound Writer is an online content analysis app that "...makes it easy to create content for increased reach, engagement and conversions." With a little "speedometer" that goes from red to yellow to green, you can have this web app analyze your content and offer suggestions on what elements to tweak. You can also pop in your keywords and it will offer suggested and trending keyword phrases to add to your content.

Although I haven't used Inbound Writer long enough to verify the effectiveness of its optimization, I will experiment with the app over the next month or so and provide a follow up report.

So, this brings us back to the initial question, "Should You Write Content with SEO in Mind?" It depends on the marketing tools you have available. As I mentioned, my recommendation has been to always write for people. If you only have SEO as a promotional tool, then by all means, write with optimization in mind. Just remember, you have options when it comes to promoting online.

SEO is only one of many online marketing tactics. Social media, PPC, Facebook, Twitter, iBooks, podcasts and press releases provide alternatives. With the publishing industry currently suffering from what the music industry went through (and continues to go through), the opportunity to publish and promote your content independently expands with advances in technology.

Unfortunately, as the industry shifts and content marketing grows in use among the social marketers online, the value of just good, meaningful and entertaining reading material tends to get lost in the shuffle. Given that social media provides tools to easily share content, I don't think we need to sacrifice quality for optimization. In fact, I believe you can have both if you follow a few guidelines:

Make it not only topical, but long-lasting as well
Riding trending topics, or "newsjacking" as it's called works well initially to gain quick visibility, but tends to become dated after awhile. Tapping into related, firmly established topics of interest can guarantee your content continued search ranking.

Don't sacrifice readability
Always defer to the reader when writing content. If you think you need to optimize more, but it compromises the intent or meaning of a phrase or paragraph, leave it be. Your readers will be much more engaged and willing to share.

Practice
After awhile of writing and optimizing, and rewriting and optimizing, it eventually becomes somewhat easier. With practice, choosing whether to please the search engine or readers become automatic.

To help you get started, here are a couple of websites related to both content writing and content optimization:

http://www.copyblogger.com/blog/

http://www.seomoz.org/blog

http://www.distilled.net/blog/