Good copywriting skills can help you sell with your blog. But if you think by ?copywriting? I mean ?SEO copywriting,? you?d be wrong.

In fact, you?re probably wasting your time even worrying about traditional SEO techniques when it comes to blogs. Here?s why.

Writing for Search Engines

Search engine optimization (?SEO?) copywriting means writing web page copy that is optimized to rank well in the search engines. This includes inserting targeted key words in certain places (like titles), and in frequencies and densities designed to satisfy a particular search engine algorithm.

Why isnn?t this as important anymore? Essentially, SEO experts think traditional SEO for blogs is a big waste of time.

Humans Matter More

The gist of the argument is that when it comes to search rankings, what?s written on a web page is less important than what other people say about that web page, and how many times.

It all comes down to links.

First of all, referral traffic (links from other bloggers) is of higher quality for the things that matter most ? subscriptions and sales.

It?s like the difference between a prospect who is sent your way from a happy former client, measured against someone who finds you in the Yellow Pages.

But this also impacts your search engine rankings. The algorithms favor sites and pages with incoming, non-reciprocal links from body text ? in other words, express recommendations from other people. And much more weight is placed on the words used in those links (anchor text) than the words on the page linked to.

Just ask George W. Bush.

You won?t find the words ?miserable failure? anywhere on the biography page of the current U.S. President, and yet that page ranks number one for the search term in Google. That?s because a whole bunch of other people (mostly bloggers) decided to link to W?s bio with the anchor text ?miserable failure,? and obtained top ranking.

The trend of search engine?s favoring what other