SEO vs. grammar: must we choose?

Other than word-of-mouth, nothing brings people to a website faster than a good search engine ranking. With the unending proliferation of pages on the Internet, optimizing your website to have a high ranking on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN is becoming all-important for some businesses.

Search engine optimization (SEO) involves a whole range of actions. Optimizing written content in particular means, among other things, ensuring that keywords for which you want a high search ranking are adequately represented in your website’s text. So, if your site has music reviews and you want it to rank high whenever people search for the term “classical contemporary music,” then make sure you use that term frequently in your website.

Writers run into trouble, though, when they try to cram keywords into their web content. The more keywords, the thinking goes, the higher the ranking. But while a high density of keywords may help boost your ranking (and even then, it’s not guaranteed), it’s hard to get your text to sound natural when every third sentence contains those keywords. Even worse than awkward-sounding sentences are grammatical errors that creep into your text from trying to wedge words into a sentence that is better expressed differently.

As a result, while you may be drawing more people to your site with your keywords, if visitors find a site that's difficult to understand and unprofessional, your credibility will suffer. And lost credibility will negate the effort you put into drawing people to your site in the first place.

The solution is to find a balance between using keywords and retaining natural, correct text. A 5% density is relatively easy to sustain. That is, for every hundred words, five are keywords. 10% is harder but still possible. Go much higher than that and you're asking for trouble.

SEO is important, but it doesn’t have to be at the expense of good grammar or a professional style.