Last year, a bunch of copy­writ­ers who also blog — like yours truly — shot the breeze on the Nuts and Blog­bolts talk radio show.

It was an inter­est­ing and at times spir­ited discussion.

After some talk about con­tent and copy (or should I say, writ­ing con­tent ver­sus writ­ing copy), the show’s host, Mike San­sone, asked each pan­elist if we would indi­vid­u­ally respond on our blogs to this question:

“Writ­ing for the vis­i­tor is more impor­tant than writ­ing for the search engines. Can both be met with­out sac­ri­fic­ing quality?”

Ryan Healy posted his answer on the sub­ject. Good answer. I agree with him, because he makes some great points. But I also dis­agree as I think there are ways around it.

So I guess my answer is both “yes” and “no.” Here’s why.

First off, I’m not a search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO) expert by any stretch. How­ever, I do know enough about SEO to know that it’s pri­mar­ily based on three major factors:

Code, links, and content.

Let’s take a look at each one…

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The “Google Slap.” You’ve heard of it. You were prob­a­bly affected by it. Essen­tially, Google, the world’s largest search engine, recently penal­ized a whole bunch of sites because they, too, judged them to be of poor quality.

Either they dimin­ished their pager­anks into obliv­ion, or they increased their AdWords costs by jack­ing up the prices if the cam­paigns led to poor con­tent. (And as you prob­a­bly know, this has dri­ven a lot of mar­keters out of business.)

But keep in mind, Google didn’t make this change by pulling it out of thin air or to dic­ta­to­ri­ally decide what’s good for the Inter­net. They’re sim­ply fol­low­ing what peo­ple want and giv­ing it to them.

(In fact, when Google makes such major changes, let it be a good indi­ca­tor of what’s going on in the marketplace.)

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