Content Writing & Copywriting Blog

Happy New Year

Dec 31, 2005 No Comments »

SEO Content is good for your business

Dec 26, 2005 No Comments »

Some web masters try to undermine the importance of SEO content because they think if they are already paying for AdWords and similar programs, getting optimized content for their websites doesn’t make sense. Well, they are getting it all wrong.
Such confusions takes place because very few people know what optimization really means. They think optimization is carried out merely to get found by the search engine robots and get ranked higher. Yes, this is a big reason to get your website optimized, but a bigger reason is, when you get your website content written by a “good” website content writer – content you call optimized – he or she writes it in such a manner that it lucidly conveys your message to the reader. This is what matters the most, and this is what very few website content writer can achieve for you: getting your message across, and writing search engine friendly content along the way. There is no use getting found and get listed among the top 10 results if people who come to your website don’t actually want to do business with you. If you’re getting high traffic for all the wrong reasons, you are not only not doing business, you are also spending money on the bandwidth that is being used by the useless traffic.
Content that is optimized for the right traffic automatically gets optimized for search engines. And if you optimize your content for search engines with a clear perspective, your content automatically gets optimized for your readers. So when you are optimizing your content for search engines – in the right manner – you are actually doing a favor to your business.

Merry Christmas

Dec 25, 2005 No Comments »

About being an SEO writer

Dec 23, 2005 No Comments »

People from my website often ask me, “Are you an SEO writer?”
I always reply in the affirmative. I think I’ve always been an SEO writer because if you really understand who an SEO writer is, you know that every good writer – a writer who understands how to talk about a product or a service – is an SEO writer.
Don’t know what SEO means? It means search engine optimization. So, what exactly is SEO writing and how you can be an SEO writer?
When a searcher, for instance at Google, searches for a keyword or a key phrase, Google tries to rank the resulting links according to what they contain. Do they have information the searcher is looking for? What web pages have the most appropriate text? The job of an SEO writer is to convince the search engine robot – in the right manner – that OK, this is the web page that talks a lot about the term the searcher is searching for. The SEO should write the content of the page in such a manner that it should look very convincing to the search engine robot?
But does this suffice? No. The SEO writer doesn’t only have to satisfy the search engines. The SEO writer should also make sense to the readers, the human readers. The SEO content is written in such a manner that it should use the search terms enough times, but not more, and not less. Take for instance this article. The phrase SEO writer appears again and again, but unless your attention is specifically brought to it, you don’t realize that the phrase is being used again and again. This is the difference between an SEO spammer and an SEO writer. An SEO writer knows how to write and how to use the required key phrase again and again without resorting to needless keyword-stuffing, as you may have witnessed on many websites.
An SEO writer – apart from being a good writer – should also be aware of how the source of the web page appears to the search engines. Although it’s not necessary that an SEO writer should know how to create web pages, a fair knowledge of XHTML and the rudimentary tags can be of great help. It’s not enough that a page should have the rightly written optimized content (although for human reader this is enough). Quite often the search engine robots get lost in the quagmire of badly created web pages. For instances, all the header information should be there. The opening tags should be accompanied by closing tabs. There should be no dead links. Preferable, the links should contain the key phrases being searched for. A proper sitemap should exist in the root directory of the website.
So what makes you a good SEO writer? Respect your readers first of all. Don’t mislead them, don’t write something you don’t mean to write. Write to the point, and unless you are experimenting with literary forms, be as succinct as possible.
On the other hand, being an SEO writer doesn’t mean you totally get trapped in the SEO stuff and start writing very rigid stuff. Always remember that even while being an SEO writer, your writing should touch the reader. It should leave an affect. You cannot succeed as an SEO writer if you can only bring in tonnes of traffic. That traffic has to generate business. You need to create music, and not noise.

Contrasting feedback is an integral part of working as a content writer

Dec 21, 2005 No Comments »

I’ve been working as a web content writer and freelance copywriter for more than two years now. This is the official time I’m talking about. Unofficially – not promoting my content writing service through a website, not advertising in AdWords, not optimizing my website for the relevant keywords, etc. — since 1995 I think. Back then I wrote many learning modules and had created a niche in the local computer learning centers by writing easy to understand, humorous tutorials. People didn’t know much about the Dummies series back then, and neither did I.
Since then I’ve come a long way. Although I’m still designing websites (and I’m about to relaunch this part of my business shortly), if all of a sudden I stop developing and designing websites, I can manage my finances easily just writing content.
Two separate incidents evoked my desire to write this post. Yesterday I received a very “disappointing” feedback from a client. I don’t want to publish the email due to a strict policy I follow, but the client said the content was written in a miserable manner, had many grammatical errors, and somethings I wrote were not even remotely connected to the service he is providing. I immediately wrote back an apology and assured him that if need be, I’d completely re-write the whole thing. Re-writing is no big deal as the first draft – especially if it is a long, specialized copy – generally requires one or two re-writes.
Anyway, I thought maybe because I’m using OpenOffice’s Writer as my word processor I messed up with the grammar part somehow. I opened the document in MS-Word and it didn’t show the mentioned grammatical errors. Then word-by-word I went through the whole thing. Maybe some style issues were there, but I didn’t find any syntactical errors. I wrote to the client, requesting him to point out the errors so that I could iron them out. Haven’t received a reply yet.
Then in the morning I received another feedback from another client, saying that her website has started making sales ever since I re-wrote her content. She wants me to write regularly for her and she hopes that my writing can make even the other website of hers successful.
I get the latter sort of comments more often and it is very rare that I receive the negative feedback. Negative feedbacks are humbling, they keep you on your toes, and even if you think that to some extent they shouldn’t be negative, the make you learn and re-learn your skill on an ongoing basis.