How To Write Online - The Big Difference
Wednesday, Sep 24, 2008
In a series of three articles we will advance into the dilemma of building website content to please both search engines and stimulate visitor interest. Search engine optimization is today an important part of writing an article online or publishing a blog post. In the name of journalism and independent writing this can of course be seen as an unfair compromise, forcing editors to include attractive, yet unfitting keywords in both titles and content. However, the sooner we realize that Google is running the show and that SEO is a must, the sooner we can accept the rules of engagement and focus on writing good quality content.
“We are all underdogs until our websites rank high in Google and daily visitor traffic volume is by the thousands. It is then we can write to write, rather than to please the search engines”
Writing is seldom anything but a compromise between creating independent texts and altering them so they'll sell better or draw more attention. A complicated art form only possibly understood by the crowds if made overexplicit and simple. Offline journalists have to deal with chief editors, small budgets and competitive colleagues, but at least they often already have a base of loyal readers.
Writing is seldom anything but a compromise between creating independent texts and altering them so they'll sell better or draw more attention. A complicated art form only possibly understood by the crowds if made overexplicit and simple. Offline journalists have to deal with chief editors, small budgets and competitive colleagues, but at least they often already have a base of loyal readers.
Online writers and webmasters have to face the demands and requirements of the search engines to even get as little as one reader. Of course there are other ways, like traditional offline marketing to get traffic to a website, but it is not near as efficient or cost-effective. Furthermore, large traffic amounts does affect how a website ranks in Google, MSN Search or Yahoo, but it does not guarantee anything. A temporary ad campaign in TV, radio etc will at most temporarily increase traffic volume. Ranking high in Google will "permanently" increase traffic.
However, simply inserting keywords in the title and body may qualify a text as search engine optimized, but it does not mean it will rank high in the search engines. The same rules apply online as offline; in order to get red, texts have to contain a level of quality. Though a poorly written text that has been properly optimized for the search engines can rank high, it is normally only temporary. Remember that the average reader is much pickier with information and sources online than offline.
The E-reader
Writing a text to be published and red online is not the same thing as writing for offline reading. It's computer screen vs. paper print, the same reader however with completely different routines of reading. Online, it is all about finding specific answers to quite specific questions, googling for fast and accurate information, entering websites, scanning its content and exiting for a new website if the information is not found within the first minute.
An internet-user has an immense amount of sources to choose between while people in the analog world often are too comfortable to change even a newspaper subscription. On such a competitive market good quality content is hence essential for the prosperity and growth of a website. Knowing what your website visitors are looking for and supplying it is the winning concept of a successful website.
More to come
Hopefully you now have an insight how it is to write texts for online publication. Understanding how the average internet-user acts and reads when entering a website is essential in becoming good at web-copy. It is under these terms online quality content is produced. And the following two articles in this series will be devoted to exploring and explaining how to write online texts that are interesting for the reader as well as the search engines.
