Search Engine Optimization & Your Message

Why should you care about SEO?

I can just write my website content and not worry about SEO. Are you sure? Do you even know what SEO is? Website content is about more than your message. If only it were that simple. Along with writing an effective message, professional content writers know the importance of SEO – search engine optimization.

Open the yellow pages and find your company listing. What category are you listed under? Everyone in that category is listed alphabetically. Maybe you and some of the others have paid extra to have a display ad or your company listing in red. Now go to the Internet and search for that category. How many thousands of websites are listed? A quick glance should tell you that they are not in order by the alphabet, city, region, or even country. Why is one website listed first, and what causes another to be listed 10,245,786th?

While computers don’t have money to spend, they are what cause a website to be listed first or last in a category. On the Internet, words that describe what a website offers are called keywords.

Traditional marketing materials focus on the customer. Online content has to be written for both people and computers.

Keywords are a major part of SEO and are crucial to getting a website listed high in the results. Professional content writers know about SEO and know how to pepper website content with targeted keywords, while avoiding excessive use (keyword stuffing) penalties and maintaining readability for your paying customers. Professional content writers will help to identify the keywords that should be targeted. They research how people search for companies like yours and look for keywords that will be most effective in bringing you new business.

Company X claims they can get me a top-ten listing in a week? Why should I hire you, you don’t promise that?

Professional online content writers write content that conforms to the rules of the web, makes effective use of keywords, and provides human-readable content.

While there are some professionals who are extremely talented at SEO (and charge accordingly), there are many more who are nothing more than snake oil salesmen. Like with all professions, there are companies who offer quick fixes that may even work for a while, but often fall flat with time. Unscrupulous SEO companies can get a website permanently removed (delisted) from the major search engines and directories. Be extremely careful with anyone who makes big promises regarding search engine placement.

SEO = keywords? Is it that easy? What about links?

Along with keywords; links affect where a website is listed on the search engines and directories. Links are where other websites mention the name of your website and provide a way for their visitors to come directly to your site.

SEO & YMC

I will work with you to determine how people might search for you on the Internet. I will then write online content that both informs and highlights our targeted keywords.

Any web-related work that I do for you will always be done with search engine optimization in mind.