There's a deadly myth about search engine optimization and
writing for the web: that good SEO and good writing don't go
together.

As a website copywriter, I hear this myth repeated back to me
all the time by new clients and prospects. "Don't bother
search-engine-optimizing the content," they say. "Just make
sure it is well written and the keywords will flow naturally
into the content." Or, they repeat the words of so many
self-styled gurus: "don?t write for the search engines, write
for the people who will be reading what you write."

If you're one of the people who believe there's a conflict of
interest between search engines and humans, you're operating
under two misconceptions:

* Misconception 1: you know more about what people want to read
on the web than the search engines do.

* Misconception 2: you or your writer will just naturally write
the content that people or search engines want, without
consciously trying to meet their demands.

Why Search Engines Know More about Your Website Visitors than
You

"I want a well-written web page, not a list of keywords." It
frightens me a bit when I hear this, since it demonstrates a
complete lack of understanding of what search engines do.

A search engine is not simply a massive find function, like the
one in the "Edit" menu of Microsoft applications. It does not
just pull up any page that has the keyword in it X number of
times. If it did, all pages that show up on search engine
results would simply contain a list of the keywords.

Ultimately, writing for the search engines means writing for
web surfers. Think about it: services like Google thrive on
giving people the pages they want to read. If they consistently
failed to give people what they wanted, people would stop using
them.

What Your Website's Visitors Want to Read

Most of the time, people don't want to read on the web. Reading
on a screen hurts the eyes. It doesn't help that a lot of web
pages make it harder with text that's too small, backgrounds
that are colored rather than white, and lots of extraneous
graphics.

Besides, when it comes to reading matter, there is an
overabundance of choice on the web, more than any library on
earth. Of that, an unfortunate amount isn?t worth reading. Time
must be rationed.

In fact, people treat a web page much as a search engine does:
they scan it. In particular, they scan it for the keywords they
entered into the search engine. If they arrived via a link from
another website, they are still looking for words and phrases
related to their interest--which are generally the same as the
keywords people enter into search engines.

In short, Nobel-prize-winning literature makes bad web content.
You have to write specifically for the web. That's why the web
hasn't fueled much of a resurgence in the short story or other
literary writing, dashing many hopes. Ebook versions of paper
books have also disappointed expectations.

Newspapers are the only paper publications that have made a
smooth online transition, precisely because they are written in
short, to-the-point paragraphs that are easy to scan.

Still Think Good SEO Web Content Makes for Bad Reading?

You've just read almost to the end of a piece of
search-engine-optimized web content. This article was optimized
for the keywords, "SEO," "search engine," "search engines,"
"keyword," "keywords," "search engine optimization," and
"writing."

The keywords were present in headings and throughout the
content. The content itself is easy to scan: paragraphs of
one-three sentences, broken up by sub-headings every four
paragraphs or so.

Naturally, those keywords are too broad for this page to have a
chance of ranking high in search engines for them. But this page
will get some of the atypical search keywords that account for
as many as half of all searches. So, if someone types in a
phrase like, "keyword writing search engine optimized content,"
this page would have a pretty good chance of showing up.

To be sure, this article is on the long side for a web page.
Most people won?t even scan more than 600 words of text;
250-500 is ideal.

But this article is destined primarily to be shown in an email
newsletter, where attention spans are longer since people are
more confident the source of the content can be trusted to
repay their investment of time. Besides, as a well-structured
page, it can be split into two or three pages according to the
subheadings.

In short, there?s much more to writing well for the web than
just writing well. If you?ve had enough sense to have your web
content written professionally, have enough sense to take the
advice of most website copywriters: search-engine-optimization
for keywords and good web writing are the same thing.


About The Author:

Joel Walsh is a professional content writer
and founder of UpMarket Content, whose site offers information
on getting great website content:
http://upmarketcontent.com/website-content