Writing Blogger

There’s a must-read article on SiteProNews’s Web site about what the drive to create SEO-friendly copy has done to the quality and readability of content all over the Web, and the seemingly casual disdain many writers and site publishers have for their readers.

The writer (Karon Thackston) has plenty of really helpful things to say and practical tips for how to write effective online copy that you can also read. My fear is that she’s tilting at windmills, but hopefully hers is a voice that will grow louder and be heard.

Read the whole thing.

It all starts with the search. Unless you own a domain name that’s already highly well known, search queries are the vehicle through which most, if not all, of your visitors will arrive at your Web site. And what they’re going to be looking for, before they’ve thought of a product or service you might sell, is information.

Of course, each user who visits your site will eventually make a decision on what kind of product or service to purchase (or not to purchase), but in the meantime, information is what they’re seeking. They’re in the process of making a decision about something that’s important to their businesses, their careers or their lives. In between the moment they first click through to your site and when they decide what action to take next, your site plays a highly meaningful role.

What does that mean for how you might approach designing and writing for your site, in practical terms? Keep these three things in mind: Your page header meta descriptions, your first paragraph, and how you end the content on a page.

“Window shopping” on search engines with Meta Descriptions

If you’re familiar at all with HTML coding, you’ll notice several items in the code for a Web page if you ever view the source code in your browser. At the top of the page, your site should contain “< HEAD >” tags, followed by several lines that begin with “< meta >.” The meta “description” tag is one of the most important in this list, especially for search engines like Google, which display the contents of your meta description tag word-for-word in their search results pages.

A well-crafted meta description tag not only can get you ranked higher in the results, but also can serve as a way to “brand” your results by putting your words upfront for users to select, rather than having a search engine randomly select relevant text from your page for its results. Your meta description tag should be relatively brief (75 to 100 words maximum), and should stick to noun phrases that announce your site’s goals and intended audiences clearly and succinctly.

Like a thing of beauty, a great lede is a joy forever

Well, maybe that’s overdoing it a bit. But you get the idea. Short, pithy lede sentences and paragraphs are the mother’s milk of the Web, and are as important to online copywriting as they are to the great stories of the ages. Who can forget “Call me Ishmael” or “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”?

Not that I’m arguing for bombastic prose that takes itself too seriously — just that it’s important to offer answers to your users’ questions that are direct and on-point. Readers in any medium, but especially online readers, don’t want to wade through three or four paragraphs to get to the main idea of what you’re trying to communicate. They want to see it as soon as possible, and that means in the first few words of the very first sentence.

All’s well that ends well

Though many may disagree, I believe the final paragraph or sentence in your copy is every bit as important as the first. Assuming your site user makes it to the end of the content on a given page on your site, the end is the point when a decision can be made, a question answered, a problem solved. Here is where you can provide that answer, solution, or goal.

As soon as I was finished typing the headline above, I realized I probably should’ve asked the question “what makes a great Web page?” We probably all know, in a general sense, what makes for good Web copy — shorter, more concise copy, with plenty of headers and subheaders to break up blocks of text on a page, filled with search-relevant keywords.

That, of course, helps when you want to get your Web site seen by the search engines. But what makes an actual great Web page, from the point of view of the reader? From this writer’s perspective, I think having a narrative focus to the page is as important as it is when you’re writing a journalistic-style feature story.

It’s critical that each page have a “beginning,” “middle” and an “end,” in the same way that a news or even a fiction story does. You’re telling a story of what a business does, or how it solves a problem, and you want the reader to find your story compelling (or at least interesting, right?). To do that, your Web pages have to have a narrative structure.

In my next post, I’ll post some examples from clients I’ve worked with and other examples I’ve found on the Web… have to run at the moment!

Don’t know about you, but the weather outside sure makes potential distractions outside the house less appealing on days like this. No wonder I’m getting more work done!!

In the meantime, I’m also checking out some new business writing blogs (well, they’re new to me, anyway) that are worth a look. Here’s a few:

Business Writing Blog - by Lynn Gaertner-Johnston, a regularly updated blog on business writing whose theme lately deals with asking the right — and sometimes tough — questions when you’re on the job as a business writer.

CopyBlogger - one of the truly invaluable blogs on commercial & advertising copywriting out there.

Copywriter Underground - another indispensable daily read for us writers, with added perspectives on what it’s like to be a freelancer and with thoughts, ideas and opinions from other creative professionals

There’s a great discussion going on over at MediaBistro.com that’s titled “The Most Grueling Job in Media” but which has developed into a discussion about the high-stress, 24-7 demands of working in the publishing industry today (or really any highly competitive industry today, for that matter).

It really got me thinking — how do you, as a freelance writer or as a business/corporate communications writer or editor, place limits around the time you’re willing to give to your work and your clients? Do you simply shut off at a certain time of day (say, 6 o’clock?) and call it a day, or do you find yourself working at all hours of the night?

I know for most, the temptation is to work all kinds of odd and crazy hours, and to be available for any task no matter how big or small, especially because freelancers and contractors always have to hustle to get that next job, so your reputation could be on the line if you fall down on the job, so to speak. But how far is too far in that direction?

Interested to hear others’ $0.02.

You’ve probably come across this in your career oh, probably a thousand times or so. You’re reading a deliverable document or white paper for a project or initiative within your company, and the size of the document is the thing you notice the most about it. When I used to work in consulting, it was called the “thud” factor, this idea that anything we delivered to a client had to look like a phone book in order to validate the hours and hours we spent working on our deliverables for them.

Why is business writing like this? Why can’t we adopt more often the writing philosophy and practices of the Ernest Hemingways of the world, and simply be simple and clear? I think it’s all related to that idea of the “thud” factor — that we have to try to appear to have spent eons of time on our work, no matter whether simple might be more effective or not.

When writing for a client, I try always to keep in mind one of the most essential ideas of Strunk and White — “omit needless words.” That places a premium on editing and re-writing, which is actually the heart and soul of all good writing, when you think of it. As Hemingway himself once said so appropriately, “the first draft of anything is sh*t.”

I’m afraid I took a much more extended break from blogging than I intended, and it’s already a little over a month since my last post. I’ll be posting more in this section very soon, on some business writing topics that all of us encounter whether we work full-time or on a freelance basis for companies. In the meantime, I found an excellent article on the value good writing brings to business, especially in the day and age we live in. Money quote:

“People have been complaining about the quality of student writing since Plato,” said Kate Ronald, an English professor who runs the school’s Howe Writing Initiative. “But I think businesses are paying more attention to it. Businesses today are doing so much more writing, and doing it so much more publicly - because so much of the discourse is discussed on the screen rather than on paper.”

You can read the whole thing here.

A book I haven’t yet read — but have read quite a bit about lately — that keeps popping up in the back of my mind is W. Chan Kim’s and Renee Mauborgne’s “The Blue Ocean Strategy,” a book about the situation businesses face in trying to catapult themselves out of the “red ocean” of bloody struggle against multiple competitors into the “blue ocean” that they alone occupy.

That got me thinking. With the many, many, many freelance copywriters and business/commercial writers who are out there in any major city (in my hometown, for example, Google lists 257,000 results when you enter a search for “Atlanta copywriter”), how does an individual writer stand out from the pack?

I think the answer lies in part in offering a unique service — say, specializing in fields like technology or medical-related writing — but also in the relationships you develop with potential and existing clients. When there are competitors out there by the thousands doing what you do, the thing that makes you unique is, after all, you.

That realization makes it all the more important to build strong bonds with clients based on providing high-quality, on-time service and on trust. Those may sound like simple things, but time and time again they’re the things that matter, especially when you’re an individual working to sell your services in a competitive business arena.

Just my thoughts for the day — I’ll pick up again after the Christmas holiday. Everyone have a wonderful holiday and see you next week.

Getting your website to the top of the search results in Google or any other search engine these days is a tall order for every writer. With so many writer’s websites already on the Web, the competition is indeed stiff, and it’s important to be patient and allow optimizing tips you incorporate into your site the time to yield results in the search engines.

While you may not get to a number-one ranking in Google, you can move your site up in the rankings by making it easier for search engine algorithms to “understand.” Here’s a few tips that will help get your site noticed:

Write Accurate, Keyword-rich Meta Tag Descriptions

If you’re used to using HTML, you’ll notice a piece of code near the top of the source code for your website pages that reads something like this:

< META NAME = "description" CONTENT = "Description goes here.">

This is an example of what’s called a meta tag, and it’s the piece of code that Google reads — and displays in its search results pages — to show to users what your site is about. The description from the meta tag fills the non-clickable, plain text description just underneath the clickable website title in a Google search result.

This is where you want your “elevator pitch” to occur. By using a pithy, keyword-rich description (such as “Chicago, Illinois-based copywriter specializing in copywriting, sales and marketing materials for the restaurant industry”), you make your site more relevant both to Google’s results and to Web users scanning a page looking for the closest match to their search terms.

Include Relevant Keywords in Your Website Title

Your website’s title — which appears in the blue bar at the top of your browser — needs to include the search terms potential clients are most likely to use when they search for writers, copywriters and related vendors who sell the kinds of services you offer.

These terms help both Google “find” you when users search on “Chicago copywriter,” for example, and for users scanning a search results page — if you include the exact search terms that were keyed in the search, you’re more likely to receive clicks from potential clients.

Your website’s title is also highly important for Microsoft’s MSN Live Search, much more so than on Google in fact. And with the introduction of Windows Vista early in 2007, it’s a safe bet that MSN Live Search will become a more important search engine to users in general because it’s likely to be integrated tightly into the new operating system.

Use Relevant Keywords In Your Home Page Text

Your home page’s textual content — the copy that introduces who you are, the services you offer, and sells potential clients on your value proposition — is perhaps the most important piece of real estate on your site from the perspective of a search engine.

Using algorithms and calculations that are far beyond the capability of my faculties to understand, search engines such as Google scour home pages from any number of related sites to determine which are the most relevant for a particular search word or phrase.

That’s why SEO experts often encourage website owners to fill their home pages with keywords — though as the point below will expand on, it’s easy to go too far with this. The point you should take away is that you should have a home page that real people can easily scan, read and understand, and which also includes ample relevant keywords so that Google and other search engines can detect its relevance as well.

Don’t Overdo Any Of The Above

One point to make in all of this — it’s very easy to overwrite or include too much content or too many keywords when you’re trying to optimize your site for search engine results. Google and other engines have caught onto this now and will penalize sites that try to “game” their results by stuffing their home pages with relevant keywords over and over in ways that no real person would find coherent or understandable.

That’s why it’s best to keep it simple by including keywords in each paragraph of your home page text. Just don’t make every word in every paragraph a search-friendly keyword.

Of all the books and articles that have been written over the past several years about how to succeed as a freelance writer or copywriter, a relative handful actually offer specific, practical advice on how to get started and market oneself successfully to potential clients. I’ve put together a list of just a few tips that have worked for me, but I’ll also expand on this topic in future posts. In the meantime, consider these tips:

American City Business Journals’ “Book Of Lists”

In most major cities throughout the country, the AmCity Business Journals publish what they call the “Book Of Lists,” filled with a breakdown of the top companies in each major industry in the city. Here where I work in Atlanta, the book provides lists of the top 25 and/or top 50 companies in industries such as Health Care, Hospitality, Retail, Manufacturing, Professional Services, Law Firms, Technology companies and a lot more. I find the book useful because it does the work for you of gathering contact information, Website URLs, addresses and potential people to contact when you want to market yourself to a group of companies in a specific industry. Of course, follow-up with marketing is also essential, but this book is an excellent place to start your marketing efforts in an organized way.

The “Book Of Lists” isn’t cheap — here in Atlanta, it retails for about $50 — but it’s well worth buying for the leg up it gives you and the time it saves you in tracking down target client information. You can find out more here.

Joining a Local Business Association

Local business associations, which meet monthly and sometimes as often as every week in some metro areas, are a great way to get yourself face-to-face with real-life potential clients. Many business people attend these meetings also for the purpose of meeting potential customers and clients, and you’d be surprised how many of them will be interested in the services of someone who can write effectively and clearly. Many are entrepreneurs or small business owners who simply don’t want to do their own writing, whether it’s for marketing materials, Web sites, or other media, and meeting them in person saves them the time and effort of having to track down someone on their own via Google or the phone book. It also gives potential clients a chance to meet you in person, which is the best way to market yourself of all.

Joining Local Freelance Organizations — Especially If They’re Large and Well-Established

Local freelance organizations — such as the Freelance Forum, a popular group for freelance writers, designers and marketing professionals in Atlanta — is a great way not only to have a sense of community with people who do what you do for a living, but also a way to get fresh, new ideas about areas of business you may not have thought of. Often there’s only a nominal fee for attending if you’re not a member, and they put you in the mix of people who can help you network and share job leads and potential assignments. All in all, they’re a great place to start, especially for beginning freelancers.