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Good Search Engine Marketing Depends on Good Writing

By Virginia Lawrence

When you’re marketing a Web site, you’re writing and editing for the site visitors and for the search engines too. You are writing the words that your customers and the search engines are looking for.

Good site content, or information, is absolutely necessary for any Web site offering goods or services. You start by confirming that the Web site has enough text content that’s accessible to the search engines. This means that critical text cannot be within the graphics on the site, because search engines cannot "read" the text in graphics. The text must be directly available as text on each Web page.

For the search engines, the Web site text must be carefully worded to include the most important keywords for the page.

For the site visitors, the text must be compelling. It must inform the site visitor about the products/services offered by your site. Also, the text must encourage appropriate visitor responses, such as buying online or contacting you, the site owner, for more information.

After developing or editing the site text for search engines and visitors, you as the Web marketer will develop the important meta tags. The Title tag is the tag most obvious to the site visitor, because he sees the contents of the Title tag in the very top line of his browser. The Title tag also tells the search engine the topic of the page, and this helps the search engine to evaluate the importance of the page for that topic.

The meta Description tag is not noticeable to the visitor on the page, but that tag is used by many of the search engines. They use that tag in determining the page contents, so a well-crafted Description meta tag helps the search engines to rank the page. In addition, search engines often use the description tag as the text displayed in your listing within the list of sites resulting from a search. Thus, a good Description tag entices the searcher to click on your link within the list of pages returned for the search.

Yes, Web site marketing is dependent on good writing. Your Web pages are your communication materials. The text within your Web pages must clarify your message, incorporate your important keywords, persuade the searcher to visit your page, and beguile the searcher into responding to your site’s offerings. Whether you’re writing for your own Web site or on contract for someone else’s Web site, your good writing is vital to that site’s success!

—© 2005 Virginia Lawrence, Ph.D., SPAWN's Webmaster and Technology Editor, is a professional Web Developer and Online Marketing Consultant. She routinely places client sites on the first page of a Google search. Contact her at virginia@spawn.org or visit her Web site at http://www.cognitext.com.

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