Say it ain’t seo, Joe.

Say it ain’t seo, Joe.

May 25th, 2011 // 6:18 pm @ andy // 2 Comments

Hello there. How are you doing today then? Everything ok? Life going well? No grey clouds, ( volcanic ash notwithstanding ), on the horizon? Everything just tickety boo? Well bully for you, you smug git.

I’ve had a couple of days of nightmarish techno-fear. Well, I say techno-fear. It’s probably a walk in the park for loads of you out there but for me it was a nightmare. My website went down on me you see, ( which is nothing like as pleasurable as it might sound by the way. Just imagine my disappointment ), and with it my andy@whitewriting.com email address. For me, such events are nothing less than terrifying as they mean I have to get involved with the dark arts and wizardry that make the World Wide Web work. And that’s just not me at all. I know, as a copywriter of some repute, ( please don’t snigger, you just look stupid with that stupid sniggery stupid face of yours ), I probably should know the ins and outs of the internet but I’d really rather not. I have quite enough useless rubbish tumbling around in my head without having  http, html, coding and all that malarkey jostling for elbow room. So, as I always do in these circumstances, I phoned someone who does know about such matters. In this case Gary at Mediaburst. Gary’s ace Gary is and he knows this stuff so it all got sorted out in a matter of moments. Turns out these ‘Web hosts’ need paying from time to time. Who knew?

Anyway, while all this was being cleared up, Gary decided to check out how my site was performing SEO wise. Now I’ve never claimed to be the World’s leading authority on SEO but it turns out I’ve not really paid the kind of attention I give to clients’ websites in that area to my own. You see, having done one of those ‘Keyword density’ test things it turns out that, according to Google, I’m not a Manchester copywriter at all. I am in fact Stockport’s leading Radio Art Director. Now that would be simply lovely if I was in fact a Radio Art Director, better still if there were such a thing as a Radio Art Director. But there isn’t. You see that would be a bit like being Radio’s leading make-up artist, set designer, juggler or fire-eater. So saying, there was a ventriloquist with his own radio show some years back. That’s a great gig isn’t it? He must have had a terrific agent, in fact I think he’s still in the business, working closely with the Commissioning Director of ITV 3.

So, having taken some SEO advice on board and with a view to increasing my ‘hits’, I’ve spent some time this afternoon shoehorning the words ‘copywriter’, ‘copy’, ‘writer’, ‘Manchester’ and ‘Stockport’ into the home page of The Whitewriting website. Which leads me neatly to a subject close to my heart. And that  subject is, copy written specifically to work for SEO.  I hate it and it is, by and large, bloody awful. Just clunky and clumsy and horrible. Ok, it may appeal to the spiders that run the search engines but once you click a link, arrive and start reading, you pretty quickly want to stop reading. I wrote a post about it a while ago, if you didn’t read it then, you can have a look by clicking here.  The problem as I see it is, once you start to rely on on keyword heavy copy to reel in the search engines, it destroys what I like to think of as ‘real’ copywriting. Words that flow, pulling the reader along for a pleasant ride, sometimes meandering to take in an interesting thought or two, occasionally stopping off at a particular idea. Hopefully providing a little entertainment along the way.

I’m not going to go though it all again here because it would just get repetitive and slightly dull, wouldn’t it? Very much like SEO copywriting in fact. However, I suppose I’ll have to face up to it and try to make my site just that bit more SEO friendly.

Either that or remain Stockport’s leading Radio Art Director.

 

 

 

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