I suspect Michel knows the finer points of grammar but like many of us deliberately creates grammatical hiccups. (Notice how I left out the words ‘that’ and ‘he’?)

I won’t put up with bad grammar, but if disruption creates attention then all bets are off.

Oops. Let me reword that:

Bad grammar is something up with which I will not put.

He he

Jonathan

You are a copywriter so I’d just like to inform you of the following thing that could be fixed in your post above:

“This is not because I disagree with anything Ryan said, because he makes some great points. But because I think there are ways around it.” - Michel fortin

This quote displays incorrect use of punctuation and the word “but.” It should be rewritten as follows:

This is not because I disagree with anything particular that Ryan said, as he makes some great points, but because I think there are ways around [this issue].

White papers can be a great example of copy and content living happily.

I like how you put this out there.

I have never heard these terms before.

Well put.

Mike

That’s the way I’ve always done it. I never really spent time on SEO. That said, there are tweaks to the code I do that help the search engines index my site. But for links and content, I just keep focusing on providing my audience with what they want. The rest works itself out in the end. (In fact, that’s how I’ve been doing it for over a decade online.)

@Joanna:

Exactly. Right on. I tell my clients to hire SEO experts when it comes to coding or some link building (even that is arguable). But as for content, just keep focusing on the audience. Because it’s ALL about the audience, isn’t it?

Thanks for this thoughtful and practical post.

I think there is a big risk of people getting hung up on writing with the IT in mind. This gets in the way of the things that are really important to quality writing like flow, or finding your own voice. (I am thinking here of people new to blogging rather than professional copywriters).

I liked the way you framed the technical end of it (like search engines, code, additional traffic) as part and parcel of the same thing: your audience, your visitors, your readers. And that at the end of the day is who and what we are writing for.

Joanna

cheers
Adam

You’re exactly right. When you have a dynamic site like a blog or CMS site, and you continuously write quality content that uses phrases relevant to your niche, you’ll naturally draw the attention of the search engines.

And all content is really copy, whether it’s simply there to draw people to the site, or explicitly enticing the visitor to a take a particular action. For one thing, your content title can read like any headline, creating curiosity, controversy, or whatever to get the user to click on the link. Then, there’s what you put in the meta description - it’s like the lead in a sales letter. You can write it such that you draw the user further into the article or to click on the link from the search engines.

Writing naturally has another side benefit with the search engines: you’ll create more long-tail references, which can bring you more traffic to the site.

The article itself can easily be written like a sales letter without being a sales letter. You’ve got a strong headline (title), solid lead (first paragraph that entices them to read further), provide benefit statements (the main points of your article), and creates a close (the conclusion). The difference is what you do with your close/conclusion. One trick is to close with a reference to another, related article on your site. Another is to close with a reference to a resource that provides more information or assistance. This resource can be your own product, or ideally, an affiliate product.

Sid

Quoting you:

“Personally, I don’t spend time on things like keyword optimization and density. I look at it this way: give what your users want, and you will naturally give what the search engines want. … The objective is to focus on your audience…. “

Right on the money:

This for me is almost the complete answer, because the search engines, above all else, now look for “experts in the niche” websites.

This is why so many niche enthusiast sites do so well: They are chock full of niche jargon that someone unfamiliar with the subject could never write. But the search engines (Google in particular) know all about that jargon, by constantly comparing and contrasting websites on the same subject, and arrow in on those websites that not only use that language but frequently add more of it .

The good news for real experts is that keyword optimisation which uses keywords in websites or articles that are from ‘top paying keywords’ type lists will not cut it at all soon in terms driving traffic.

Worse still, the number of inbound links to a website (or votes for the site if you like) is beginning to play a far smaller role now than it used to, and will count for less and less.

By contrast, expert text (like yours on copy writing) glows with oblique references, weird aphorisms, strange but wonderful jargon, special phrases, and word relationships that a non-expert does not know exist.

This is the great user experience Google wants in its search results, and by God they are going to have it.

Try looking at a Hobbyist forum. The rankings are often far higher than commercial sites who don’t know the buzzwords and jargon….

The day of the keyword stuffer is rapidly ending, and the dawn of the the expert who freely writes about a subject he loves is to hand. Watch out for it: Soon everyone will be talking about “Latent Semantic Indexing” otherwise known by Google as ‘true expert context’.

Jeeez that was a bit of a rant eh?

Jonathan

Bonus: The page still makes an income from the lead generation and only from organic search results.