Take the Time to Write Well!

Today I came across an article in Search Engine Land’s Strictly Business column that annoyed the hell out of me.  Not because I disagree with the point the author was trying to make. If I understand her correctly, I whole heartedly agree! I’m annoyed because the article was so poorly written the very important point she was trying to make got lost in bad writing! (you can read the article here. )

I believe that the overall point of the article is “When there is a mis-match between the key words you are targeting on a web page and the overall tone of the page copy, that web page won’t yield the results you expect. Here’s what you can do to fix it.”  I can only assume this was the point the author meant to make because at no point does the author tell the reader what point she is trying to make.

The Major Mistakes Made
1. The author breaks the Golden Rule of Copywriting which is “Tell the reader what you are going to tell them.  Tell them.  Then tell the reader what you told them.”

2. The other major mistake the author makes is that she doesn’t write like she would speak.  See the example below. Would you speak like this?

Bad Writing:
Considering that, it is important to first gain clarity about the issues affecting performance before prematurely changing your keywords. Otherwise, you might find yourself “throwing out the baby with the bathwater” when you toss keywords that seem to be underperforming.

Moreover, be mindful that changing keywords can greatly affect your visibility in the search results. Given that it takes a great deal of time and effort to achieve visibility on certain keywords, you need to consider whether or not any keywords changes are worthwhile

Plain English:
Changing keywords can have a big impact on your rankings and traffic.  You need to know what issues affect performance before you change the keywords you target.  Otherwise you run the risk of “throwing the baby out with the bath water.”

I could go through the article and give you more examples but I’m willing to bet at least 95% of the people reading this article bailed out before the author got around to explaining how to solve the problem.

Who’s to Blame?
I know how much guts it takes to put your work out there on the web. I don’t blame the author for this poor writing. I’m all for giving people the benefit of the doubt and I’m willing to bet that if the author set this article aside for a few days then ran it through the crucible one more time she’d be able to boil it down to the good stuff.

Who do I blame?  I blame the editors at Search Engine Land who should have read this with both eyes instead of just looking for an article to publish in this week’s column.

This could have been a really good column that generated links. Instead the author and the editors punted and missed a good opportunity. No wonder why people think social media doens’t work.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 11:58 am and is filed under Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.