Why It Pays to Have Your Web Content Edited by a Professional Before You Put It Online
Whenever you sit down to do some serious writing, it is important to take into consideration the size of the readership you are targeting; that is, whether you are expecting just one person, or a hundred persons or perhaps a hundred thousand readers to peruse the material you are composing.
Some writers pay meticulous attention to all aspects of writing when drafting a document such as say, a business letter, even when it is intended solely for the eyes of a single recipient.
No doubt the writer in this case would be a stickler for accuracy who also realizes the value and benefits of communicating effectively and making a good impression on the reader.
In marked contrast to this, you will also find writers who will dash out prose hastily and quite carelessly even when there is a great likelihood of their work eventually reaching a very wide audience.
Regrettably, quite a number of web content writers seem to belong to the latter category.
They do not seem to care that their work is going to be scrutinized by people scattered across more than 200 countries and territories spanning the globe.
In fact, their work may be so mediocre that if they were to submit a sample of their literary output to a book publisher, the material would either be rejected outright or accepted for publication only under the proviso that the work would first be subjected to extensive editing or even rewriting.
This would be so because book publishers need to exercise at least a modicum of quality control if they are to survive in business.
Fortunately or unfortunately, no such constraints apply to websites because the Internet makes it possible for everyone to enjoy the freedom of the wild ass.
You can upload anything to a server without worrying about quality control issues.
But please keep in mind this hard truth.
If you want your website to become popular with users and attract a regular readership, or in the case of a commercial website you wish to convince potential customers and win regular orders, then you need to pay attention to the wording and presentation of its written content.
Reason and common sense would dictate that the larger the readership you anticipate, the greater the care with which you should compose your writing.
And few things possess a greater potential for attracting a large readership than a website.
Indeed, an average site may be visited by thousands or even tens of thousands of visitors during the course of a year.
Upon visiting a website, many of them take less than a minute to decide whether to continue reading or jump to another site.
So you need to make sure that you hold their attention right away.
There is also another compelling reason for devoting painstaking care when developing web content.
Not only should the material appeal to humans, it needs to strike the right chord in the search engine robots too.
If you ignore this point, then the chances of your website appearing within the first 100 search results will be pretty remote! In most websites the webmaster and the content provider work together as a team, and their areas of expertise will be quite different.
The webmaster no doubt will be familiar with search engine optimization (SEO) techniques and he will apply same to the title, meta tags, alt attributes, file names, links etc relating to each page.
But the content writer should also know a few things about optimizing web pages.
If your website is to appear early in the search results, then the combined SEO inputs of the webmaster and the content writer should mesh together neatly.
Only then will you get the synergy that will boost the ranking of your site.
The usual practice though is for the content provider to hand over his write-up to the webmaster so that the latter may optimize same by stuffing it with keywords and key phrases.
This approach often works, but webmasters are generally not noted for their stylish prose and they are likely to disrupt the flow of text by inserting keywords indiscriminately.
Their contribution would therefore be best confined to the invisible code and the visible page layout.
An alternative approach, such as getting a professor of English renowned for his erudite knowledge of English literature and the rules of grammar to edit the content may not help either, unless he is quite familiar with SEO techniques.
Therefore, the best solution would be to submit your work to a professional editor who is proficient in English and also familiar with the intricacies of search engine optimization.
By reviewing and analyzing the site carefully he will be able to identify the most appropriate keywords and key phrases applicable to each page and then blend them in seamlessly into the content.
This approach will render your website more appealing to people and ensure that it makes the right impression on those creepy bots, crawlers and spiders too.
Some writers pay meticulous attention to all aspects of writing when drafting a document such as say, a business letter, even when it is intended solely for the eyes of a single recipient.
No doubt the writer in this case would be a stickler for accuracy who also realizes the value and benefits of communicating effectively and making a good impression on the reader.
In marked contrast to this, you will also find writers who will dash out prose hastily and quite carelessly even when there is a great likelihood of their work eventually reaching a very wide audience.
Regrettably, quite a number of web content writers seem to belong to the latter category.
They do not seem to care that their work is going to be scrutinized by people scattered across more than 200 countries and territories spanning the globe.
In fact, their work may be so mediocre that if they were to submit a sample of their literary output to a book publisher, the material would either be rejected outright or accepted for publication only under the proviso that the work would first be subjected to extensive editing or even rewriting.
This would be so because book publishers need to exercise at least a modicum of quality control if they are to survive in business.
Fortunately or unfortunately, no such constraints apply to websites because the Internet makes it possible for everyone to enjoy the freedom of the wild ass.
You can upload anything to a server without worrying about quality control issues.
But please keep in mind this hard truth.
If you want your website to become popular with users and attract a regular readership, or in the case of a commercial website you wish to convince potential customers and win regular orders, then you need to pay attention to the wording and presentation of its written content.
Reason and common sense would dictate that the larger the readership you anticipate, the greater the care with which you should compose your writing.
And few things possess a greater potential for attracting a large readership than a website.
Indeed, an average site may be visited by thousands or even tens of thousands of visitors during the course of a year.
Upon visiting a website, many of them take less than a minute to decide whether to continue reading or jump to another site.
So you need to make sure that you hold their attention right away.
There is also another compelling reason for devoting painstaking care when developing web content.
Not only should the material appeal to humans, it needs to strike the right chord in the search engine robots too.
If you ignore this point, then the chances of your website appearing within the first 100 search results will be pretty remote! In most websites the webmaster and the content provider work together as a team, and their areas of expertise will be quite different.
The webmaster no doubt will be familiar with search engine optimization (SEO) techniques and he will apply same to the title, meta tags, alt attributes, file names, links etc relating to each page.
But the content writer should also know a few things about optimizing web pages.
If your website is to appear early in the search results, then the combined SEO inputs of the webmaster and the content writer should mesh together neatly.
Only then will you get the synergy that will boost the ranking of your site.
The usual practice though is for the content provider to hand over his write-up to the webmaster so that the latter may optimize same by stuffing it with keywords and key phrases.
This approach often works, but webmasters are generally not noted for their stylish prose and they are likely to disrupt the flow of text by inserting keywords indiscriminately.
Their contribution would therefore be best confined to the invisible code and the visible page layout.
An alternative approach, such as getting a professor of English renowned for his erudite knowledge of English literature and the rules of grammar to edit the content may not help either, unless he is quite familiar with SEO techniques.
Therefore, the best solution would be to submit your work to a professional editor who is proficient in English and also familiar with the intricacies of search engine optimization.
By reviewing and analyzing the site carefully he will be able to identify the most appropriate keywords and key phrases applicable to each page and then blend them in seamlessly into the content.
This approach will render your website more appealing to people and ensure that it makes the right impression on those creepy bots, crawlers and spiders too.
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