Date: 16th May 2007

Indifference towards search engine marketing

It’s funny but I, recently, came to realize how little people in my part of the world know about search engine marketing. You should see the way I try to explain what I do, so, in the end, I always resort to “I write articles for websites, blogs and search engines”. If people ask me ”What do you mean by writing for search engines? You mean you write for search engines like google and yahoo…etc”. *sigh*

That is why most of my major clients are from other more internet-savvy nations…mostly US of A where most people know that a website needs to be marketed and worked on properly in order to have people come in. I tried marketing my search engine writing services to Malaysian, Singapore and Taiwan people but they just don’t get it. In fact, they think that since they’re not selling anything online, they don’t have to promote their websites through search engines and I am like EGAD!!! While it is true that their main focus is on local market, why not maximize the potential? Spread the word, get people to come in. There’s really no harm in impressing the search engines.

Well, I have been writing for the past 8 years and have not met a single net-savvy Malaysian yet. At least not someone who is familiar with search engine marketing. If I do come across a person who knows what search engine marketing is, I will surely let you guys know.

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Date: 26th February 2007 

Having a website is not enough!

What exactly are search engine articles or more popularly known as SEO articles in the search engine marketing, optimization community/industry? SEO articles are not all that different from your conventional articles. A long time ago, search engine articles used to be just articles written for major search engines in an attempt to achieve high ranking in search engine listings for their preferred keywords. For example, if you want your customers to find you via major search engines, you would enlist the help of an SEO writer to fluff up some copy for your website so that the page will get high listing in search engines. The quality of such articles and credibility of such SEO writers used to be suspect - and the market became saturated with SEO writers who can churn out a few sentences here and there and meat it out with the selected keywords.

But the search engines got smarter and realized the manipulative ways of these online marketers and the techniques of SEO writers - and they modified their spiders (programs used by search engines to crawl websites and links). This is when SEO writers need to get smarter too.

There is no longer any use for SEO writers to produce SEO articles that people (readers like you and me) don’t understand and yet attracts high ranking in search engines. Not only are such articles undesirable, in fact, website owners may even get the boot and get punished for using such techniques to manipulate the search engine spiders! To get back into the good books of these major search engines can be a difficult, if not impossible, task. So, be warned!

There are many things to take into consideration when writing an SEO article. For example, placement of keywords. The SEO writer needs to know where to place the preferred keyword(s) in the article, the density of the keywords (how many times it appears in the article, relation of the keywords and article to the main website…etc. If one thing goes wrong, all your effort will be wasted. The title of the article is, also, an important point to take into consideration. The SEO article needs a relavant and enticing title too.

Be careful of hiring careless SEO writers who are from the old school - check to make sure that they have basic knowledge of search engine marketing before you hire them. Quality, as far as the SEO article is concerned, is of utmost importance too. The search engines will track related keywords, links, tags and also, search engines these days like your SEO articles much better if the readers like it.

The online marketing industry have changed a lot, so, the SEO writer needs to keep himself/herself updated with the latest developments of the search engines in order to succeed.

Good luck!