SEO article, content & blog writing services.
A professional SEO writer can help get your webpage ranked.
By- Michael McKown
This article is in two pieces. The first piece is a true story that took place in April, 2023:
A friend of mine had started a part-time auto detailing service and had been building it for years. He recently leased a shop, quit his high-paying job, and went to work full time doing what he loved — playing in the water (and that is what he said). He complained to me one day about his search marketing problems. He felt he was getting ripped off by an SEO company he had hired a long time back. He was paying these guys around $2,000 a month to get his site ranked number one on Google, you know, the usual pure baloney supposed SEO experts spew. My friend fired those SEO guys. He asked if I knew anyone who could help him get ranked higher.
“Yeah, me. I’ve been doing this since 1999. I hired a well-known SEO guy in ’98 to do the same with a site I had back then. I had to fire him and learn to do it myself.” I told my friend I’d help him out. For free. He offered money, I told him to give me a ride in his bright red 1992 Mazda Miata as payment. “Let me give you an introductory course to SEO,” I said. I told him I needed 90 minutes to teach what he needed to know. A couple days later, he was in my office as I walked him through the process from start to finish. I cleared away the cobwebs and fog. “Now that I see how this works,” he told me at the end, “it seems simple and logical.” We then set up a time for me to go through his website and fix it.
And then he took me for a fun ride in his cool little car. I’d never been in one before.
That SEO outfit he hired built a lot of really sketchy backlinks for his site and never once told him anything useful about search engine optimization, but it did send him a lot of useless reports that made it seem like they were working hard on his behalf. To me, they were playing a distraction game. Keep him in the dark, shovel reports at him and siphon the bucks from his pocketbook. And so I went to work on his site and made changes to each page. It took a couple of hours. I told him to be patient, that Google would index the changes in time and he would probably see results in a few weeks.
I made notes about the site’s individual pages’ positioning for all its important keyword phrases and sent that info to him. About two weeks later, I checked his positioning for each keyword phrase. His site had risen dramatically for nearly all keyword phrases. I emailed him and told him, “You’re rising in the rankings. Check your keyword phrases.” He was excited at the quick results. “You don’t need to pay $2,000 a month to get well-ranked,” I said. “But wait until your competitors notice your higher rankings. Let them pay $2,000 a month to try to catch you.” Then I broke up laughing.
Again, he wanted to pay me. “Just give some free car washes,” I said. Got my first free wash today — April 29, 2023 — two hours before the grand opening of his new shop and the car show, food, music and raffle that accompanied. And when things wound down, he had a big grin on his face. I congratulated him on his successful big opening. “I’ll be here for you as a customer as well as for SEO support, as needed.” He thanked me, then I hopped in my 2021 Tesla Model S Plaid and headed home.
And now, for the second piece of this article:
First the definition. SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO writing is the art of tuning the text of a webpage so that an Internet search engine understands what the page is about. This is the first step in the process of getting a webpage ranked high on search engines. A well-tuned business webpage offering products or services can generate lots of sales.
The writer is partially responsible for getting that webpage ranked. But there are other aspects to this art that are the responsibility of the webmaster or website designer. Specifically, the webmaster/designer must create an effective title tag, description tag, menu labeling, and page URL. For those who don’t know what those are, your webmaster/designer can explain.
And then there’s the matter of backlinks. Those are links from other websites that go to your webpage. I won’t into detail on methods of obtaining such links, but suffice it to say you want your page to be so uniquely informative and useful that those who operate other websites will want to link to your page as a service for their own visitors. Therefore, your page needs to be interesting, informative and compelling.
So two steps. The writer creates the text that sells your products and services, done in such a way so search engines know what the page is about. The ranking of the page in competitive search results is largely determined by what your webmaster or designer needs to do, as well as the backlink profile.
If you want to hire an SEO writer, your first step ought to be to find out what that writer has achieved in terms pages that rank high for competitive keyword phrases.
Secondly, get a consultation with that writer. Let’s assume you’re in need of SEO-friendly tuning for a page offering red widgets for sale. No search engine is going to rank your page high up for the keyword phrase “red widgets for sale” unless that search engine understands that your page is offering red widgets for sale. The URL of that page should, for maximum benefit, include the phrase red-widgets-for-sale. And again for maximum benefit, the anchor text of links to that page from other websites should read “Red Widgets For Sale.”
What about how text is configured on the page? If you’ve been told that keyword stuffing is the way to go, forget about it. That approach could get your page or site punished or ignored by search engines. These days, the likes of Google and Bing are smart enough to spot manipulation. Just be honest. Natural language is the way to go, with keyword phrases in the right places and not used to excess.
If your SEO writer is sufficiently skilled, he or she can create compelling text that keeps a visitor to that page on that page for a considerable amount of time. That requires serious copywriting skills. And it’s important if you want your website content, articles or blog to be found with an Internet search. Visitors who quickly leave your page are noticed by search engines. Visitors who quickly “bounce” to some other site is noticed by search engines and they consider bounces to be a negative ranking factor.
Are our writers capable of tuning your text for maximum SEO advantage? Well of course, as you found out in the first part of this article. Our writers will follow my example. All you have to do is contact us and then we’ll get started.