The SEO Conundrum: Man Vs. Machine
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s essentially the process of creating content and enhancing 
layout and design on your website to attract the highest number of visitors possible through various search engines.
In layman’s terms, SEO is a constantly evolving science which focuses specifically on making your website more search engine friendly.
What Can SEO Do for Your Website?
Since SEO makes your website more attractive to search engines, it has the potential to draw in new readers who often become customers and referral sources. Researchers estimate that around 90 percent of first time visitors arrive on websites via search engines like Google and Yahoo. And, the more often your site is visited, the more the search engines like it.
How Does SEO Work?
Search engines “crawl” the web with automated programs called spiders or bots. Research indicates that approximately half of the 20 billion existing pages have been crawled.
Web pages which have been crawled are then indexed by the search engines, so that when your customers type their search terms into one, it can quickly determine which pages in that index are relevant. Search engines each have unique algorithms to choose which pages show up and in what order they appear.
So why should you care about any of this? Studies show that most people will click on the results nearest the top of the search page. So, to put it simply:
Optimizing Your Website=Higher Search Engine Rankings=More Clicks=More Traffic=More Potential Customers Viewing Your Content
What Does SEO Have to Do With Freelance Writing?
There are many good reasons to hire a freelance writer. In addition to well-honed writing skills, many are also SEO experts. That is, they can create optimized content for your website–from articles to ad copy to sidebar goodies. Plus, many can offer help with other website optimization techniques as well.
So, What’s the Conundrum?
The unfortunate thing about SEO is that many content writers are so focused on making their material search engine friendly that it doesn’t flow properly. This makes the writing seem stilted and unnatural–and hard to read.
Essentially, some SEO articles are written only for search engine optimization. So, while they may get a few extra clicks in the beginning, they’ll have a high bounce rate since readers aren’t interested in nonsensical and useless information.
And, most search engines take this into account–meaning that the more often a reader lands on your page and immediately clicks away, the lower your search engine rank can fall.
The fact is that your potential customers are intelligent people–and if you’re posting substandard articles and other low value content on your website, they’re going to question your credibility.
But if you present them with well-written, interesting and easy to read content, they’re far more likely to stick around and find out what you (or your company) are all about.
What’s the Solution?
You could, of course, take the time to learn the science of SEO and SEO writing. In fact, if you’re so inclined, check Outspoken Media’s SEO post to get you started.
Alternatively, you could hire an experienced freelance writer to write your website’s SEO content. This way, you can focus your attention on other important details in your business and personal life.
By bringing in a professional writer, you can rest assured that your optimized content will be tightly-written, easy to read and customer friendly.
Are you ready to take your website to the next level? Contact Angela Atkinson here or directly via email at angela@angelaatkinson.com to discuss your project!
8 Responses to “The SEO Conundrum: Man Vs. Machine”
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Hi, Thanks for your article. i’m a newbie seor from chengdu in china planning to learn search engine optizimation via google.com, yahoo.com and other search engine. i hope you will publish many articles such as this article that it will improve my seo skills.
What a brilliant commentary about search engine optimization. I’m frankly quite stunned that that has not really been articulated earlier to such a great length.
Because the new Caffeine update to Google’s search algorithm, this post is moreso intriguing, especially to reflect on. Thanks for this!
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The SEO industry has changed alot over the years, what used to work before, doesn’t work anymore. You obviously know whats up, but I can’t wait to see the change of Google in the next few months.
Hello. This is kind of an “unconventional” question , but have other visitors asked you how get the menu bar to look like you’ve got it? I also have a blog and am really looking to alter around the theme, however am scared to death to mess with it for fear of the search engines punishing me. I am very new to all of this …so i am just not positive exactly how to try to to it all yet. I’ll just keep working on it one day at a time Thanks for any help you can offer here.
Thanks for the post, Its very informative! I to am a keen blogger and have been building site for a while now
Hi – really great site you have made. I enjoyed reading this posting. I did want to issue a remark to tell you that the design of this site is very aesthetically sweet. I used to be a graphic designer, now I am a copy editor in chief for a merchandising firm. I have always enjoyed playing with information processing systems and am trying to learn code in my free time (which there is never enough of lol).