Writing Internet Articles is about Quality, not Quantity...
“We have you surrounded. Put down the keyboard and step away from the desk!”
If there were such a thing as the Copywriting Police, this would be their command to many webmasters trying their hand at writing Internet articles to get better search engine rankings.
This is mainly because widespread abuse of the article marketing scene has substantially lowered the overall quality of information out there, and forced Gran’daddy Google to take action against wrongdoers who break his quality guidelines.
For those of you not familiar with the concept of article marketing, here's how it works...
Since every SEO expert and his brother bandies around the phrase ‘Content is King’ without stopping for even a second to explain what it actually means¹, most webmasters are looking for alternative sources of relevant text to grow their website and increase its position in the search engine results.
Let's all start writing Internet articles to get our site to the top of Google...
This universal desire to get to the top of Google has spawned a vast number of archive sites where expert-authors² can post articles on every conceivable subject for webmasters to read and re-publish on their own website, thus increasing its overall relevance on any given topic. As a matter of course these articles include a link to the author’s own website, so boosting its link popularity and theoretically benefiting its search engine rankings in the long-term.
So everyone wins and they all live happily ever after? Not quite.
As writing Internet articles is now perceived to be a mainstream web promotion method, more and more budding authors are submitting decidedly inferior copy to the article directories out there.
Let’s face it a minute, the simple fact is that not all of us are able to put fingertip to keyboard and produce insightful and easy-to-read editorial on the subject of our choice, just as not all of us are cut out to be fighter pilots, cryptographers, or piano tuners. What’s more, poor quality copy is not generally spotted and eliminated by webmasters desperately looking for content, since they themselves are usually <controversy>not excessively gifted in the literacy department</controversy>. As a consequence the Internet is becoming riddled with bad spelling, grammar and punctuation.
“Did he really just say that?”
I sure did… But before digging out your pitchforks, grabbing the flaming torches, and heading up the hill to smoke out the techno-heretic, please allow me to say the following in my defense:
The statement stems from over a decade and a half of personal and professional experience. My authoring days started in the early 1990s and since then I have worked with a great many web designers, developers and code masters. And while the majority of these individuals fluently speak a multitude of coding languages, many of them would be unable to string together three English sentences coherently even if their life were to depend on it, simply since their personal skill-set calls for an entirely different type of spelling and grammar.
“It is then, not a question of stupidity but rather of different abilities.”
Be this as it may, the fact of the matter is that an ever growing number of individuals are cheerfully writing internet articles of a surprisingly poor quality, and thereby not only lowering the overall standards of the Information Super Highway but also damaging their own professional image before the entire world. Not only that, but the overall drop in standards, along with widespread content duplication, and the increasing use of ‘Parasitic Article Rewriting Programs³’, which feed on other people's original content and produce nothing but synonym-laden gibberish, has now drawn unwanted attention from Google, whose mission it is to preserve the Web's overall quality standards in its quest to give users the best possible search results.
Maybe Google is the Copywriting Police after all...
In other words, Google is gradually assuming the role of Copywriting Police by rewarding high-quality, well-written pieces, and trying to clean the scum from the Article Gene Pool’s bottom.
As a direct result, the promotional effectiveness of writing Internet Articles is now inversely proportional to the amount of sheer idiocy involved in an author’s approach to it. So unless you know what you’re talking about, and can talk about it in an eloquent, entertaining way:
“Put down the keyboard and step away from the desk!"
On reflection, it seems that this month’s offering is going to be one of ‘those’ articles.
Please click here for page two; ‘Poor Copywriting and its disastrous effects on your business’.
¹ I have personally long suspected that many of the buzzword experts out there don’t actually have a clue what half the things they say to people mean beyond surface appearances.
² They used to be places for skilled professionals to showcase their knowledge, but given the unbelievable drop in overall writing and expertise standards since Article Marketing has become a mainstream practice, I now use this term loosely.
