Choosing a Copyrighter to write appropriate text for your site is a minefield, you only have to post a request on a forum to be inundated with responses from a vast array of people offering this service. You will then have to pick from a range of service providers; some highly qualified, some less than qualified and some over qualified for your needs.
The prices of the UK based freelance writer can vary dramatically from £15 (I’m not joking) to £300 for around 500 words but what can you expect when you hire these writers? Obviously the quality of the text will vary greatly but not in my experience as greatly as one might suppose, the real factor in terms of the quality is down to the amount of research required to write a piece. For highly technical pieces the text will not flow as freely, sources will need to be researched and correctly cited and some writers (even the more expensive ones) will avoid this work like the plague. Other writers gravitate towards writing a string of keyword stuffed meandering sentences in a misguided attempt to cynically manipulate the search engines or their clients.
Now don’t get me wrong there are copyrighters that produce great work for £25 per 500 words but these writers tend to choose subjects that they are familiar with. This article for instance comes easily to me I am hardly pausing between paragraphs and actually quite enjoying the process consequently it’s taken me about 45 minutes to write the above text, which is not a great deal of time and therefore more cost effective.
Guidelines for hiring a SEO Copywriter or Copywriting Service
So after some thought I have prepared the following guidelines for hiring an SEO Copywriter or Copywriting Service:
Write a Brief or Specification
Write a detailed Brief or Specification communicate what type of written work you require, the easier you make the process for the writer the better the price and the value that you will get back.
Get a Recommendation & View their previous work
Source your writer via a recommendation if possible and make sure that you have seen their previous work, is it similar to the content that you require, is it of a high enough standard? If you can’t get a recommendation source a number of potential writers send them a full brief or specification and start the process of eliminating the unsuitable candidates.
Match the Subject to the Writer
Given the choice it is always best to match the subject to the writer not push an unfamiliar subject on to a reluctant copywriter or service provider. If I wanted to write about Gloucester or Cheltenham I would hire a writer from these areas, if I wanted an article about cars I would talk to writers who are car enthusiasts.
Get the writer to suggest titles
Send the writer a selection of keywords and ask them to come up with titles and section headers so that you can then evaluate the potential before seeing the final written piece.
With SEO Copywriting Best Value is often the Key
You don’t need a battleship to sink a bathtub, and you don’t need an expensive writer to write about familiar everyday objects or services, the key is to source a writer who can offer you the Best Value for each project.
Quality over Quantity
One thing is for sure when writing online there are rules and the main rule is that it’s quality over quantity every time. Rank chasing is not what good SEO is about, if your site ranks high up on the first page for a given search phrase so what if people click through to read the gibberish, will these people trust your site or end up buying from you?
This article is about 600 words long and took me around 2 hours to complete including the all important title tags and description some previous research was required.
So what makes an Ethical SEO Company Ethical? Perhaps one can find an Ethical SEO by searching for “Ethical SEO” in Google or perhaps by searching for “Professional SEO” the reality is that these are often just words, targeted because they have a relatively low level of competition when set against the number of historic monthly searches.
Now I’m certainly not saying that the companies that rank for the above phrases are in any way unethical or unprofessional the fact that they have selected these phrases at all is to their credit. And yes I get the hypocrisy; this post including the title tag, page title and content are obviously focused on optimising it for the phrase Ethical SEO Company.
What I’m trying to get at here is that Google has no way of telling how a company operates or conducts itself, it simply returns the best results that it can given the available parameters. Broadly speaking (and greatly simplified in order to explain my reasoning) there are 2 factors that dictate how search engines rank pages:
- Onsite/Onpage SEO (Which can include Domain Name Selection as well as Optimised Title Tags, Internal Links, Visible on Page Text, Page Titles etc).
- External Inbound Links (that are pointing at the site pages hopefully, but not always from relevant, respected or trusted websites)
The first factor is completely in the control of the webmaster in question; all it takes is knowledge of SEO to put the content in place to fulfil this part of the site optimisation. The second factor is the external links coming into the site pages, to put it simply Google and the other search engines look on these links as one site voting for the other.
In an ideal world a company would set up a website, call themselves an Ethical SEO Company and create the onsite content that makes web site owners want to link through to them. In reality most companies (even ethical ones) will find it difficult to achieve this type of inbound link. Most companies have to build quality content and even then work on building links to their site.
So what makes an Ethical SEO Company?
Answer: “Some of the Above”
To find out what makes for Ethical SEO have a read of the following pages, these are Guidelines set out by the Search Engines to tell webmasters and site owners how to follow (or should I say how not to break) the rules:
Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/basics/basics-18.html
Google Webmaster Guidelines:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
Google Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Guidelines:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291
Bing Webmaster Center Help:
http://help.live.com/help.aspx?mkt=en-us&project=wl_webmasters
Dmoz Guidelines:
http://www.dmoz.org/guidelines/
If you want to hire an ethical SEO then do some research, you have been told that the company you have contacted is ethical (and they may well be) but don’t just take their word for it, understand what you are paying for.
“Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it’s best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to “help” you.” SOURCE: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291
Having started up this blog only a short while back, I am still in the throes of adding quality content to get the blog up and running properly. I am enjoying the process and writing is fun but… as the floodgates begin to open, the spam starts rolling in…
Obviously this Blog is moderated and I delete blatant spam as soon as it appears, the trouble is I’m getting a lot of comments that are in between being blatant spam and being insightful.
I have therefore been struggling with the nofollow / dofollow question and whether I should apply these tags to the post comments on this Blog.
What are Nofollow / Dofollow tags?
A link with a nofollow tag will appear the same to the general web going public as a link without the tag, but by implementing the nofollow tag the Blog or Forum owner is telling the search engines that this link has not been checked (or is not from a trusted source) and that the link should therefore pass no link juice or power to the resulting page. At least that is the official line; there is some debate as to how the tag is really being dealt with by Google and the other search engines. Tests have been run that prove that the Search Engines at least follow the nofollow links to their destination whether the resulting pages receive any link juice is open to debate.
Nofollow tags are implemented as follows:
Visit my <a href=” http://www.justinmarch.com/cheltenham-gloucester-web-design-seo-offer/”>SEO Company Cheltenham</a> site.
Which would look like this: SEO Company Cheltenham
Applying a nofollow tag, the comment would be transformed to:
Visit my <a href=” http://www.justinmarch.com/cheltenham-gloucester-web-design-seo-offer/” rel=”nofollow”> SEO Company Cheltenham</a> site.
Which would look like this: SEO Company Cheltenham
As you can see both of the above links look exactly the same to the casual observer.
NB: There is no dofollow tag; essentially dofollow is simply a “normal” hyperlink (or the absence of the nofollow tag).
Find out more about the background of the nofollow tag here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html
See David Leonhardts’ blog post for even more insight into this debate.
So what to do about Nofollow / Dofollow tags on this Blog?
I act to prevent spam as much as possible but am also willing to reward insightful comments with a dofollow link, the trouble is I’m getting a lot of comments that are in between, they aren’t blatant spam and they aren’t quite as insightful as I would like.
The problem is it’s a trade off, I don’t want to put people off, and I don’t mind a bit of banter as it helps to humanise my Blog, on the other hand I don’t want to necessarily reward banter with a dofollow link.
Option 1:
- delete the spam
- nofollow the in-between comments
- follow the insightful comments
Option 2:
- delete the spam
- delete the in-between comments
- follow the insightful comments
Option 3:
- delete the spam
- follow in-between comments
- follow the insightful comments
Conclusion
For the moment anyway I think that option 1 is the most ideal I will just have to put up with the questions relating to why some comments are assigned nofollow where others are given normal link status.
I look forward to pleanty of insightful comments on this below…
