Happy Autumn and Halloween!
First of all, I have to vent a little. I got accepted to write informational articles for a freelance writing site. Tom's been doing this for awhile, but it's all new to me. I just finished my first article yesterday. It was pretty stressful, but also exciting to be writing for pay :D. I was waiting today to see if the article got accepted, and just got a reply that they wanted revisions. Now that's nothing unusual in this business (I've learned from seeing Tom go through the learning curve), but the thing this client wanted from me was MORE KEYWORDS throughout the article. I took the time to write the article carefully so it would be informative and make the reader want to read it. It was much better than anything written on the rest of this client's website, and yet they didn't care because it didn't have a high enough percentage of the total article in keywords. Why do people like this bother to pay someone to write their articles, when they could just as well use the 550 keywords they sent me in a list to use for a 850 word article and get the same effect? I'm not exaggerating. The list of words they sent was 64% as long as the total article they wanted. If I had used all of the keywords they wanted--many of which are spelled incorrectly on purpose--I wouldn't have been able to use complete sentences.
Today's lesson, for all of you future entrepreneurs out there, is that if you inundate your web copy with keywords just to get people to find you in a google search and click on the ads on your web page, you will get the opposite effect. Google will not bring up your article in their search field if it is made up completely of keywords. It will red flag their system as a spam site and will not be recommended to people. If your overpaid publicist is telling you that this is the way to get people to your site, you should fire them and find someone else who actually knows what they are talking about!
Okay, I think I've finished my vent. I added an additional bunch of keywords to that article--another 10% of the total. I'm still not sure it's going to be enough for my client. My article is now less informative and more clumsy, but there you have it.
On a lighter note, we're looking forward to going to a party tomorrow night at Jenny and Jonny's house down in Spanish Fork. Tom and I both have Star Wars themed costumes. I'll try to get some pictures of the party up in the next couple of days.
In other news, Tom starts his NaNoWriMo tomorrow (or really he started it about 45 minutes ago, since we're sitting a bit after midnight now). If you don't know what this is, here's the site. http://www.nanowrimo.org/ We're all cheering him on--GO TOM!!
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