Getting What You Paid For

You are more than competent to judge if the web copy your content provider sends you is good, bad, or mediocre.

OK. You've read the handwriting on the wall and the postings on the webmaster forums. You've read Google's guidelines so many times you're reciting the key bullet points in your sleep. You're fully up to speed on the necessity of adding a steady stream of good, relevant, on-topic, search-engine-optimized copy to your website. You've decided to take the plunge and sign up with a content provider or writing service.

There's just one thing holding you back. How are you going to know if the content you receive is worth what you're paying for it? How, in other words, how can you tell if it's any good? Don't you have to be a professional writer or editor yourself in order to properly evaluate editorial content?

Let's answer the last question first. Absolutely not. You may not be qualified to write a doctoral thesis on whether Scott Turlow is a better writer than Ernest Hemingway, but you are more than competent to judge if the web copy your content provider sends you is good, bad, or mediocre.

One of the best ways of doing this is by asking yourself a few questions about the articles, blog entries and other web content you receive.

1. Can I understand it? Good writing is simple, to the point, as clear as the windshield on a showroom-fresh car. A lot of high-school dropouts shop online, if they can't understand an article, it's useless as a web sales tool. (There are, of course, exceptions to this rule - sites aimed at rocket scientists, brain surgeons, and English lit professors, for example.)

Many content providers and writing services hire inexperienced journeymen writers or interns with very limited (if any) knowledge of the topics about which they're scribbling.

2. Is it correct? Many content providers and writing services hire inexperienced journeymen writers or interns with very limited (if any) knowledge of the topics about which they're scribbling. Though GetWebContent.com only hires writers with multi-discipline experience writing copy for many different industries, technologies, and lifestyles, our writers are still generalists in their knowledge of your particular marketing niche. You are the expert, the guru, the oracle, in your field. You know the rights from the wrongs, the true from the false. Well-written, accurate copy is good. Inaccurate web content is bad no matter how well-written.

3. Will it embarrass me? How can you possibly be embarrassed by your web copy? Let us count the ways ... no, let's not, there are too many. If your copy is inaccurate (as discussed in point two), it would be embarrassing to have someone who knows what isn't correct read it. And if it's full of illiterate slang and improperly capitalized words, it will offend readers who didn't drop out of high school and a fair number of those who did. But the most embarrassing errors in web copy, the ones most easily recognized, the mistakes most likely to undermine your site's credibility with potential customers are . . . hey, let's have an example here: Albert's Pets & More invites you to take advantage of our monthly special, 50 percent off on all kat boxes.

Yep, that's the biggie. "Kat" boxes. Bad spelling. Nothing makes a web page seem absurd as quickly and surely as misspelled words. Even if you don't know whether "doggy" is more correct than "doggie" (neither do I), you can check the spelling of the content you receive by copying it and pasting it into MS Word or another word processor and running the spell checker. Grammar checking -- the use of "its" instead of "it's", for example, is much harder, but such mistakes - unlike spellings -- are recognized by relatively few people.

It's a good idea to have copy that, as we say in the writing trade, sings - even if quietly.

While we're on this topic, I should mention that all GetWebContent.com copy is professionally proofread before it is delivered to customers, an essential step most of our competitors skip. (Note: This doesn't mean you won't get copy with an occasional typo; nobody is perfect. What it does mean is that two pairs of eyes, not just one, will be deployed to try and catch those errors before they reach you and your customers.)

4.) Is it interesting? Copy can be totally accurate, 100 percent grammatical, perfectly spelled and still bore people to death. Since a potential customer who falls asleep while reading an article on your site is unlikely to remember to visit the shopping cart upon awakening, it's a good idea to have copy that, as we say in the writing trade, sings - even if quietly. Once again, you don't need any special skills to tell if something is interesting. If you can read it without your attention wandering, it's passed this part of the test.

5.) And, finally, last and most important - search-engine optimization. Understand this, you cannot buy pre-fabbed SEO'd copy. Anybody who tries to sell it to you is a con artist. SEO copy has to be custom-written because it must incorporate your keywords, refer to the things you sell, dovetail with everything else on your site. An article written by someone who's never seen your site, an article that's just sitting in a data mine with a "for rent" sign dragging from its scrawny neck, cannot - CANNOT - be honestly sold as search-engine optimized. Which doesn't mean a lot of people aren't making exactly that bogus claim while selling tons of ancient, irrelevant web copy.

GetWebContent.com writers SEO every piece of web copy they write at no extra charge.

Just because copy is custom-written for your site does not, however, mean that it is search-engine optimized. You can't really write SEO'd copy on the fly. The process involves writing an article, blog or blurb and then going back and optimizing it for search engines. Most web content providers don't take the time and trouble to do that, others only do it for an additional fee. GetWebContent.com writers SEO every piece of web copy they write at no extra charge.

Judging the quality of SEO'd copy is completely unlike judging whether the piece is interesting or checking its spelling. To really evaluate search-engine optimization correctly you'd have to be a search-engine algorithm and be able to think in machine logic. But there are ways to tell whether the writer of the copy you're buying has made an honest, intelligent, professional SEO effort. For more on this, please visit our SEO Before & After page. That's it, a five-step program for testing your web content. Get yourself some content and give it a try.