…..heart away!’
Diet Girl here this afternoon, under duress I must tell you- that silly dog has pushed me in front of her screen whilst she turns my workspace upside down to look for Eric The Penguin. I’ve been reliably informed by Daniel (’The Master’ to regular readers of this blog) that Eric has been missing for several weeks now and Ruby is distraught. In fact, she hasn’t been on youtube all day, she’s that upset.
I guess it’s me for today’s update then folks…..
So back to Boyzone. I hate Ronan and his bunch of manufactured cronies as much as the next person, but the lyrics to that song have a valid point. As the author of a lot of the articles, copy and forum posts that are sent out from Vizcom, and as someone who spends at least three days a week floating about on the internet (actually that’s a lie- it’s more 24/7, 365, but I don’t want you thinking that I’m an anti-social anorak), I can’t help but notice that bad quality of writing on some of the sites that I visit.
If you own a website for your business, or are thinking of purchasing one- perhaps you actually build websites as part of your job or hobby, then please, read on.
I’m aware that when you construct your website pages, there’s a certain amount of keywords that you should use within the text to ensure that the site turns up in search engine results when a potential customers types in the write words and phrases.
So I imagine, if you’re anything like me, you have a list of words for each page, and try and ‘join them together’ which is the crux of my argument.
When I was a kid, I had a load of magnetic flash cards with words on each which I would chain together on the fridge to make sentances and stories and bore my doting parents to death with, and it’s it’s this, which is now being practised by grown adults, which makes their websites read badly. In fact, I’d even go as far as saying ’spammy’.
What I’m talking about is when the webmaster (or whoever it is has written the text) and done minimal work with the keywords. Sometimes, they just have commas in between each and you have to use the nav bar to work out where to go on the site, which is usually peppered with internal links like they’ve going out of fashion. Other times though, they’ve been a little more creative, and used ‘and’, ‘with’, ‘plus’ and ‘including’ in between each keyword to join them together under the guise that they’ve actually made some effort, but also creating the most boring text known to man.
For example, imagine a website that sells socks, and you need to incorporate the different ranges of socks available. What it should read like is something along the lines of:
“Huxleys Socks have been producing socks and slippers for over twenty years, and are suppliers to Woolworths and JJB Sports, as well as several independant retailers throughout the Glasgow area.
To see our Sports range, including socks for Football, Climbing, Diving and Basketball, click here….”
You don’t have to be Enid Blyton to make a sentance that is appealing to the reader- just remember that you’re writing for people, and not just for search engines.
An example of the kind of text that I’m complaining about, using my sock shop analogy would be:
“Buy socks, football socks, climbing socks, diving socks, basketball socks- click here!”
That doesn’t make me want to click anything, that makes me want to find the author and slap them with a wet fish.
Today alone, I’ve come across seven of these sites whilst researching an article I’m writing for one of our customers, and it’s so frustrating when you’ve got a mountain of sites to trawl though and your attention is waning as the amount you’ve read so far is ridiculous and there’s still a few more to go, and the style of writing is so unimaginative that it could sedate a small child.
Surely, in the words of Ronan, et.al, if ‘words are all we have’ then we should be using them to their best potential, not boring our potential customers to death when all it takes is a little effort to make your text incorporate your keywords and sound appealing to a human reader.
If you can’t write- then admit it, and find someone who can to supply the text to your website- please, don’t put people off by spamming your pages with strings of keywords in sentences and paragraphs that don’t make sense.
Plenty of website companies, including ours, offer writing services, and often for quite an affordable price. In a world that is becoming increasingly virtual, don’t let your companies’ online presence slide because you couldn’t be bothered to sort out your content; it leaves experienced surfers like me bored and frustrated and I won’t lie to you, we’ll click the dreaded ‘back’ button quicker than anyone else to get out of there.
Anyway, that’s my rant over with. I had planned to do some more work but now my desk is such as mess because of the dog, I shall ignore it until tomorrow. Presuming Eric is found, Ruby will be returning tomorrow, so thank you for putting up with my rant and no doubt I’ll be back again covering Rube’s holidays……
