Optimizing Your Website

By far the majority of websites are there with a purpose - to sell a product or a service. Many website owners believe that a wonderfully designed website will draw searchers to it by reason of its design, but nothing could be further from the truth. I have a couple of friends who are two of South Africa's award winning designers, and they designed a website for themselves that, design wise, was faultless. But they got no visitors to their site other than those who found out the web address from a business card or letterhead. Why? The answer is simple. They used few keywords, the whole site was based on faultless graphics and Flash. The result being that there was nothing there for a search engine to look at or index. Search Engine Optimisation and the copy writing that goes with it is essential for any website.

Search engines need to look at content, and they need to see content that is relevant to the meta keywords used in the head of the site's source code. That is one of the reasons why a copy writer is an essential part of the team putting together a successful website. Copy writing for websites is a profession based on experience - experience that is gained from knowing how search engines work and what they look for. For example, if you fill a website article such as this one with a particular keyword or keyword phrase, it will be ignored by search engines, because their algorithms recognize its overuse.

You can find out more by visiting my website at http://www.themasons.co.za
Michal J. Mason