As one who makes his living writing, and particularly writing that is read online, I am keen to see eWriting take its place alongside journalism, screenwriting, creative non-fiction, feature writing, fiction and other genre of writing.
eWriting is a specialized skill in many respects, not least of which is understanding the ‘back end’ of the web page or blog and how your eWriting is found. One of the reasons we have so many articles on this site, apart from providing as wide a range of information as we can, is to help eWriter’s rank their own sites.
Search engines use keywords to locate relevant web pages. So if you type in ‘beef’, you will be rewarded with millions of pages with the word ‘beef’ somewhere in the text. If you are looking for ‘beef cake bars’, then you should not come across sellers of beef, butchers, abattoirs and so forth. Likewise, if you use ‘beef retail butcher’, you shouldn’t be taken to any gay bar sites.
In the early days of the web people would simply load the page with meta-tags and often the text was just one keyword after another with an ad to click on or a short exhortation to buy something. The rest of the page was gibberish and of no use to someone looking for info on beef, be it the butcher or the gay bar variety. The search engines quickly changed their algorithms to weed out the blatant wastes of time and space.
In short, over time the scene changed as the search engines and web crawlers got more sophisticated. The bottom line today is ‘Content Is King’. You need content, good quality content and lots of it. The more and the more useful the better. This results in your site ranking higher so it appears on the first page or even the first non-paid listing if you get it right. Few people look beyond the second page so being the 35th listed site out of a million hits means few people will ever keep looking long enough to find you.
The search engines also use other criteria to find you and rank you and how popular your site is to visitors is one other way. They look at how many sites are linked to yours and how many you link to. The old days of simply swapping irrelevant links with as many other sites as possible are also over. The links need to be, preferably one way from a highly ranked site to yours and that there is a genuine connection between the sites and their content.
The goal is to provide the person searching with the best result. This means the most relevant, well written information possible. Forget your site and your goals for a moment and think of the person reading your site. If you want them to buy from you or click on an ad you host, then give them something in return that makes it worth their while to do this. Give to get, simple as that. The more you freely give, the more you will eventually get.
As for those ‘black hats’ who think they can fool the search engines… keep in mind they hire some of the smartest minds around to figure out ways to cheat and then how they can beat the cheater. Why bother? It is just as easy, often easier, to do the right thing and give good value content. For a true eWriter, it is a pleasure.