UPDATE



Hi. This is an old, unmaintained blog. You may find these sites more to your liking:

Carson Brackney: This is my primary site.

Ad Astra Traffic: Content production/article writing service.

Ad Astra Traffic Team: For those who'd like to get writing gigs with Ad Astra.


Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Human spiders and VEO...Reasons to hug your freelance content writer...

"Also, it's no secret that Google and Yahoo have large human workforces to supplement their search engine algos. They know about the spammy site you put up last summer. Truth is... once you're on 'the list' of evildoers, it's nearly impossible to get out."

Hey, I didn't write it. I just read it.

Personally, I'd be willing to wager that is a bit of an overstatement. However, if it's true, it is the best possible advertisement for a freelance content writer in history. Better keep those Google employees happy and impressed with warm, fresh, custom content of the highest quality!

If found that sliver of hyperbole here in an article supporting Colin McDougal's ebook on VEO (vistor experience optimization). I've mentioned VEO and McDougal here before (he was even nice enough to stop by and add to the discussion). Basically, McDougal argues that the best way to stock up on search engine love is to stop worrying about keyword density, tags and SEO tricks and to focus instead on providing a visitor-friendly experience.

McDougal's position makes a high degree of sense. The search engines exist to send folks to good sites. Thus, if one wants traffic they should build a good site. Among other things, that means filling the site with high-quality content instead of junk.

In some sense, that does force on to put a modicum of faith into Google's ability to actually discern garbage from the real deal, and we all know that isn't always the case. Overall, though, the perspective seems at least relatively sound.

VEO is the freelance content writer's friend--and many people on the webmastering side of the fence think it's a boon to them, too. I don't profess to be the world's greatest SEO mastermind, but it seems to me that an approach that combines nice, safe, "white hat" SEO with CM's VEO is probably the way to go.

So, whether one believes that the big search engines have an army of well-trained human "site-raters" or if they just like what Colin McDougal is preaching, it should lead them to embrace professional freelance web content writer as partners in their online success.

That can't be a bad thing for me. Or for them.