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The Internet's Three Headed Monster

By Dan Furman

The "Three-Headed Monster" of the Internet is made up of the three key aspects of website marketing: Writing, Design, and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

All three of these are vital, but if asked to rank them in terms of importance, I would do it like this:
  1. Writing
  2. Design (only second by a nose)
  3. SEO
I can hear you now: "But Dan, you're a writer, of course you'd rank writing first."

That's a fair point, so let me use my writing skills and defend my ranking:

The first thing we need to establish is you not only want visitors, you want an action from those visitors. Whatever that action is - buy, register, contact us - your site is pointless unless a certain number of visitors take action. Right?

Unless you are a huge, advertising-fueled site like Amazon, your website must persuade a visitor to take action. Your website's writing is what primarily does this.

I will also plug design here, because design helps as well. Writing and design working together is a very powerful combination. An easy to navigate and easy to read website that is persuasive is an unbeatable combination.

But the reason I rank writing (slightly) over design is this: good writing might be able to overcome bad design. But good design can never overcome bad writing.

 Give me a plain white background and thirty visitors, and I'll sell something. A web designer or an SEO person cannot say that.

Nothing can overcome bad writing. If your visitor doesn't like reading your site, you are sunk. I don't care if you get thousands of visits and rank #1 on Google.

And that brings me to SEO. Is it important?

You bet it is - after you get a well-written and well-designed site.

Once you have a site that works (and you can test this with simple pay-per-click advertising), you want it in front of as many eyes as possible. But you have to be careful with SEO firms, because some of them are so focused on ranking (after all, it is their business) that they forget that content is still king.

Many SEO firms just want lots of "relevant content" that the "search engine bots" will like reading. I would rather see content that humans like to read. So would your customers (being human and all.)

In short, your content, and your website, still has to sell. Ranking and number of visits is irrelevant if it doesn't sell.

Some SEO companies will want to change your opening headline and your first paragraph to read like a search term. They'll want it to say "Jaguar New York" or "Buy New York Jaguar" for a Jaguar dealer in New York. They care only about the rank, not the fact that your copy sounds like a six-year old wrote it.

Avoid companies that want you to do this.

A good SEO company will want to work with your copywriter. They will tell the copywriter what keywords and phrases to work intelligently into the copy.

So think about what you will say (writing), then say it (design), then, if you know you have a winner, broadcast it (SEO).

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