Web writing: the ignorance is not bliss factor

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Friday, April 6th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed

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I’m a sucker, so I eagerly clicked on John Kremer’s post “The best author website I’ve seen in a long, long time”.

Should be great, yes?

Not. And I’m tempted to say that if that’s the best you’ve seen John, you don’t get out enough, but since I’m a nice person, I won’t say it.

The site is lovely, very creative. Unfortunately, the author’s going to have to work really hard to get anyone to see the site, because all that creativity is wasted. It will take continuous advertising to promote the site, it’s never going to get any organic traffic, because it’s just about invisible to the search engines.

Here’s what the search engines read (they can’t read images):

Seo

To comprehend the full horror of this situation, open the site at http://noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com/ and then click View Source in the View menu of your Web browser. You’ll notice that the only indexable text on this page is:

“No one belongs here more than you. Stories by Miranda July” and “Presenting: No One Belongs Here More Than You, a new book of short stories by Miranda July; that woman who made Me and You and Everyone We Know”.

So we have an excellent, truly great SLIDESHOW which is not, and never will be, a Web site. A Web site must contain TEXT a search engine can read. The above few words are just not enough.

Always, always have plenty of text on each Web page

I know you’d never do this to any of your Web writing clients, would you? And if you had a sudden rush of blood to the head and decided to create a really, really creative Web site, you’d make sure that the slideshow or whatever it was, was part of a true Web site with lots of text that the search engines would love, wouldn’t you?

Urgh. I’m so depressed thinking of the opportunities wasted with this site I’m going to go smash an Easter egg or two and eat chocolate…

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