Sarah Arrow

As you know I work in a small business, consult for other small businesses and work on various blogs in various capacities across the web . I have one bug bear that  have picked up in my learning processes. Want to know what it is? It’s websites that have been written for the search engine spider rather than human beings.

This weekend I was looking at a relatives website and it had clearly been written with the search engine spider in mind. Hardly any of the text made sense and it was crammed with their key phrases. I decided to google their key phrases and they didn’t rank for any of them, which is not a surprise, it’s a new site. Anyone who did stumble across it would have trouble reading it and they could have lost business through sloppy language use.

This lead me to musing why people did this, is it because they don’t understand how search engine optimisation works? or it because they have trusted a professional who just works on short term results rather than long term ones?

As a blogger rather than an SEO specialist, I read the text of a site rather than look at how it’s set up or any other of the SEO aspects, I try to think how my potential reader would think. A site that is written for spiders is not an easy read it’s very stilted that made me wonder whether the site owners had actually read their own website? If they did, why didn’t they correct it?

You don’t have to be a brilliant writer to express clearly and concisely what your business does and the benefits to your potential customers. A copywriter needn’t be expensive, and they are not difficult to locate -  I can recommend three straight off of the top of my head

Lesley Morrisey

Bian Salins

And Sally Ormond

Anyone who tells you people only scan or skim read on the web have never received an email from an irate reader informing them of a typo, a spello or anything else. Why? because the viewer didn’t stay long enough to read the text, a glance told them it would be rough going so they moved on to the next website swiftly.

As I mentioned earlier the site in question belongs to a relative, do I tell them and give them an action plan to correct it? or do I stand back? The most annoying thing is, in real life they are literate and articulate people. You would never believe it to read their site.

What would you do?

Sarah