Writers Make Your Point

Making Your Point:

While many search engine strategies suggest different and sometimes downright loony ideas for SEO copy writing, there's one thing most everyone agrees on - Make your point in the first paragraph. The focus, or key idea behind the entire piece, should be described in short in the first couple of lines.

Writers wanted - Hot markets need fresh writers.

There, see - That wasn't so difficult, was it? I'm writing this post to make writers realize that you need to make your point in the first paragraph, which I did. Then comes the difficult part - Which is to analyze, debate, provide facts supporting your arguments and list the benefits. End off with a question and / or a Nostradamus kind-of prophecy of what's to come in the future. That tells the readers that they actually learned something new and invites them to participate in the debate. Now let's see if I can manage to do all this...Uh, oh! How do I get myself into these situations?

Analysis, Debate and Facts:

The argument for front-loading your article is obvious - The average attention span of a webpage visitor is a few seconds, 10 seconds at the most. If in those first few seconds, you don't come up with some solid text or interesting subject matter to induce the visitor to click or scroll down, you're toast and the visitor has moved on to another site. Here's my take on how to do this, monetize it to the maximum, and then move on to the second paragraph:-

What you do is state precisely and concisely what the article is about in the first paragraph. Just below it, you place a banner or text link advertisement which provides the same service / product. There's a good chance that the visitor, rather than just close your window, might decide to click on the ad and see what's inside. So, now we have 3 choices - Continue reading, click on the banner or just close.

I have done this time and again, and I have analyzed my traffic stats and these are the results:

Articles not following front-loading:

Visitors who scroll down : 10%
Visitors who close the window : 85%
Visitors who clickthru to another link : 05%

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Articles following front-loading:

Visitors who scroll down : 35%
Visitors who close the window : 40%
Visitors who clickthru to another link : 05%
Visitors clicking on banner : 20%

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The percentage of visitors who close your window just dropped by about 45%.

Now forget about the 65% of visitors who either clicked on the banner or just closed your window. You're left with about 35% of visitors who scrolled down to read further. These are the visitors who are somewhat impressed with your knowledge. Now you can bloviate to your hearts content. Explore your thinking, lay out the facts, take the article and your point, to it's logical conclusion.

There's not much point in writing a "Eureka" moment at the fag end of an article, if no one is going to see it. There's a reason why advertisers pay more to be placed in a prime slot. That's because there's more of an audience there. And that's why the best programming is also slotted on primetime. SEO copywriting is no different. You place the best ads and put your best content in a place where there's a maximum audience and chance for clicks.


Question / Prediction :

Um...I can't think of one. So, this is my question. Do you have a question? Post it in the comments. C'mon - I'm allowed one screwup per post. As for the Nostradamus thing, here's my prediction - Neither Hillary Clinton nor John McCain is going to be the next President. Why? What do you mean "Why"? Did anyone go and ask Nostradamus "Why"? And, does this have anything remotely to do with front-loading or freelance writers or article formatting or web content or SEO copy writing? Nope. But it's the fag end of the article, and I can jump upside down if I want to.