Thalasar Ventures

One of the consistently offered services on various webmaster boards (Digitalpoint and V7N) are for content creation. Everyone wants a site with rich content but doesn’t have time/writing skills to actually do it so you might think outsourcing to a country where English is a common taught second language is a good idea. Of course you would be entirely wrong.

People trying to game the search engines with content is as old as the Web itself. A particular style of writing focused on keyword density has developed. This is different than auto generated garbage from various software packages. This is original copywriting and it’s original garbage. Here’s an example I got today at my online business directory. I got the link request as I normally would for a real estate site. When I went to the site, this is what was on the opening page,

realestateagentsadvice.com provides the Real Estate conditions information of all states of America like California, Georgia, New York, Wisconsin and Oklahoma Real Estate…
USA has long been a longing place to live in for every citizen of the rest of the world. USA offers you a highly technical and independent life which you hardly find in other Parts of the World. It is the place to work, earn, learn and enjoy with the family. In other words it’s a dream land where you can fulfill your most cherished dreams comes true. Though Real Estate in America is in high demand, it is affordable by everyone.
United States can be called the Heaven on Earth. It reveals its beauty as if God made it when he was in a good mood. It bears everything in abundance when it comes to beauty, beaches, mountains, valleys, climate, water and so on the list is endless.

Notice anything odd about that copy? It’s clearly written by someone for whom English is a second language. Nonsensical phrasings such as “longing place” clearly indicate a complete lack of knowledge of US idiom and structure. Yet this site was submitted as a US real estate directory. The content is “original” yet it’s less than useless. In fact anyone actually reading the content would immediately be turned off and would think either this person is a poor writer or simply not that intelligent. When trying to get a user to convert (in the case of the above site file out a form for a real estate lead. But with copy like that, who in their right mind is going to submit any personal information to a site like that?
You see even worse copy on sites designed for gaming the search engine system with a specific keyword density in mind. Here’s one from Technorati on the search term “mortage” where the writer has a few words on “securing a bad credit mortgage”

Alleviating yourself from huge credit card, as well as other head-spinning debts by assessing your options now, before all those debs start blowing up in your face is one way to right your financial ship. One plausible option is a bad credit mortgage loan, and it’s a good first step towards a more financially disciplined lifestyle. In other words, a financial second chance.
Unfortunately, many people have a hard time facing the reality of their current financial situation and they foolishly think they can go it alone. Fortunately, today’s credit markets have geared many of their programs for people just like you and they are more than happy to assist you with your financial woes by doing anything and everything possible to assist you in securing that much needed mortgage refinance to get you back to financial solvency. . . .
But before you actually take that big leap in to actually applying for a bad credit mortgage loan for yourself, try your best to actually arm your self with (more than) enough information to actually guide you through the debt restructuring process.

This copy was written with the terms “bad credit loan” and “bad credit mortgage” in mind. It was written entirely to drive up EPC on the Adsense ads on the page. (For those of you wanting the rest of the entry it can be found http://rapidcashweb.com/?p=8). This copy holds absolutely no value for the reader since it simply contains hackned cliches about “bad credit mortgage” so that the Mediabot at Google will find those keywords and display the appropriate ads. It’s a business model built on sand. While these pages might rank highly for awhile (or attract people through the blogosphere) it’s not sustainable. People coming to the site do so accidently – they aren’t ever coming back and in fact while note your site as not being worth the time. Given the high cost of acquiring a reader, why would you chase them off with splart (spam articles)?
People use this garbage because they can think they can get something for nothing (or at least something for very little). I will post on this a little later but right now I want to highlight what lessons we can learn about copywriting for the web.
Find your voice
This is the most time consuming part I think for an aspiring blogger/writer. It takes time and a whole lot of writing to find your voice. I would start with things that you enjoy. Take your time – it will come.
If you can’t write, pay for quality
Buying 1,000 articles a month that 200 other people also get won’t really work. Google will find every single on of those pieces and someone is going to be deemed authoritative and everyone else is going to be deemed a copy. Writing original copy that only exists on your site is the way to go.
It takes time
Writing original articles takes time and building content takes time. Resist the urge to take short cuts and buy the services of that writer who quite doesn’t quite speak English.
The original headline of this article is “Spart” which my neologism for spam article. I am now going to set a article at the wikipedia.org devoted to the term.