The Ethics of SEO Copywriting
As search technology has advanced, online copywriting has offered a watershed of opportunities for writers that wish to make a living doing what they love. Promoting websites on everything from payday loans to third party politics, current search protocols have created an arms race in content. Rather than keyword stuffing or cloaking content, the easiest way to promote your site in the search engines now is to actually create better content.
And this means a lot of good things for copywriters. Search engine optimization may still be somewhat mystifying in the specifics, but the proof is in the pudding. In an industry where writers are paid by the word, there´s a high risk that most of what is produced will be filler. The best writing is often promoted by using less words, not more. Under these circumstances, writers have to make a decision about how much to sacrifice their quality standards for a better hourly paycheck. Fortunately, the natural SEO rewards of genuinely high quality content are balancing that out now, and writers who are interested in the quality of their products are rewarded with greater SEO effectiveness, and (one would hope) eventually career advancement because of it.
A more problematic issue is that, regardless of what they put on the screen, every writer is ultimately responsible for what products they choose to promote. We don´t always have control over the work that´s available to us, but there is a choice to be made. If you´re a health food enthusiast, is it ethical to promote a cheeseburger? What if you believe it will genuinely hurt people? This is where copywriters face the same dilemma that every worker attempting to pay the bills must at some point confront, creating the best content and defending the best values we are able to along the way.
Information About | Angela Harlan | 13 November 2012 |
