Monday, September 10, 2007

Advice on Writing – 5 SEO Writing Mistakes

Your writing is a product, and the better you make that product the more money you can make from it, and the better your chances of getting a good job writing. Here are 5 common writing mistakes that you need to know about. Focusing on avoiding these mistakes is essential if you want to improve skill. Writing all will-nilly won’t get you anywhere.

  1. Don’t Write Articles in One big paragraph

In academic writing you write in long paragraphs. For online writing gigs, nobody cares – write short paragraphs that take less than 10 seconds to read! The average internet user gets bored of what they are looking at after 10 seconds and moves on.

  1. Avoid Excessive Formatting

Don’t, just don’t, use bold, italicized and underlined text in the same article. Use simple subheadings in bold or a font size larger, but don’t let the text itself draw attention! It’s the words that are important.

  1. Keep Your Writing Business like

If you are writing a blog, you can write with slang. For website writing gigs you need to keep your spelling, grammar and word choice perfect.

  1. Clarity, Clarity, Clarity!

If there is one thing Ron Irwin (my writing teacher at varsity) taught me, it was to write clearly. Use short sentences and the simples words you can find. Don’t use big synonyms if a more widely-understood word will do.

  1. Try Not to Sound Like a Salesman

Your readers can smell a sales pitch a mile away, and so can clients. The ideal SEO writing strikes a balance between conversational writing and business writing, a mixture of information and praise.

If you have any writing tricks or tips on how to improve your writing skill, post them as a comment!

In the mean time, here are some related posts to keep you going:

- Write Without Sounding Like a Salesman

- Easy eBook Writing System

- Get Well Paid Writing Gigs

- How to Get Into Internet Copywriting


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