Posted in Driving Website Traffic	September 28, 2006

By Kim Mateus , Managing Editor Mequoda Daily and Library

If you're a writer or an editor, the best person to do the search engine optimization of your website is you. Hiring a search engine optimization firm to consult with you is fine, but trying to delegate search engine optimization to others is generally a mistake.

For content-driven, periodical websites, the day-to-day work of search engine optimization—preparing the written copy on your website so it can more easily be found by users—is a down-and-dirty, grind-it-out, got-to-be-done part of the editorial process.

Search engine optimization is becoming a routine part of the editorial function, and website writers and editors must learn to be search engine optimization experts.

Search engine optimization is a job for people who love words and who can write and edit at the professional skill level. Once you understand the process of making search engine-friendly pages, you'll want your writers, editors and other content creators to do it themselves. If you create content yourself, SEO now should be a part of your job description.

We're not strategizing here about website architecture or site maps or navigation. Those are separate issues where SEO and design consultants can be useful. They can help you make certain that your site architecture is properly designed and coded, so that when the search engine spider hits your homepage, it can find the second, third and fourth tiers of your site.

But it is the editorial writers who are responsible for preparing copy for the website who now should be trained in search engine optimization. If you're determined to succeed at search engine optimization, you must be a good writer, with a love of language and an appreciation for the subtleties of meaning and nuance. If you don't excel at writing, you probably won't be a very effective SEO editor, either.

The Mequoda SEO Process for search engine optimization is naturally entrepreneurial. It is designed for writers and editors who are actually creating content for their own websites. We believe larger organizations that outsource or delegate this process to their marketing or (worse) information systems departments are not likely to benefit from these search engine optimization techniques. That's because the content creator is more likely to be fully engaged in the complete editorial process.

For more information on the Mequoda SEO process, sign up for a free trial of the Mequoda Library today and check out our report on SEO.

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