Bill Shakespeare – you know, The Bard – would have made a terrible web writer. He never gave a thought to keyword density and didn’t even know what strong text was or how to use it in web writing.

Oh, he could write a sonnet and some pretty good stage scripts, but as a web writer, Shakespeare would stink.

Web Writing: The Melding of Art and Science

You can write the prettiest prose and still suck as a web writer. You can write the most compelling sales copy and still stink as a web writer. Why? Because web writing isn’t about sounding pretty or even compelling. Web writing is a mixture of art and science, and to be a successful web writer, you have to know both and be able to deliver both on demand. And you have to do it a lot. And like any other kind of writing, if you CAN mix the art and science of web copywriting, you can make money.

The W3 consumes content like geeks consume chips – potato OR RAM. That means there’s a constant demand for more content of higher quality that: (1) is well-written and cogent, and (2) has a keyword density of 2% with keywords used in strong text, embedded links, headlines and other higher ranking “content.

The art of crafting a well-optimized piece comes in two forms. First, there’s the art of stringing together words in an engaging way. This art is an aspect of writing a thank-you note and writing site text for a tire distributor. It has to read right, feel right and sound right in the reader’s brain.

The second aspect of the art is the integration of optimized text inside those beautifully crafted letter strings. (Yep, content is nothing but a bunch of letter strings to the discriminating search engine spider.) How often can you use the keyword string “thermal gain glass panes” without starting to sound a little stilted?

A good web writer is one who integrates aspects of the science of SEO with good, clean and engaging writing. Oh yeah, then there’s conversion – the third ball in the air for the web writer.

Web Writing and Conversion Ratios

Once you’ve actually got a site visitor, you have less than 10 seconds to capture the attention of that visitor and keep him/her on site long enough to read that optimized, flowing and friendly text you’ve created. Shakespeare would have totally gotten this part of the gig. He can push buttons. Just read Hamlet with the Cliff Notes. Man, he can really push those emotional buttons. And that’s part of the web writer’s job, too. Define the demographic. Define the needs of the demographic, determine the objectives of the client site. Then define both services and, more importantly, benefits. Benefits push buttons when it comes to boosting conversion ratios.

So, even if you’re the best writer in your creative writing class, even if you’ve been published in The New Yorker, even if your tech manuals are the talk of the seminar, if you can’t meld the art of writing with the science of SEO and conversion optimization, you might as well start writing Shakespearean sonnets.