Archive for the ‘Web Copy’ Category

Blog ghostwriting for SEO: Pay peanuts, get monkeys

Monday, December 1st, 2008

Pay $10 – $25 per blog post?! Wow! Put me down for 200 of those. I imagine they’ll be top shelf link bait! Just what I need for my SEO… C’mon! I know blogging is hard work and takes a lot of time, but do you really think the answer is outsourcing to someone cheap? [...]

Facebook did WHAT?!

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

Today’s ‘Marketing Pilgrim’ announced: Facebook Note Removes British Juror from Trial WHO removed her?! Unless Facebook has really extended its reach recently, I’m pretty sure IT didn’t remove the juror. I think it’s far more likely a judge did that! The problem with this headline is that it’s written in the active voice but has [...]

Google is right to penalize sites that over-optimize internal links

Friday, November 21st, 2008

In today’s blog post at Search Engine Journal, Ann Smarty reveals results indicating that Google penalizes sites with over-optimized internal links. Specifically, she examined the effect of linking to the Home page using keyword rich anchor text. These results are very instructive (thanks Ann!), and they make a lot of sense. Google is right to [...]

A quick tip for keeping your readers on your copywriting slippery slide

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

In his acclaimed book, The Adweek Copywriting Handbook, copywriting big-gun Joseph Sugarman likens sales copy to a slippery slide. He says the sole purpose of the headline is to get the reader to read the first line of copy, the sole purpose of the first line of copy is to get the reader to read [...]

A copywriter’s vent about crap SEO copy!

Monday, November 3rd, 2008

I read an interesting blog post today: Low value content is destroying your website. The guts of the post: most pages of most websites are low value. People hardly ever visit them, and if they do stumble upon them, they tend not to return. Only a handful of pages are visited often. Furthermore, “… what [...]

SEO, Lies and Videotape – 7 Common Lies Told by Search Engine Optimization Providers

Friday, October 31st, 2008

I’m ashamed to say it, but many SEOs are just plain dishonest. They know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an utter mystery to most of their customers, and that nobody outside of Google really, truly knows Google’s ranking rules. So they lie. And they get away with it. This article lifts the lid on [...]

Are backlinks in syndicated articles really counted?

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

Article marketing, article PR, article submission, article distribution… Whatever you want to call it, it’s a great way to generate backlinks. But are those backlinks really of any use? I decided to find out. For quite a few years now, I’ve been using article PR as a link building method. For an SEO copywriter, it [...]

US v British/Australian English in Website Copywriting

Friday, October 17th, 2008

Which do you use? US or British (Australian) English in your web copy? Your website is globally accessible, so your readers could come from anywhere. It may seem a trivial consideration, but many readers really care. British readers, for instance, tend to have a strong preference for British English. US readers tend to prefer US [...]

Copywriters, use more contractions!

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

If there’s one piece of advice I’d offer to copywriters (other than embrace SEO), it’d be, “Use more contractions!” I’ve lost count of the number of freelancers who’ve sent me samples chock-full of things like “we will” and “you are” and “we are”. Even fairly conservative audiences like to read the way they speak (within [...]

FreeCopywriting.com splitting AdSense revenue with copywriters

Monday, October 13th, 2008

I’ve just upgraded FreeCopywriting.com. Here’s how it works: You write some copy and submit it to FreeCopywriting.com Google automatically displays ads whenever someone views that copy Google pays a commission whenever someone clicks on one those ads Half the time, that commission goes to me. The other half of the time, it goes to you [...]

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