This is just a quick screencast illustrating how to use Wordle word clouds to tell what your copy is optimized for. This is something good SEO copywriters have been doing for quite a while, so there’s nothing new here. (One of the main reasons I’m posting it is so I can link to it for [...]

Google’s Head of Spam, Matt Cutts, recently revealed what SEO copywriters have known for years: including generic product copy (e.g. manufacturer supplied) in your product descriptions can cause problems with your search ranking.

So yes, you’re far better off writing your own product descriptions.
Don’t worry, it’s not as scary as it sounds!
I know that sounds scary, [...]

Copywriter-in-training Shae Baxter emailed me today with a question. I thought my answer might be useful to others. (Sorry, I’ve done this twice in a row now!)
The Question
Is web content writing different from web copywriting? Are there different skill sets involved?
My Answer
Thanks for your email. Unfortunately the answer is yes.
Some people are starting to think [...]

I’ll keep this short ‘n sweet: I’ve FINALLY release my new ebook, ‘Practical SEO Copywriting’.
It captures most of what I know about SEO copy. Not just the theory, but the practice. How to do it right. How to handle the difficulties. And most importantly, how to balance the needs of Google against the needs of [...]

The following four pieces of copy support a theory I’ve written about in a guest post at Science for SEO. The thrust of that post is that helpful, informative copy naturally contains the elements the search engines look for when assessing relevance. And now that the search engines are smart enough to find those elements, [...]

Most websites target a variety of audiences. And each is Googling something different. Here’s an example of how to think about keyword analysis, and how to structure your site around your target keywords (using ‘clustering’ or ‘theming’).

Choosing keywords for your SEO copy & structuring your site around them from Glenn Murray on Vimeo.
Please comment
Let me [...]

Some of my Twitter followers talk to me a lot
I love my Twitter followers (although I hate the term ‘followers’). They’re so helpful and friendly and giving. And I have some brilliant conversations with them.
I’d like more of my followers to do the same
But I keep seeing the same names and faces popping up in [...]

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? How [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]