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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I was recently asked if I’d be interested in writing some articles to increase a company’s search presence. I had to turn the job down, though, because the client was only prepared to pay US $10 per 500 words. (Actually, in light of my article PR experience, they generously upped their offer to $15 per [...]

Just read some very interesting statistics presented by one of my favourite writers, Gerry McGovern. (The statistcis weren’t from his research; he was just discussing them.) According to a February 2008 study published by the Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research, “Sixty-two percent of marketers believe traditional television advertising has become less effective in [...]