‘Link baiting’ may just be a fancy name for ‘good web content’, but it’s a handy reminder that content is critical to a high search engine ranking. Simply put, it’s about making your site content so good that people can’t help but link to it. They feel they’d be doing their own visitors a disservice [...]

Just a quick post this time… I quite often find myself recommending tools or specific applications of tools for copywriting and SEO copywriting. So I thought I’d cut out the middle-man and simply publish my list and a few comments on each tool. So here’s my list of copywriting tools and SEO copywriting tools. If [...]

One of the best ways to build the link popularity of your site (thereby increasing your search engine rank) is to check where your competitors’ links are coming from, and try to get links from those sites yourself. (You’ll be surprised where some of their links come from.) Yes, it’s a simple idea, but when [...]

Probably the most well known method of generating inbound links is to look for link partners. This is done in a variety of ways: ask customers to link to your site (possibly in return for a link to theirs) ask suppliers to link to your site (possibly in return for a link to theirs) look [...]

There are many possible ways to generate links. Some are dubious (like auto-generation software, and sites set up by webmasters simply to host links to their other sites) and I won’t be discussing them here. Others, like those discussed below, are legitimate. NOTE: Link generation is an ongoing (often tedious) task. You need to be [...]

Sorry for my long delay in posting. For the first time in history, I had a long break over Christmas. Only fully back on board today. Now back to business… What gives you a high ranking in the search engine? Well, assuming you’ve completed step one (i.e. you’ve optimized your website for your target keywords), [...]

Within the HTML code behind your page, there are things called ‘meta tags’. These are short notes within the header of the code which describe some aspects of your page to the search engines. Although there is some debate over how important meta tags are when it comes to SEO, it’s generally agreed that they [...]

When you’re writing your SEO copy, chances are there’ll come a time when you’ll wonder whether you should target the plural of your keyword or the singular. e.g. Do I target “tennis shoe” or “tennis shoes”? To answer this question, the first thing you need to do is find out what your target visitors are [...]

The short answer is no. The long answer follows… As soon as you start optimizing your web copy, you’ll realise that it’s quite difficult to repeat your keyword again and again, without your copy becoming very unfriendly to readers. This is particularly problematic when you’re targeting very specific keyword phrases. For example, for me, targeting [...]

One of the most important aspects of optimizing your site for search engines (SEO) is your web copy. Google and the other search engines read the words on your page to figure out what your site is about and which searches they should display it in. But they don’t read like humans. We actually make [...]