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 [...]

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 [...]

I just watched the ‘Rank is Dead’ video interview of Bruce Clay over at WebProNews. Very interesting and, above all, entertaining! Bruce made some very interesting points, but ‘cmon, everyone has to recognize that he’s just beating up some buzz! His claims that sites with ‘engagement objects’ (e.g. videos) will outrank sites without, simply because [...]

This is a question a client asked me a couple of days ago. And the answer is most definitely, no! Your tagline is the written spearhead of your brand. You want your customers to remember it, and to always associate it with your company, your products and services. But it doesn’t need to explicitly refer [...]

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 [...]

Last week on Twitter, I irritated Jill Whalen (@jillwhalen). And I was mortified. This is the person who set me on the path to becoming an SEO copywriter! Her ebook was the first SEO-related ebook I ever bought. She’s a genuine celebrity in the SEO world, and someone I really do look up to. And, [...]

“Out him! Out him! Out him! People have a right to know!” Sounds very familiar, doesn’t it? But if you think I’m talking about lifting the lid on the personal lives of the Neil Patrick Harrises and T. R. Knights of this world, think again. I’m talking about exposing black-hat SEOs for the depraved, oiled-up, [...]

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 [...]

When I first checked Twitter out, I didn’t get it. Like you, I’m always too busy. So I had one quick look, couldn’t see the immediate benefit, and (much to my own misfortune) I didn’t come back for months. It wasn’t until I had the privilege of seeing Darren Rowse present at a Search Engine [...]