Take your pick
Pick a piece of online copywriting you like. Even some of mine! Cut and paste it into a new document. Then print and read it. Odds are you’ll find it doesn’t work as well in print as it does in pixels.

Is this harder to read?
Writing for the web is different, because reading a screen is different. It’s harder than reading paper, so work to make web copy less difficult to read. Tempt the visitor to keep going.

Yours sincerely
The web is informal – when did you last see a webpage beginning “To whom it may concern”? Use the first person and active constructions. Take liberties with grammar and construction, as long as you know what you can get away with.

Byte sized*
Break a chunk of copy into short paragraphs – it looks less daunting.

Ask a designer
Any designer will tell you about the advantages of white space. That works on-screen too.

Love spiders
Pepper web content with headlines and sub-heads. It leads the visitor on. And it’s an SEO technique for grabbing spiders.

Key words and phrases
Only humans read print. But web pages are read by stupid software. It doesn’t understand what you’re saying, it just indexes words and phrases. So, repeat key words and phrases more frequently than you’d do for a human reader. However, spiders aren’t going to spend money with you so, for the sake of the humans out there, learn to repeat key words and key phrases unobtrusively.

Pixels, not print
Always proof check for typos and grammaticals by reading your copy as a print out. You’ll see more mistakes that way. Then proof read for sense and readability on screen, because that’s where everybody else will read it.

Keep it short
Bored yet?

*deliberate mispelling. But you knew that anyway.

content, copy, Copywriting, grammar, grammatical errors, search engine optimisation, SEO, webcopy, writing

My usual advice on writing for websites is keep it short, keep it relevant, avoid repetition, and make sure key search terms are included in the page copy (as well as the page title, headers, tags, etc). There’s an exception; the FAQs page. That’s where you can relax a little and expand.

Frequently Asked Questions WILL be read by those with real interest in doing business with you (they’ll be read by your competitors too!) Because potential customers come to FAQs seeking answers, you don’t need to worry about crafting words to grab their attention in the first couple of seconds, and convincing them to buy in the next two. You can use more words without boring the reader. You can insert some jargon. You can build in plenty of internal links. You can include a raft of H2 and H3 headers, much loved by search engines. You can cover a single topic from several angles by varying the question. You can include lists – which you’d normally avoid doing. And you can pack in key words and phrases.

Effectively, there’s no limit to the number of FAQs you can pose but, for readability, once you get beyond about ten or twelve, start breaking them into topic groups, to tidy the page visually. Unless an FAQ is deep down technical, limit answers to no more than 50 words or so. If you need many more, consider linking from a summary answer to a sub-page with the full answer in glorious Technicolor.

Many web copywriters regard FAQ’s as a chore. They’re actually a powerful SEO weapon. That’s why, at writeltd.com, we love them.

web copy copywriting FAQ SEO

A Google Sitemap isn’t an ordinary sitemap designed for humans to read. It’s an XML document designed to help Google’s bot index every page on your site as efficiently as possible.

Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask all use the same protocol, so you need only create one XML sitemap.

There are a number of reasons why a Google sitemap is a useful addition to your site…

• Tell Google to revisit your site and add new pages and changes to its index (used in conjunction with a Google Webmaster Account)
• Submit a site to Google for the first time (via a Google Webmaster Account)
• Use it in conjunction with robots.txt to ensure the site is indexed correctly
• Sites that make heavy use of Ajax, Flash and/or Silverlight have a hard time getting indexed correctly. An XML sitemap ensures every page is visited by the bot (page content is another matter)
• Sites with long-winded virtual URLs containing codes and ids can ensure Google indexes them correctly
• Sites with multiple URL formats can ensure Google doesn’t punish them with a duplicate content penalty (in conjunction with robots.txt)
• The sitemap helps Google find pages more than 2 links from the homepage

All things considered, an XML sitemap is a useful thing to have if your site contains a lot of links. Or if your site isn’t being indexed correctly by Google.

The question is, how do create a Google sitemap? And what the heck is XML?

The good new is, you don’t need to know anything about XML to create a sitemap for Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask. All you need is this free XML sitemap creator.

You may have noticed some of the benefits of an XML sitemap are best realised in conjunction with a Google Webmaster Account. I recommend you also open a webmaster account, and register your site(s) with it.

A Google Webmaster Account is an excellent way to submit a new site to Google, find out whether or not Google has a problem with your site, and gain access to very useful information about how your site is doing. A webmaster account also links to additional information, services and resources. You can pick up a Webmaster account here.

Once you have a Webmaster account, click the ‘Help’ link at the top of the page. You’ll find everything you need to know in Google’s extensive help system.

google sitemap, Search engines, xml sitemap

A new search engine purports to search social media sites in real time. It’s called Bliipa, and it offers some interesting possibilities. For example…

• Find out who’s talking about you
• Find out who’s talking about your competitors
• Monitor chatter about keywords you’re interested in, and join in (i.e. better target your conversion)
• More easily find people you can form alliances with

The major search engines have (so far) been unable to provide real time search on social media sites. Bing does monitor certain sites, and I wondered whether or not Bliipa was monitoring less known sites.

To test this, I entered text from specific feeds I placed on my own Twitter page. Sure enough, Bliipa found them. This looks like a fantastic new tool, and something web marketing folk can put to very good use.

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