As you’ve probably realised, when it comes to search engine optimisation there’s always a trade-off between writing regular English that flows well and writing the slightly twisted version of English you churn out to please Google, Yahoo and all their algorithmic friends.

If you’re optimising your site for certain keywords, you have to think about things like keyword density (that is, how many times you’re able to shoehorn your keywords into the text on your site as a proportion of the total words you write), whether your keywords and keyphrases are used as headings, in bold or in italics, and whereabouts on the page you use them.

And your page titles are no different.

The search engines look at your page title, analyse the words you use, and work out how important you think your keywords are. If you put your keywords front and centre, they think that you think those words should be emphasised and weight them accordingly. Consider the following as an example:

• Marketing Copywriter | SEO Copywriter | Ad Copywriter Daniel O’Connor
• Daniboy is Daniel O’Connor, Marketing Copywriter, SEO Copywriter and Ad Copywriter

The first phrase is the current title for my copywriting business homepage. The second phrase is what I used to have. Which do you think will be more effective with the search engines? That’s right, the first one.

I’ve put the keywords I want to optimise right at the beginning and left the search engines in no doubt about what I want to emphasise. I’ve also thought about the keyword density of the title and took out irrelevant words like "Daniboy".

Personally, I think the second phrase reads a bit better. But like I said at the top, it’s a trade-off. The best thing you can have is something effective that reads well and I’m happy with how it is now.

So what about your page title? Need any work?

One mistake I often see in letters is when the writer has not remembered to have the salutation match the farewell message. This is a quick and easy explanation of what you should use.

• If you address the person receiving the letter directly - if you write their name, in other words - end the letter with "Yours sincerely" or "Sincerely yours".
• If you address the receiver in an indirect way - if you don’t write their name - end the letter with "Yours faithfully " or "Faithfully yours".

Thus:

and:

Happy writing.

An old-school classic that somehow never seems old. This game’s been going since, what, the 1860’s? And you still get a rush of adrenaline whenever you manage to snag one of the red UFOs that zip across the top of the screen.

Play it here:

http://www.neave.com/games/spaceinvaders/

Have a good weekend.

When you optimise your website, you do so with an eye on what you think your direct competitors are doing. Quite simply, you try to analyse what they are doing, decide what they’re doing well, and then work out how to do the same… but better. So who are your competitors? Do you know?

One of the most important things in SEO is to decide on the keywords and keyphrases you think potential customers are using to find companies like yours. So for me and my services I’d expect people to put in things like "marketing copywriter" or "seo copywriter" — and they do, as I can see by looking at my website stats. It’s therefore logical to assume that if people find me by using the keyphrase "marketing copywriter", they’re finding other companies offering similar services at the same time.

If you have a keyword or keyphrase in mind and want to check out the competition, the obvious thing to do would be simply to enter it into a search engine and look at what comes up. The results you get will give a good indication of what sites you’re up against.

Some of the results you get, however, won’t be relevant. Some of the sites that rank highly won’t necessarily be specifically optimising for those keywords/keyphrases; they might be ranking highly for a number of different reasons, none of which might be relevant to you. Adobe doesn’t optimise its site for the phrase "click here", but still ranks as the number one site for that phrase on every search engine in the world.

So how can you get relevant results to find out what your competition is? How can you get a list of sites you can check out and steal from model?

Here’s how: Use the "allinanchor" search function and research the anchor text of your rivals.

Anchor text is the words you see written on the links you click on. When I put a link to my copywriting website, for example, I could write the anchor text as here, Daniboy or Marketing Copywriter. All three are examples of anchor text.

Instead of simply entering marketing copywriter in Google and seeing what comes up, if I instead put in allinanchor:marketing copywriter, I can get a much clearer idea of who my competitors are. The results I get will tell me which sites have backlinks using that specific phrase, a sure sign of the kind of optimisation I’m looking for.

Check it out. It’ll save you time deciding who you’re competing against.

Window Resizer

This add-on is incredibly useful when you’re building your website.

Although most monitors these days are large enough to cope with any site they come across, a lot of people still use smaller monitors that, depending on the size of the site and the images it uses, require you to scroll across and down to see the whole page.

If your website’s pages are quite "large", you might be annoying (and potentially losing) your customers by forcing them to do lots of scrolling.

How can you tell the way your site’s going to look on small monitors? You could downsize your browser window to approximate what a smaller monitor would see, but there’s no real way of doing that with any accuracy.

This add-on will do it for you. It gives you the option of seeing a web page in the following sizes: 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024 and 1600×1200.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1985