WEBSITE COPY IS IMMEDIATE

It grabs attention. It’s all about me, me, me. Don’t click away! There’s more good stuff coming, if you only read more! When you write copy for your website, you have to try to keep people reading. The more they read, the better they’ll feel about you and whatever you’re trying to sell them. What you “sell” them could be a thing, a service, or even just an idea.

IT’S NOT SUBTLE

A good reason for buying whatever it is they’re selling? Yep, you need that. Nuance? On the other hand-type counter-arguments? Nah, not really. “Long-copy” websites (you know the ones. They have just one page, paragraphs with TITLES that SUDDENLY pop OUT at you and LOTS of RED) will meander their way to the point, but regular websites should try to keep things short and simple.

GOOGLE HAS TO LOVE IT

Bing’s great. Yahoo! and Ask get lots of visitors. But Google’s the one that matters. And Google has rules. You have to optimise your site to get good results, but not optimise too much. It’s not easy if you don’t know how! A lot of the old tricks that used to guarantee page one rankings are now worse than useless. Keyword stuffing? Thousands of incoming links using identical anchor text? Nope. They’ll penalise you.

IT HAS TO WORK WITH YOUR SITE DESIGN

Your website copy needs to be punchy, grammatical, and contain no spelling mistakes or typos. It has to convey a message and convince site visitors to want to read more. And it has to be disciplined. People will read a page with 300 words of copy. They won’t be so happy to read 3,000 words in the middle of the page that destroy the look of your site. Got a lot to say? Edit yourself! Here’s my web copy portfolio page.