Web Content

Everything you forgot about link-building.

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Web link buildingVisit a handful of online marketing websites and blogs and you’ll get an idea of the emphasis being placed on the various activities near and dear to marketers’ hearts.

You’ll find a lot about search engine optimization, in spite of the howls of people who say SEO is dead. (They’re wrong.)

You’ll find plenty about the benefits and rise of social media.

And you’ll find tons of information on content marketing.

But you can go for quite a while without finding a meaty page or post about link-building.

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Optimize each page of digital content according to its purpose.

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Web content optimization.Content marketing is a hot topic, and for good reason.

Content is the lifeblood of most websites, blogs, video channels and photo apps.

A constant flow of new and compelling content gets visitors hooked and keeps them engaged.

What is content? Often it’s an article or a post. But it could be a review or a buying guide. It could be a video, a photo essay or a slideshow. Or an ongoing series of photos on Instagram or Pinterest. Or a podcast or a vlog. It could be a multimedia mashup.

Add together all those new pages, posts, videos, photos and podcasts – plus all the tweets and Facebook updates that are created – and you have hundreds of millions of new pieces of content uploaded each day.

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Optimizing a web page doesn’t mean it has to be all new.

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Start from a blank pageClients like to feel they are getting their money’s worth when they pay you to improve on an existing web page.

This is true whether you are writing an online sales page, subscription page or some kind of content page.

In my experience, clients not only want you to completely rewrite the current control, but they also want you to base the new page on a totally new idea.

If you give them a variation on the current page or, heaven forbid, just make some tweaks to what they already have, they become very disappointed and will likely throw your draft back in your face.

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How to write for an audience that likes to snack.

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Snacks for your online audienceBack in the early days of the web we followed the lead of traditional media.

Newspaper editors favored long, detailed articles with maybe one or two images.

We did much the same. Except back in the days before broadband, we took it easy on the images. They took too long to download onto the page.

Even with the arrival of broadband we still focused on using a ton of text. Why? Because that’s how we caught Google’s attention. We wrote long articles and posts, included a few keywords and waited for a flood of readers.

Well, things have changed since then.

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The fastest way to learn about writing for the web is to have fun… while writing for the web.

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Coffee Detective websiteYou probably remember this from your own time at school.

When you enjoyed the subject, and liked the teacher, you learned faster and did well. And the most enjoyable classes where those in which you were actually doing something rather than just studying a text book, line by line.

Long story short, you always learn more when you’re having fun. And what you learn sticks when you learn by “doing” instead of just reading text books.

The same is true when learning online writing and copywriting.

You can study all you want, but you’ll learn most when you “do it”, and when you’re having a good time.

Which brings me to my own favorite learning tool.

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3 Ways for online copywriters to optimize every page of copy they write.

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Three cogs representing three areas of web page optimization.As an online copywriter you probably focus a lot of attention on applying your skills as a copywriter, page by page.

Nothing wrong with that. I do the same. I always want each page of copy I write to be the best it can be.

But I also have to consider three other factors that will impact the performance of my copy. In other words, online copywriting is about more than just writing words that sell.

Here are the three other factors I pay attention to. Once I have addressed them all I can finally relax in the knowledge that the page ready to be published.

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