Archive for category SEO

Copywriters – Artists or Scientists?

Picture by Sarah G...

Picture by Sarah G...

What Art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern: the distinctive faculty. In the minds of men the useful has succeeded to the beautiful. Instead of the city of the Violet Crown, a Lancashire village has expanded into a mighty region of factories and warehouses. Yet, rightly understood, Manchester is as great a human exploit; as Athens.

- Benjamin Disraeli

Tom Albrighton and Martin Williams have spent the greater part of this week discussing whether or not copywriters is the right term to describe professional creators of content. While they have covered that debate fairly comprehensively, it has raised a few other interesting questions.

The question that intrigues me most as an SEO, is that of a percieved division between the “creative professional” copywriter and the “keyword-driven” SEO content mill. It’s a question I’ve tried to answer before in discussions, explaining that the latter has to balance the art of copywriting with the science of SEO.

But am I right? Are copywriters artists, or are they scientists? And is there really a fundamental division between the beauty of the copywriter and the usefulness of the SEO content creator?

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How Not to Pitch an SEO Client by Email

Ironhide Facepalm by Tenthousandleaves

Ironhide Facepalm by Tenthousandleaves

I’ve had a bit of a debate with an SEO specialist called Bikash. I was going to turn it into an informative post outlining the mistakes he made when he pitched me by email. Having a webmail address, not looking at my site, contradicting himself. That sort of thing.

Then he finished off with something so stunning, so moronic that I can’t bring myself to critique it. I’m going to regurgitate his “pitch” to you all, and you can take from it what you will. Hell, let me know what you think his biggest mistake was in the comments section.

Now brace yourselves, and read on.

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You Really Shouldn’t Be Blogging

Photo by Brainware 3000

Photo by Brainware 3000

Common wisdom across the Blogosphere is that you should be blogging. All the time. If you’re not creating reams of content regularly, then your readers are going to desert you, RSS subscribers will throw in the towel and the search engine spiders will retreat to less dusty corners of the web.

This is of course, rubbish. Because guess what? You really shouldn’t be blogging.

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Laura Wilde Bings and Decides

She Came, She Bing-ed, She Decided

She Came, She Bing-ed, She Decided

You can’t have missed Microsoft’s media offensive. Magazines, TV Adverts and Xbox Live are singing the praises of Bing – the search engine successor to MSN Live Search.

From every street corner and every television set, they’re calling upon the people to Bing and Decide. What Microsoft hope is that people will try Bing once and turn away from Google’s “information overload.”

Every SEO professional has an opinion. Bing isn’t advanced enough, Google have ruined their clean results page with sponsored links and embedded videos.

But what about the non-professionals? What about the people who don’t see search engines as a living, but as a means to an end. Luckily, I live with such a person. So I posed her a question. “Will you Bing and Decide?”

Her answer – why not?

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