Search engines are cool, but they aren’t that bright. They don’t know that you meant ‘car’ when you typed ‘vehicle’. If you’ve just spent 3 hours digging through a thesaurus, finding every alternative for ‘shoes’, start over. Burn the thesaurus. Think about the words that people use to find you. Then, as a revolutionary new [...]

SEO still lives and dies based on good copywriting. If you’re going to move up in the rankings and stay there, you have to know how to write customer- and search engine-friendly content. But you’re a writer. You shouldn’t have to learn about SEO, keyword mining, pagerank and the robots meta tag. You just want [...]

Yo, copywriters. If you freak out about semantic markup, then you have varying degrees of apoplexy over links. But linking is a critical part of smart online copy. Links are why it’s called the world wide web, and not the world wide collection of random disconnected bits and pieces. So you need to learn. Here’s [...]

Copywriters are a weird, weird bunch. They fearlessly crank out pages of great prose – an activity that terrifies most people – but are horrified when I mention something like ‘semantic markup’. The concept of a heading tag reduces the best writers to a mass of quivering jelly. Well, for all you writers out there, [...]

Become an internet marketing creature unlike any other Times are tense, and now more than ever, you feel the burden of needing that ever-elusive advantage over the competition. If you’ve overdosed on tipping points, purple cows, and cheese-moving, it’s time to turn to the true treasure-trove of internet marketing secrets: the dating bible “The Rules” [...]

One of the most common misconceptions about a copywriting career is that all you need is good writing skills. This is hardly the case. There are many great writers in the world who would either not enjoy copywriting, or who would not excel at it. But there are definitely certain qualities that predispose people to [...]

If you were a creative writing or English major, you may think your job prospects include pouring coffee in a cafe while scrawling poems on napkins, burying yourself in manuscripts as an editorial assistant in a publishing house, working as a journalist for a local publication, or of course writing the Great American Novel. But [...]

It’s the tiredest of icebreakers. And yet, at lease once a month, someone asks me what I do. After I say I’m a copywriter, I am usually treated to one of three sparkling remarks: “So, you just copy what other people write?” “So, you make copies of other people’s writing?” “So, you make copyrights?” Har, [...]

The economy is rocky. Resources are tight. It's the perfect time to run out and hire a creative services firm to do your Internet marketing, right? Right! While resources must be considered carefully in a rocky economy, I am here to explain why investing in professional creative development is one of the soundest business decisions [...]

When you read that paid search and organic search require separate content strategies you might think, “Duh! That’s obvious.” Except that something happened to me last week, and this was not the first time. A Portent’s client earned a top ten ranking for an important keyword, one right near the top of the keyword chart. [...]