And that’s the official word.

In layman’s terms, your website needs to offer real, useful, and original content in order to be picked up by that monstrous Google Bot. 

Charles Dickens would have been delighted to have lived in this epoch, because in our era of e-commerce and the World Wide Web, copywriters for the web are actually making money.  Or they ought to, at least, in the new scheme of things.

By the Google yardstick, e-commerce as we know it would come down flat on its face if it weren’t for the meticulous copywriters who organize and deliver competent, useful webpages for customers and clients to search, and for Google to index. With more and more businesses joining the WWW bandwagon to attract customers, the signs augur well for copywriting business. Undeniably, where advertising was the driving force of marketing two decades ago, it is web content that now creates the online market for a certain product or service.
 

After the advent of the printing press, copywriting assumed new importance as it was suddenly possible to distribute sales texts over large audiences. From verbal delivery to the written word, copywriting made possible the uniquely proactive communication of the salesperson.

With the advent of the Internet, however, the importance of copywriting exploded. Today, everything that is said, delivered or sold on the Internet involves a written selling pitch. Even audio visual aids such as online multimedia and video depend on the power of the sales message, the ultimate creation of the copywriter’s mind. Today, copywriting is the most powerful tool that can be employed to sell a product or a service, or to win an audience over to a particular point of view.

Copywriting is often employed in order to help sell a product or service. Copywriting for marketing purposes usually entails describing a product thoroughly, highlighting perceived features and benefits in order to convince the target audience to buy your product. Believe it or not, however, many of us have a hard time understanding the basic difference between features and benefits. Both highlight the importance of a product and make it appear desirable. Contrary to popular perception, the two are not the same.

Features and benefits share a common purpose: describing the usefulness of a product. However, the similarity ends right there. A feature is a characteristic of the product, an aspect, or something it offers. It might not always be a benefit. A feature, of course, might result in a benefit. A feature is product centric: it is an attribute of the product entity.

A benefit, on the other hand, emanates from the customer. It is what affects the customer. A benefit is the way the product could provide an advantage to the customer, or make their life better. Sometimes a feature may provide a benefit to the customer. That’s when you can attempt to portray it as a core competence or a unique selling proposition.

Let’s take an example. Suppose you’re selling a car with Bluetooth connectivity as a feature. Yup, that’s a feature all right. But shouldn’t it belong in a PDA or mobile phone? What does a car have to do with Bluetooth connectivity? It would certainly be better if you could highlight the benefit of that particular feature. Like Bluetooth connectivity could enable you to listen to your mobile phone conversations through the car’s speakers, enabling you to talk effortlessly and not have to fiddle with your phone while driving. Hence, its a feature that translates to a real benefit: driving safety.

A good way to look at features and benefits is by way of a entity-relationship diagram. As is apparent, features come from the product, while benefits gravitate toward the customer or stakeholder. The two can also overlap in a USP.

The UK is one of a handful of countries with an advanced copywriting industry. A post industrialised country with a highly developed advertising and marketing industry, the United Kingdom is the birthplace of the English language. A country with such rich lingiustic traditions as Shakespeare and Jane Austin, England is where copywriting for the English language was developed and took off.

Copywriting is arguably most developed in English speaking countries. These countries are characterized by high literacy rates, a relatively affluent population and an extensive advertising industry. Large businesses are looking to sell their latest offerings to targetted customers. Copywriting is the means through which they seek to differentiate their products from one another.

Today, England, America, Canada, and Australia are the only countries where professional English language copywriting services are offered. DMOZ currently lists less than 50 copywriters in the UK, which is a relatively small number if you consider the fact that England is where English was born.

The art of copywriting has evolved from writing sales copy for marketing purposes to writing for the Internet. Today, copywriting is perceived to encompass everything ranging from marketing and product descriptions to articles for Websites. While copywriting has evolved to see demand for it outstrip supply, it has also formed new paradigms and ideas.

Working with words is nothing new. Ever since the invention - or discovery - of written language in ancient Sumer (Mesopotamia), the written word has assumed new forms. At first, writing was used to record important information such as astronomy and calendars required for agricultural and irrigation purposes. With the help of writing, the ancient civilizations could record annual river flood times, the equinoxes and solstices, and the storage and management of crops and grain.

Later, with the invention of the printing press, writing assumed new proportions. People could now publicly disseminate information in the form of printed books and newspapers. Suddenly, the power of the written word increased dramatically. Later on, people realized that writing wasn’t just for conveying information. It could also be used to convey feelings and sentiments. Moreover, it could be used as a sales tool by way of persuasion. And this was the birth of copywriting.

Copywriting can be viewed of both as an art as a science. An art because it derives from one of the most ancient human traditions of old: that of literature and writing. Science, because it banks heavily on an understanding of human psychology and how it can be turned to a business advantage.

Know your audience

It is important to know who you’re writing for. You must be aware of your target audience. No copy can be successful without without it being geared exclusively towards a specific recipient. This target audience must be persuaded to elicit a specific response or action.

Know your offering

It is critical to get a complete rundown of the plan of action or product you are offering. One must know the strengths or unique selling propositions USPs of whatever it is you are trying to promote or market. The strenghts must be portrayed in a way so as to cause the target audience to take action.

Know your call to action

It is highly critical to have a well defined and specific call to action. this is basically what you want your audience to do, be it buy a product, or to commit to a particular course of action such as a signup.

SEO Must Change, and So Must Google

by Waqar Ali Shah

Search Engine Optimization is a curious term. At once, it can evoke a variety of notions, ranging from global perception management to crafty search engine manipulation. It may be appropriate to state here that almost all SEO today is straddling the boundaries of white, black and gray hat.

The term Search Engine Optimization appears to convey that SEO is about developing or managing a website’s evolution in order to make it fully realize its potential, or to make it accomplish the goal of being able to provide relevant content about its specific domain or niche, and as a corollary rank high in the relevant SERPS. The word “optimization” would have us believe that it’s really about tweaking a website to perform at an “optimal” level. This imparts an air of benignness to a field, which we shall now see, isn’t as innocuous or transparent as it may seem. Notwithstanding purely black hat techniques, even s0-called white hat SEO attempts to alter global website perception in a way that is not congruent with the wider objectives of achieving search engine results relevance.

Take link-building for example. Google calculates PageRank based on incoming links, and a higher PageRank almost always translates into better rankings for the more competitive keywords. All SEOs agree that inbound links are a major contributor to increased rankings in Google. However, these same SEOs invest time and money, which includes paying other webmasters, to create backlinks. This involvement of money betrays the fact that incoming links to a website aren’t really “votes” at all, but votes solicited through “bribes”.

Consider link building campaigns. It would be great if you could persuade owners of relevant, related websites to link to your site to actually provide real value to the end user experience. However, most link building campaigns involve outsourcing the work to a specialized party that aims to get a whole lot of links by hook or by crook. Submissions to directories are perfectly legitimate, however. But sneaking links into unsuspecting websites such as comment-enabled blogs or wikis is not. And from Google’s perspective, neither is paying someone to link to a website. If an incoming link is a vote, as Google would have us believe, then by all means, paying to get votes is an unethical practice. This can be called artificial link building, or to put it bluntly, bribing. Link building practices, then, are really skewing the cherished ideal of the highly relevant search experience.

What is Google really doing to combat artificial link building, especially sneaky campaigns executed over a longer period of time in order to appear natural or organic? Google seems to be at a loss as to how best to combat this widespread, growing practice. If link votes can be manipulated by link-building campaigns that can pretty much guarantee you links(or votes, depending on how you perceive it) in return for money, then PageRank cannot be an effective indicator of relevance based on links/votes.

Then we have self-proclaimed SEOs openly advocating search engine manipulation by offering spammy automatic content generation tools that can guarantee you tens of thousands of pages. For example, we have bluehatseo.com offering ways to rapidly set up huge websites based on largely nonsensical content that will inevitably attract a lot of irrelevant traffic. Whether or not this is ethical is debatable, but what is obvious is that search engines must catch up with these devious promoters of irrelevant content that are swamping cyberspace.

There is something hugely disturbing about the fact that major search engines such as Google continue to be so easily manipulated by deft webmasters. In a recent case study I happened to come across, a mortgage solutions website generated nearly 15 million backlinks using link exchanges masquerading as permanent links. The website continues to occupy the top rank for extremely competitive keywords in what is clearly a bewildering example of black hat SEO tolerated well by Google.

Something about SEO has to change, and fast, for it to truly become a reflection of website relevance. Search engines such as Google must modify their algorithms to mitigate the effects of manipulative practices such as automatic content creation and sustained, paid artificial link building (not just rapid link building as is currently being dealt with). This must be done, even if it involves drastically changing Google’s existing algorithms - including PageRank - or replacing them altogether.

What is a niche? Or more specifically, what is an Internet or Web niche? And how does it relate to SEO? We’ve all heard a lot about how important it is to find the correct niche for Internet-based businesses. This question has been raised on Digital Point and other forums multiple times now, prompting me to attempt to answer this in the most intuitive way possible.

The literal meaning of a niche is a cove, or slit. Ever heard of a niche in the bark of a tree? Its importance lies in its confinement; its very definition implies the act of limiting. This means that your niche should be something specific and well-defined. The niche you choose for your business should be something for which there is demand in the world, and which preferably isn’t being served in the best way possible. You fill that gap.

This brings us to keyword gap analysis. Keyword gaps refer to subjects being searched unsatisfactorily. In other words, websites that can adequately serve search needs for a particular keyword simply do not exist. If you can create the information and serve it to the needy, you will have filled that keyword gap. This in turn creates a niche for your new website or online business. In this way, keyword gaps and niches are interrelated. More on this later, so stay tuned!

Hypnotic artwork comprising of 36 triangles arranged to create a beautiful Star of David in a whole new way, representing a whole new dynamic in theological design and innovation!
Gazing into the Prism, you will notice the hypnotic effect it has on you as you begin to unravel the various levels or Stars that exist therein.

It actually involves arranging triangles to create multiple Stars of David, then overlaying them to create the Prism.

We’re working on an SVG version that will be released shortly!