Delight in the long list of horrors to avoid when indulging in the black art of the web copywriter.

Spam ye not– 9 November 2004
Think you can trick the search engines and directories into supercharging your ranking? The fact is you probably can't.

My friends in the SEO (that's "Search Engine Optimisation") business spend their lives learning how to do this properly. And I spend a whole chunk of time on getting website copy as well liked by Google and Co. as possible. But the truth is this - if the search sites think you're trying to fool them, they'll drop your ranking.

Result? You've spent valuable time making your site less popular. Congratulations.

Creaky content – 8 October 2004
Got a content managed site? Then use it. The search engines will love you if you update your site regularly, and your customers will love you even more.

Quote from a customer "OK, we know our site is a bit of a beast, but our customers love it. By keeping it current we hardly ever have to send out a printed brochure or answer silly questions on the phone". So there.

Full stops are dead – 1 October 2004
If you’re writing a sentence with a web address at the end, don’t put a full stop after it. Why? Because the full stop looks silly. It’s even worse in print – some unsuspecting soul will type in that final “dot” as part of the web address.

Too clever by half – 27 September 2004
Is your website navigation (you know, the bits that say “home”, “about” and “contact”) trying to be creative? It’s fine for some audiences, but deeply wrong for most others.

It’s a bit like swapping around road signs or jumbling up the chapters of a book. Which is silly. Stick with the conventions unless your audience are ultra web-savvy.

That’s not right – 22 September 2004
Try killing the word “that” from your writing. Most of the time, you don’t need it. Eerie.

Love me. Love my bullet points – 15 September 2004
As an advertising copywriter, I’d almost never use bullet points. As a web copywriter, I use them all the time. Why? To draw in the eye and to build credibility in the seconds it takes to click away from a page.