SEO

Contrary to popular opinion, this is not the dark art that so many practitioners claim it is.

You can find lists of 100 things that must be done to get a website ranked highly by search engines. You can spend hours fiddling with 97 of them, but trust me, concentrate on just three!

Search engines like long copy, it gives a site authority. Fortunately, as any direct marketing expert will confirm, when humans are considering a purchase, they like long copy as well. So all you need to know is how to write for two audiences simultaneously!

Authority is also important for another reason – trust. Search engines trust websites that have incoming links from other websites. And the more authority the other website has the better.

While it would be terrific to get links to your site naturally, unless you’re someone like the BBC, this is unlikely to happen. So you will need to cultivate your links. I will write more about this another day.

Finally, you need to work on your page title and your meta descriptions. But that’s also a story I’ll save for another day.