Everyone familiar with the basic copywriting rules knows that successful copy is the one that answers the most critical question for us all: What’s In It For Me? However many authors fail to realize the way this question has to be asked so that it can reflect the preferences and traits of the readers’ personality types. Yours most important objective in your copy is establishing a consistent communication with each personality type, so your prospects can provide the information they require to influence their buying decision.In the most general classification we can observe four main personality types which can be labeled as Amiable, Analytical, Driver and Expressive. Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg and Lisa Davis in their book ‘Persuasive Copywriting: How to Take Your Words to the Bank‘ provide a detailed description of each type which I feel obliged to bring up to you. Interested? Read on!

Take a look at your website. How much of your content might be considered as duplicate by a search engine algorithm? Even though you never copy anyone you can’t answer ‘none’ because someone can be copying you. Duplicate content is one of the biggest issues both for search engines trying to keep their results’ relevancy high, and webmasters trying to avoid search engine penalties.

Penalties for having duplicate content can be really harmful. This is not just a downgrade in rankings but a move to supplementary results which are hardly visible to the most of the web users. Normally it is expected that Google would select one URL over another to display in SERPs, while duplicates could be found in supplemental results. Unfortunately this is not always so. In this thread [1] of the WebmasterWorld forum you can read about a case when an original high quality and authoritative page was removed from Google’s index together with its duplicates. Considering that this can happen even to the most honest webmaster, one can imagine the amount of attention this issue gets on any SEO forum. Interested? Read on!

High placement in a search engine is critical for the success of any online business. Pages appearing higher in the search engine results to queries relevant to a site’s business will get higher targeted traffic. To get this kind of competitive advantage Internet companies employ various SEO techniques in order to optimize certain factors used by search engines to rank results. In the best case SEO specialists create relevant well-structured keyword rich pages, which not only please the eyes of a search engine crawler but also have value to the human visitor. Unfortunately it takes months for this strategic approach to produce feasible results, and many search engine optimizers use so-called “black-hat” SEO. Interested? Read on!

Related Link: Search Optimization

What will be the next big thing on the Web? This was one of the questions asked in the State of the Web Development 2006/2007 Research by SitePoint. About 5000 web professionals took part in the survey, and below is a sample of the most interesting, insightful and creative answers.(Of course the I’s don’t refer to the author of this post)

I don’t envision a “next big thing” so much as an evolution of current trends towards standards compliance, responsible use of technologies and semantics, which will hopefully aid in creating a more tightly woven web of relationships between resources. I think we’ll continue to see simplistic elegance and functionality reign supreme. Interested? Read on!

What is the distribution of clicks on a search engine results page? What percentage of clicks gets each search result according to its rank? How much more users’ attention gets the first listing compared to the second? Or how often do users click the listing below the page fold? The way users interact with SERPs is one of the most frequently discussed topics in the SEO community and is also a very important field of study for the search engine specialists. To answer the above questions researchers employ the so-called eye tracking experiments.

Interested? Read on!

Flash is evil

Building Flash-powered websites is wrong. Storing your content in Flash movies is wrong. Implementing site navigation in Flash is wrong.

Then why are there so many Flash sites? They look pretty with all those neat vector graphics, gradients, animations and cool sound effects. Flash is the favorite toy of big designer studios and numerous amateur graphic artists alike. Flash is visually attractive, and in general attractive websites are more successful than the ugly ones (notable exceptions: craigslist.org and plentyoffish.com). But this is not the case of Flash websites. All the benefits of the nice outlook are overridden by the disadvantages in terms of SEO and usability. Interested? Read on!

Link Popularity

Link building has always been a hot topic. In the beginning of the web hyperlinks were virtually the only way to get visitors to a site, because search engines were in their infancy. When search engines grew to be the major source of the web traffic, links didn’t lose their weight, as search algorithms started to rank sites according to the quantity and quality of their incoming links. And today links become increasingly important with the growing significance of the new Web 2.0 social networks. Interested? Read on!

The recent Toolbar RageRank update once again has generated a lot of discussion in the SEO community. Webmasters report their websites receiving not much more traffic despite the increased visible PageRank. In numerous forum threads people question the reliability of toolbar values. By unveiling the following five myths I hope to answer to some of the uncertainties caused by this update. Interested? Read on!

People think that copy and content are two different things, since they serve two different purposes of motivation and information. But in terms of user conversion their differences fade away. Interested? Read on!

Matt Cutts, a software engineer at Google since 2000, the author of SafeSearch, the Google’s family filter, is famous for his blog where he reveals some of the Google’s secrets. Matt Cutts: Webmaster Guidelines to Succeed in Google. A Video Transcript.

Q: What are the guidelines and recommendations to increase site’s visibility in Google?

The first thing you should do is to ensure that search engine spiders can easily access and crawl your website. You have to look at your website through the search engine eyes or use a text browser like Lynx. If you can go through your entire site using only a text browser than you are probably ok. But most of the people don’t even bother with crawlability, although they can easily improve it by creating a sitemap with text links to all the pages of a website, or by using Google Sitemaps service. Interested? Read on!

Related Link: Website Traffic Buy Web Traffic