Writing search engine copy can feel like a minefield. Get it right and your site will attract new customers via search engines and increase sales. Get it wrong and new customers simply won’t find you. The good news is, there are some simple things you can do that will make all the difference.

Web copywriting tips

Know your audience
If you have a clear picture of who you’re talking to, it’s far easier to pitch the tone and type of information at the right level. Create a mental image of your target customer, then imagine you’re talking directly to them.

Keep it short and sweet
The first couple of sentences are crucial. In a web environment, you’re competing with a never ending supply of information, so you’ve got to grab people’s attention from the outset. Make them really relevant, so that your reader knows what you have to say is what they want to read. Then, once you’ve got their attention, you’ve got to keep it. Keep sentences and paragraphs short and to the point. Web audiences need relevant information quickly. Assume that your audience has a limited amount of time to hear what you have to say.

Remember, once your site is up and running, it’s important to monitor and analyse its performance, so that you can make improvements where necessary. It’s also crucial to regularly update your content, as the search engines begin to ignore pages that aren’t updated regularly. Users want to know your site is kept up-to-date and see fresh, innovative content, so be sure to provide them with it to keep them coming back.

Achieving good Google rankings is only half the battle. The web is a competitive environment, so once you’ve got good rankings for your key phrases, you need to make sure you keep them.

If you’ve been on our homepage this week, you may have noticed our new banner, which illustrates our competitive advantage message. If you’re interested in how the image of Frank and his giant prize winning marrow was created, here’s the photographer Stephen Shepherd’s account:

“I had to source a giant marrow, so instead of getting a model maker to mock something up, I went to the Royal Bath and West show. They have a giant vegetable competition, where I managed to talk to the winner of the Giant Marrow category. He’d grown it purely for the show and was more than happy to sell it.

At this size they are not good for eating and this way he didn’t have to worry about transportation and disposal.

Because the marrow has very heavy, we had to lighten it up a bit by cutting a large section from the back and hollow it out, so what you see in the picture is a prize winning, giant marrow shell.

My feeling is that although hollow, it still looks heavy. A light polystyrene model (and I have seen them) just doesn’t look right because the human model finds it hard to make us believe the object is heavy and real.”

I especially like the glint in Frank’s eye! He certainly knows something we don’t, and that’s his competitive advantage.

To find out more about Stephen’s work, please visit his photographer’s website.

We’ve had an exciting few months at MTD! We’ve worked tirelessly to complete the suite of Four Pillars Hotels websites and now, at last, they’re finished, live and looking fabulous!

Because the sites are so extensive and we’ve been involved throughout the whole process, from the initial planning meeting to the launch of the final site, it’s given us the opportunity to bring all our web-know how and best practice together to create a suite of really comprehensive websites.

The sites have also enabled us to implement some nifty new bespoke technology, such as being able to share particular types of content across multiple sites with just a couple of mouse clicks.

As well as the fabulous back-end (excuse the pun!) the front-end is also slick, well thought-out and very user-friendly. See for yourself. Go to www.four-pillars.co.uk, check out the website and bag yourself a bargain summer break!

 Let’s face it, sales and marketing departments are two sides of the same coin – they’re both put in place by businesses to essentially create more awareness, build relationships and boost revenues.

So what’s unquestionably puzzling in this current economic downturn is the question on every marketer’s lips – why aren’t these two teams talking to each other? What has led to this breakdown of communication and what can be done to solve it?

Well, let’s look at this logically and go back to basics. You wouldn’t expect a relay team to rely on one person to win a race, so why rely on a single area of your company to sell your product or service?

Of course, sales and marketing positions have independent roles – yet, they’re each striving towards the same goal. A sales department cannot afford to spend their time getting to know their customers inside out, just as marketers shy away from one-on-one meetings.

Indeed, the problem is not the two departments individual operations, yet the fact that they’re not melding their skills into a double act that could potentially see their business grow with twice the power and dominance at a time of shaky financial stability.

The irony is that the technique businesses need to focus on during a recession is precisely the one that most sales and marketing departments are weakest at – lead generation. In order for this dark art to deliver results, both divisions must pull together seamlessly.

So how do you send this sinking ship back afloat? Well, primarily there needs to be little, or if possible, no slashes through marketing budgets – whatsoever – not even a nip.

Consistency must make up the base of this business model – continuing to push your product, service and brand boldly, whilst retaining the highest level of contact between sales and marketing departments.

Once the communication barrier has been battered and the team is functioning productively as a whole, you’ll start to review the results and realise that those non-existent networks of communication between the sales and marketing departments have actually been detrimental to company performance and crucially affected customer commitment and loyalty.

Yet it’ll all be a learning curve to look back on, since your sales and marketing team is now a united force – with more insight, focus and passion than ever, and equally more capable of delivering effective lead generation campaigns in today’s wavering economic climate.

In this challenging economic climate, we all want to cut costs. So when companies find the cost of author’s amendments on marketing projects mounting up, they often think that bringing elements of design and artwork ‘in-house’ is the answer. Marketing executives and IT workers are expected to pick up the work in the absence of a proper creative studio. Companies may see this as a logical way to cut costs, but they don’t understand the potential risks. Nor does this approach address the real issues at hand such as time wasting work practices.

Poor work can damage your reputation
It’s true that given enough time and effort, an able person can learn how to use design software. However, creativity, design know-how and the technicalities of producing artwork are very specialist areas. Handing these responsibilities to an unqualified marketing executive or IT worker invariably leads to poorly designed and badly executed work, which can seriously damage a company’s brand and reputation.

The wrong template
Even artwork that has been ‘templated’ by a professional designer doesn’t guarantee a high quality end product. Designers and artworkers do a lot of work behind the scenes making sure final artwork is good enough to print correctly. Their experience of print and working with printers ensures that the finished item is of the highest quality. Having to reprint work because of artworking mistakes can have huge cost and business repercussions. Also, when the content doesn’t fit the template, non-designers struggle to find the best layout solutions, resulting in naive errors.

Don’t distract your marketing department
Designers have the enviable ability to make the difficult look easy. They’ll come up with brilliant ideas on the spot and implement them at breathtaking speed – valuable skills that are the result of talent and many years of experience. They do this day-in, day-out because it’s their job, and they take great pride in it. Marketing executives and IT workers also have important roles, which require their full attention and commitment. Expecting them to become professional designers and artworkers only serves to distract them from their priorities.

Address the real issue – amendment management
The decision to bring author’s amendments in-house without qualified creative resources doesn’t address the real reasons for amendment costs racking up. We all expect some degree of changes on a job, but many author’s amendments can be avoided if the client’s internal processes are well planned and managed. Timescales should be agreed and adhered to. Ground rules and working methods need to be established before any work commences. All contributors, be they content creators or proof readers, need to be well managed. The project manager must employ the same single-minded approach to both the tiny details and the big picture. Marketing agencies have had to become very good at managing these sort of processes internally in order to maximise their profit. We can share these methods with our clients to help them reduce costs and secure relationships.

Play to people’s strengths
By ensuring that all the elements are as close to being right before the designer starts the job, amendments can be reduced. Author’s amends that are straightforward and easy to understand (marked-up PDFs or clearly typed instructions, not unreadable hand-written scribbles please!) can be made quickly and cost-effectively. Plus, they can be carried out by the professionals, which means they are done right, allowing everyone to get on with what they do best.

Well, it’s finally here. Google is now integrating real-time results from Twitter, Facebook and Myspace into it’s search, giving users the most update information on any given subject. This is sure to give social media a real awareness boost amongst those yet to embrace them, especially Twitter.

Watch this short video about Google real-time search:

What does this mean for brands and marketers?

Although in constant use by the technorati and celebrities galore, Twitter has yet to fully enter the mainstream. As marketers we know the potential of Twitter to reach out and engage, but for most people, its still an unknown. At MTD, we look to create innovative ways of integrating Twitter into our campaigns. Our recent Christmas campaign for Jarlsberg allows anyone to post a message about their best bit of Christmas on the Jarlsberg Sweet and Nutty Season website via Twitter. This encourages a deeper interaction with the brand and keeps the website fresh and interesting.

Real-time search will also encourage brands to start using Twitter more as a channel in its own right to promote products and services. Twitter, of course, knows this. It’s soon to launch a set of paid for business services which should hopefully make it a more professional tool for marketers.

Follow MTD on Twitter >>

Yesterday saw the very successful press launch of re-plenish, the food bank charity set up in Oxford. I was proud to be part of it and witness the brand and website, created by MTD, unveiled. Last night and today we have already seen extensive TV and press coverage.

The re-plenish charity is operating an Oxford food bank, which takes unsold food from local supermarkets and suppliers and redistributes it to existing community food projects. Following a pilot phase the project is now up and running in and around Oxford taking surplus and ‘at sell by date’ food from local Sainsbury’s and Co-Operative supermarkets. This simple system provides healthy, wholesome food to people who need it and reduces the amount of unsold food that ends up in landfill. Currently approximately 20 million tonnes of food waste goes into landfill every year!

MTD got involved with this project about 18 months ago when we met Steve Moralee, the Chair of Trustees. We shared his belief, vision and infectious passion for this cause and quickly realised that our marketing expertise could help. You can read more about it in our latest news.

We have been overwhelmed by the dedication and effort that those involved have shown to get to this point, all volunteers, often holding down full time jobs. They are all to be congratulated for making this real and I hope that everyone that can, finds a way to get involved. After all, it affects every one of us.

One of the writers that we work with has some great regular tips at The Oxford Word Barber. His observations are sublime, his content is funny as well as educational and he makes complete sense… sometimes!

I’m always on the hunt for new music. It’s what fuels me. When I discover a new band I normally track down their MySpace page and check out their tunes. MySpace band pages let you listen to a few select tracks, although quite often the latest single is limited to only thirty seconds or so – pretty annoying.

But now I use Spotify. Lovely Spotify allows me to listen to all the tracks available by the artist, in their entirety, for free. What’s more it’s fast, uncluttered and very easy to use.

If Spotify can secure its future via subscription based mobile apps (most importantly that of the iPhone) it will not only challenge MySpace Music but other internet-radio services such as Last.fm, Blip.fm and Pandora. They’ll have to rely on their social networking attributes to stay in the game. More traditional niche internet-radio stations such as NME.com could also be affected and they’ll need to maximize their original content and new music credentials to retain listeners. The other potential loser in this is, of course, Apple’s iTunes – although a significant number of people will always want to own the music they listen too, rather than just subscribe.

I’ve always been a fan of MySpace, but if it’s to survive, I believe it needs to offer better integration with Twitter and Last.fm type services. This would help the pages achieve more repeat visits by making them a hub for everything related to a band. Improved design and a good clear out of the clutter that plagues the artists’ pages wouldn’t go amiss either. But the most pressing issues such as access to more music and shorter load times would vastly improve what is increasingly looking like a tired web format. MySpace Music could also do more to help break new bands through a ‘new music’ streaming service – now that’s something I’d listen to!