I was thrilled recently to be hired by SERO and Barnsley Council to provide copy for a project called Making IT Personal: Joining the DOTs.
The South Yorkshire-led, pan-European project is all about getting young volunteers to share their IT knowledge with the whole community, and to develop new mentoring skills in the process.
The copy I provided was for a special newsletter about the project’s trip to Malta – the newsletter format being a great way to make a very long report more accessible.
Do you use sentence case or title case in your headings?
When it comes to web page headings, I’ve always been a fan of good old sentence case myself. And for lots of good reasons.
In case you aren’t familiar with the terms, sentence case is where you capitalise only the first letter and all proper nouns (such as the names of companies and people). Just like an ordinary sentence, basically.
Title case is where you capitalise the first letter and all nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs and subordinating conjunctions (because, if, that etc.). Little words like ‘and’ and ‘the’ aren’t capitalised, although different style guides offer varying rules on this.
(The AP Stylebook and Economist Style Guide are useful books if you’re interested in these rules.)
I like to use sentence case in headings because it’s easy to read. It doesn’t lead to confusion over what’s a name and what isn’t.
Take this example heading from a news story on Pitchfork, for example:
It’s not the most exciting video game ad you’ll read today.
By current standards the body copy is too wordy and technical. There’s hardly anything about the games themselves or what makes them fun.
It is however one of the very first video game ads. And it reminds me of the Nintendo Wii.
Look at the headline for a start. The Maganvox Odyssey, which was arguably the world’s first home video game console, was “a total play and learning system for all ages”.
A bit like the world conquering Wii, which offers “Great times with family and friends. Get-off-the-couch fun whether you’re 5 or 95.”
Those rising bubbles on the site are cool, you should see them.
Yes, it’s time for another guest Think Tank article.
This month I offer some tips on how to write web copy that appeals to the demanding couch potato in all of us – because we are getting lazier. I know I am anyway, at least when it comes to buying things online.
So please go on and read “5 ways your web copy can satisfy lazy people (that’s most of us)”. And don’t forget to leave a comment if you enjoyed it – I love reading them.
Writing six eye-catching banners was a highlight of the web copywriting project I recently completed for TBT Ltd.
TBT are a performance improvement and event management agency who currently deliver services to three of the world’s top five brands – a dream client, in other words.
Top o' the Google to you
So to celebrate, here are five SEO web copywriting tips for reaching No. 1 in organic search.
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