It is a myth that every trick you deploy into an SEO strategy will rank your website high in search engine listings. In most cases SEO can be detrimental to a website design and sometimes you have a choice between a good-looking website that nobody can find (see Flash websites) or an ugly website that drives tons of traffic.

We have often seen template designed websites ranking high in search engine listings, even when they still contain place holder text such as ‘lorem ipsum’ because the website designers haven’t got round to writing the website copy!

As incredible as it seems there are some websites that look downright awful when it comes to design. However, some of these sites rank on page 1 of Google.

The point is that an ugly website may well rank high in search engine listings but does it engage the site visitor? Does the site visitor want to revisit the website? Does the site visitor understand the website?

There are so many disciplines and strategies involved in website design, search engine optimisation and social media marketing it is bit like baking a pie. If you add much salt in it can taste bad. The same applies to the online marketing mix – if you add too many keywords you can turn the site visitor off.

At Clear Creative we assess who the website audience is, what the target audience are likely to want and how we keep them engaged.

Our mantra is to captivate both the site visitor and the search engines with the right balance of great creative and relative keyword density.

So next time you a fantastically designed website ranking high then let us know as they are as rare as hens teeth!

The writing was on the wall when Apple said it wasn’t going to support Flash on the iphone or ipad. It is a real shame this has happened from a creative perspective as Flash gives you real control over font and image interaction. It also has that wow factor that other sites just don’t have these days.

We built our first website using Macromedia Flash in 2002 and thought it was great. Unfortunately Flash sites are not great for SEO, even XHTML websites with Flash header images are a stumbling block.

It looks like Adobe are going to concentrate on the mobile market, and let us be honest that is where we all starting to communicate now.

When we saw the news on the BBC website today it wasn’t a surprise, just a shame that it hasn’t been developed to another level for optimization.

R.I.P Flash!

Most copywriters would love to submit quick and easy content to a web page with fingers crossed that Google and other search engines index it. If only this was the case. Our philosophy is to engage the online audience with enticing visuals, social media gossip and buzz words that Google likes.

Another trap that content copywriters often fall into is writing quantity and not quality. Keywords repeated as many times as possible is just a turn off. The problem is this that quantity is not engaging whilst quality is. To emphasise this point imagine that you are writing your CV and you keep repeating your qualifications through out your document as opposed to delivering the information concisely and to the point. It is no secret that Google recognises keyword density abuse and will demote your website.

Thankfully we have managed to engage readers on our website with great graphics and a showcase of some fantastic design work (we like blowing our own trumpet!) so we don’t have to just rely solely on keywords!

So if we get frustrated we let our imagery tell the story. It really is a wonderful way to get out the frustration of keyword copywriting out of the way.

If you have any view points on keyword copywriting or your frustrations writing web savvy content then drop us a line.

(SEO) search engine optimisation is recognised as the best source of lead generation for both B2C and B2B marketeers, in fact it beats both (PPC) pay per click and (SMM) social media marketing as top dog at lead generation according to a recent survey of online marketeers. Despite this, most of those surveyed say they plan to increase their social media marketing budgets in 2012, ahead of their SEO and PPC strategies.

These figures were compiled by Web marketing 123, a US-based online marketing agency. The company surveyed more than 500 US marketeers in August and September 2011 and about two-thirds of all respondents identified themselves as B2B marketeers.

Whether B2B or B2C, both groups of online marketeers agree that SEO has the greatest impact on lead generation. 57 percent of B2B marketers credit SEO as their primary source of generating leads, while 41 percent of B2C marketers said the same thing.