Website copywriter wisdom

Here are some of my favourite nuggets of wisdom from the greatest minds in website copywriting, e-marketing and search engine optimization:

It's the words that make the sale
"Flash animations don't make sales. CRM software doesn't make sales. Pictures of products don't make sales. If you have trouble believing that, remove all the words from your site and see how many sales you make. Without great copy, your online presence is dead in the water. It's the words that open, build, and close the sale."
Nick Usborne, Net Words

Better web copywriting = better website
"What's the single most important thing that could improve the web? It's not broadband. It's better writing."
Gerry McGovern, author of Content Critical

Words are a major investment
"To successfully rank highly in the search engines, the words on your Web pages should never be an afterthought but a major investment in your search engine optimization campaign."
Jill Whalen, Writing for the Search Engines

How will you survive without a website copywriter?
"How can a commerce site survive within an environment as text-centric as the Net without the heavy influence of a writer?"
Nick Usborne, author of Net Words

Website copywriting is hard work
"If you've ever been in charge of building your company's website from scratch, you've learned that one of the most time-consuming tasks is to write the copy or words that appear on the website. It's plain old hard work."
Ralph Wilson, Wilson Web

The value of SEO copywriting
"The most important thing about search engine optimization is good text. Bar none, it is the absolute bare minimum you must have to begin optimizing a site. And once you have it, you’ll want to keep it."
Brandon Olejniczak, SEO expert, in Digital Web Magazine

Good content = website success
"The graphics and the technology are a minor part of web success. The content is the hard part, and it is also what will make your website a success or failure."
Gerry McGovern, author of Content Critical

What users want
"White space on Web pages is like silence on the radio – a little goes a long way. Fill pages with what users want: easily readable product descriptions, relevant images and useful tools."
Harley Manning, Forrester Research

Make content the foreground
"Ultimately users visit your site for the content. Everything else is just a backdrop."
Jakob Nielsen, Designing Web Usability