I’ve had to rewrite some pretty awful website copy that was written by professional copywriters. “Long-winded” doesn’t work on the Web. People are in a hurry, you’ve got 20,000 other websites offering the same thing they can click away to in a second, and reading on the Web is just plain unpleasant.

The best training in the world for writing website copy is billboards, postcards, and magazine covers. Just look at the cover of any successful magazine and you’ll see amazingly compressed “ads” designed to get you to pick up the magazine when you’re waiting in line at the grocery store.

If nothing else, come up with a unique keyword phrase for each page of the site (except maybe the Contact Us page) based on what that individual page is about. And then use that keyword phrase in the tag, the tag and, of course, in the tag for that page. And if necessary, make sure that keyword phrase shows up in the copy at least once or twice because if the keyword doesn’t show up in the page at all, the search engines will question whether you are “spamming” their clients. And that risks getting banned or at least pushed way down in the rankings.

You also need to consider that while Google, MSN and Yahoo no longer use the or tags, the other search engines and directories do. And if the major search engines see the same description and keywords and, especially, the same title in the HTML on every page, they will immediately discount the entire website.