Nonsense Copy

To sell the unsellable: the greatest challenge of the copywriter. Of course for the most part we find ourselves putting words to the task of reasonable projects, items and services, so it's just a matter of selecting good words and putting them together in a complementary manner. But, well, that's pretty straightforward, and I fancied a challenge to dust off my skills with, so I asked the good folks of Facebook to suggest some highly unlikely and nonsensical products for me to write about. Naturally, they delivered. So without further ado welcome to the online store for stuff you are very likely to never need!

Disclaimer: do not attempt to purchase any of the following items.

1. Invisible ninja suit that is also delicious

Invisible: for perfect stealth.

Delicious: for any situation.

TECMO’s ninja suits have been the leading world standard for fifteen years, and we’re proud to serve the needs of the discerning modern ninja. But we also know that it’s a tough world for ninjas out there these days. So we’re proud to present out first hybrid ninja suit, which combines the best features of our Stealth and Tasty models: the Sneak’n’Eat suit.

No longer will you be detected by sharp-eyed minions. No longer will you find your stomach rumbling on a lengthy stake-out. The Sneak’n’Eat runs on advanced rice paper technology that makes it completely unremarkable to the naked eye, but we’ve also dipped that rice paper in vats of leading nutrients, infusing it with a deliciousness that can’t be compared.

The TECMO Sneak’n’Eat: because we care about ninjas.

2. Edible washing up liquid for cleaning chocolate teapots

Edichocpotcleanse is favoured by 90% of hungry chocolate teapot cleansers.

Complicated pot-cleansing technology removes 95% of stray chemicals from chocolate teapots: other leading brands top out at 85%.

Flavour infusion makes our washing up liquid the tastiest around. Our ever-expanding range of flavours covers every conceivable taste, from bananas to sesame oil to cat farts.

Edichocpotcleanse: it cleans your teapots, and tastes great. What more do you need?

3. Fosters with bubbles

Since 1889, the Fosters family have taken immeasurable pride in refreshment. Our signature beer is famous worldwide, and while we could have stopped there, we haven’t. We’re always looking out for new ways to improve our brew, and so are proud to announce our latest innovation: bubbles!

Very soon, in a bar near you, you’ll be able to enjoy the enhanced taste of the all-new Fosters, purposefully infused with quality carbonation by leading brewing technicians. If you enjoy our signature utterly flat taste, you’ll love this – and if you’ve not enjoyed a cold, crisp pint of Fosters lager before, then there’s no better time than now.

Effervescence: for epic refreshment.

4. Editing Skulls

Typos: we all make them. In this age of mischievous autocorrect, it's nothing to be afraid of, but it sure is inconvenient. But never fear! - we at Yorick and Boni LTD are proud to present our new Editing Skulls.

Place one of our unique skulls on your mantle, and it's ethereal eyes will burrow into your brain and follow your every manoeuvre online, converting your words from the hilarious sequence of typographical errors that is real life into the sequence of sleek grammatical wisdom that no-one real ever speaks with. Friends, colleagues and strangers alike will be amazed at your lexical dexterity and the faint demonic glow that exudes from you!

So if you're looking to get ahead in the world of words, cast your eyes on a Yorik and Boni Editing Skull, and soon you'll be saying 'alas! Poor typos! I knew them, [insert name of relevant conversational partner here]'.

5. Jun

Picture the scene: it's a bright, beautiful sunny day, but you're at home, alone, sitting in the shade, feeling bored and unfulfilled. Sound familiar? It should. Our extensive studies show that approximately 100% of the population is like this 93% of the time.

Because they don't have Jun.

Guaranteed to make your life 5632% more interesting and nonsensical, Jun brings highly unique charm and insanity to all situations with his unique breed of imaginative mania. Soon you'll go from sitting at home to sitting atop the wings of success, flying through a series of increasingly unlikely scenarios as Jun takes you on a journey to the inside of your mind. Beyond that, the world is truly and forever your oyster, or other preferred item of seafood or alternative cuisine.

Don't be dumb. Invest in Jun.

6. A instrument with cpr type qualities that takes a normal piece of steak and renovates the meat back to a cow.

In times of political and geophysical crisis, when even imported vegetables are a finite resource, no budding restaurateur wishes to find themselves paying through the nose for overpriced steak. Well, no more! With the M-00 Cowcannon, a single shot is sufficient to renovate a piece of meat back into a fully grown cow, which can then be personally slaughtered for fresh, pleasant consumption. Enjoy the luxury of infinite meat twinned with the boost of masculinity that comes with playing God and slaughtering innocent creatures, all for the a-moo-zingly low price of £500,000!

Now 90% less likely to completely annihilate the global market!

7. A ladder for moths to escape from the bath.

Jun Alex Prince Cheung was having what he assumed was a perfectly normal day: he'd just got home after a long hard slog at the office, and was looking forward to a nice relaxing bath. But it was not to be, because, upon arrival in the bathroom, horror of horrors, moths in the bath!

Permit us, if you will, to science. See, a bath is commonly wet, and when the wing of a moth comes into contact with wet, a remarkable chemical reaction takes place that renders it unable to fly. So if a moth should land in your bath... there'll be trouble afoot, as poor Jun discovered.

But no more! Because now, Jun has a moth ladder! Easy to install and easy to use, the moth ladder is the world's leading mechanism for allowing wet moths to escape from baths with their personal integrity intact. 90% of moths agree.

Here's what Jun himself had to say after we gave him a free sample moth ladder:

'Yeah it's decent.'

The Men in Hats: Several Sides of SEO (sample copy)

Once you’ve finished with the nitty-gritty of setting up your business and are ready to hit the web, you come to the next problem, a rather major one: no-one on the internet knows who you are. In order for people to start finding you, you’re going to have to figure out a way to get yourself indexed on the various search engines that people use to sift through the internet. Thankfully there’s already a field of industry that covers this niche, and that is the process of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO uses a variety of different techniques that work towards the same endgame: your website, highly ranked on Google. But! Not all of these techniques are what you might call good – they’re effective, sure, but morally, they might leave something to be desired. These techniques are known as black hat techniques, the modern wild west of the internet having appropriately absorbed the nomenclature of villainy that a man in a black hat represented in Hollywood’s classic westerns. Similarly, the better SEO techniques are known as white hat; we’ll get to them later. First, let’s meet the villains.

The Black Hat Gang

Probably the very worst thing about the gang of vagabond techniques that represent black hat SEO is how obvious they are. The most sinister offender, the ringleader of the gang, is probably keyword stuffing, the technique of shoving whatever particular word or term it is that you’re looking to pop up in search results for into a text as many times as possible. This is the text-based equivalent of when you get sent to a dodgy website to download something and are greeted by fifteen different ‘download’ buttons in various fonts and styles, each of which is poised and ready to ruin your day with popups and malware. If my keyword was keyword, then using the keyword keyword as many times as possible ends up with sentences like this one, which feature the keyword keyword so many times that the keyword keyword starts to seem like it’s haunting you, keyword. This is no use to anybody, because it makes your content look amateur and doesn’t actually help anyone who finds it. What’s the point of being the top result for ‘western metaphors in SEO’ if someone who is looking for information clicks on it and finds garbage? Well, you got a click; if that’s all you’re after, congratulations. But we can do better!

Other black hat techniques include the application of tiny, hidden text, links that don’t look like links and will, upon accidental click, send the browser off on another adventure, sneaky redirects, and the incredibly cheeky act of directly changing the content of a page once it’s been indexed!

The White Hat Sheriff

The real heroes of SEO are the ones who wear the white hats, and who outdo the black hat outlaws simply by being better than them. The true sheriff, the most important difference between black hat and white hat SEO, is a focus on user experience. Implement keywords, sure, but where they’re relevant. Focus on putting together a quality piece of content that helps the person who’s searching for those keywords; if the second best result for ‘western metaphors in SEO’ is a complex treatment of the theme, then that disgruntled user who clicked off the previous result is more likely to stick around – and time spent on a page is just as important as the initial click that gets us there. So write like a human, not like a robot that got stuck repeating keyword keyword keyword.

The search engines themselves are designed to reward this kind of content; thanks to the continued evolution of machine learning, their algorithms are getting smarter at detecting context all the time. Google can tell the difference between keyword spam and a well-written sentence, and will sort accordingly; good content goes up, bad content goes down, and the worst content might even get removed if it’s judged to be suitably unethical in its SEO applications. The Black Hat Gang will, inevitably, end up in internet jail.

The idea of user experience goes beyond the text, as well. It’s also about presentation; if your content is pleasing to the eye, it’s pleasing to the owner of that eye as well. So optimise! Design a website that looks good, reads well, and presents itself nicely on computer screens, phones, tablets; any conceivable means by which people might visit it. Then apply some of the other white hat SEO techniques: pop keywords into URLs, use keyword tails that search engines themselves suggest, curate strong, legitimate backlinks; even something as simple as having a website that loads quickly is a boon. All of these techniques, when used well, will drown out the black hats, and send your content to the top.

The Taming of the West

The web is different now to the dark days of the early 2000’s, when the black hats had an easy time of it. SEO isn’t just about language anymore; search engine results aren’t driven by how many times one can stuff variations of a keyword into a text. Nowadays, the most important difference between black hat and white hat SEO techniques is that one type has a future. Here in the dying days of the new west, the black hats are the last few cowboys, clinging to a land of lawlessness that is slowly being tamed and remade into a civilised land of quality content, with reputable locales that are linked by serviceable infrastructure and curated by good people. It might not make for as exciting movies, but at least we can find what we need!