Successful website copy isn’t just about stuffing pages with keyword rich content. In the 2-dimentional space that is the web; online copy serves a variety of purposes:

• Gives a instant impression of your company’s personality (how trustworthy your company is, how easy you’ll be to work with, etc)
• Keeps people on the page long enough to make critical buying decisions
• Informs the customer about products and services
• Provides answers to objections that would cause a customer not to buy

And most importantly:

• Asks for the sale

Having been a top sales person and a sales trainer for many years, I can tell you that asking for the sale is one of the most difficult things for someone who isn’t accustomed to this to do.

It’s a lot like asking for a date. If you get dressed up, go to a social event, find a nice person that you connect with and would like to ask out on a date but then never ask chances are high that you’ll be at home alone next Friday. By our very nature, we’re inclined to avoid rejection, but that’s not how dates (or sales) are made.

If you create a great looking website, fill it with incredible keyword-rich content that is optimized wonderfully for search engines, but then never ask for the sale, you could be losing out on a lot of profit.

Not all products and services are instant or impulse buys that people tend to buy right away. However, you’ll always want to be moving toward the sale. This is done with a call to action.

Every page on your website should have a call to action. A call to action may be:

• To sign up for your newsletter
• To buy now
• To contact your customer service department for more information
• To subscribe to your blog
• To engage in an online chat
• Any other action that moves a visitor closer to the sale

Do your web pages include clearly defined calls to action on every page that move visitors toward the sale? If so, are your pages fully optimized for search engines so that they gain the most visibility possible?

If your website is missing any of these elements, then you’re probably not maximizing your internet presence.

I wouldn’t be taking my own advice if I didn’t ask you right now to move closer to inquiring further about our Search Engine Optimization services.

A search engine optimization company like ours with a team of professional sales copywriters and optimization specialists can position your site so that it gains the most visibility and converts more visitors to buyers. How much more could you be making if your site was optimized for search engines and visitors?

Here are some things that you can do to ensure that you’re getting the most revenue from your website:

• Get a free basic SEO analysis of your website from the experts at Unlimited Web Solutions
• Contact David Williams at 888-832-0031
• Request a call back to discuss how ethical search engine optimization can improve your website’s performance.

Best of luck in your search engine optimization efforts!

Christine

Quality linking is such a critical part of the long term success of any website.  It is also one of the most difficult pieces of the SEO puzzle to excel at.  That’s why I’ll be getting deeper and deeper into linking strategies in the coming months.

It’s so easy in the beginning of a linking campaign to get tempted by the many $19.95 programs that exist.  While many of these may seem to work on a short term basis, this type of linking strategy will never last long term.  Anything that is too easy in search engine optimization is usually not good for long term stability.

For now, I want to leave you with some great ways to learn more about quality linking: 66 Ways to build links, 101 Ways to build link popularity and Over 125 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies.

Happy Linking

There are several things you should do when taking your business online, if you decide to launch your business into the WWW..

First, understand your target customer base. You need to know who is most likely to buy your product and how to market it to them in a sea of other marketing. Create a plan of action to cover the entire process of getting your business onto the Internet. You’ll also need to choose a domain name. Make sure it’s simple to remember, easy to spell, and doesn’t contain any difficult characters. This will help people get to your site. It’s also helpful to make sure that your domain name isn’t too similar to a competitor’s site. You could find your traffic being directed right to the place you least want it to go.

Once you’ve found and registered an available domain name, you’ll need to find web space, and either design your own web page, or hire a designer. If you’re not very familiar with web design, you should probably ask a professional to help you with it. A little investment here can bring you a lot more traffic, since your web page is your first impression on the Internet. Make sure that there’s some kind of payment capability or shopping cart included in your website, so that customers can easily purchase products and services. You’ll also need an automated product database to list your products on the website.

Once you have your website and online store set up, you have to let people know about it! Promote your site on the search engines, promote your site in online forums that you frequent, and use other proven internet marketing techniques. Also be sure to post notifications in your store telling people that you’re now online. Even local customers might appreciate the convenience of being able to browse your inventory online before they come in to shop.

Be sure to maintain your site regularly. Out of date sites can drive customers away, especially if they’re littered with broken links and images.

Last week I wrote about how one of our sites had been bumped out of the number 3 slot by a competitor using unscrupulous SEO tactics. I’m happy to report that we are back in the number 3 position!

This competitor remains in #4, but I have a feeling they won’t be there for long. They have poor backlinks and loads of junky keyword text at the bottom of the page of interest only to search engines.

It still bugs me though when I see a site that clearly does not have as much to offer as our client and with less quality backlinks take such a high position. Google was acting a little strange last week. I thought it was odd that overnight our site went from #3 to #13 and then was back up to #3 within a week.

Change is the nature of search though. As search engines evolve, they will only evolve in a way that promotes high interest sites. Our theory is that by building high quality, optimized content that is of interest to humans, and solid link relationships that our strategy for achieving organic results is a long lasting one, regardless of how search engine algorithms may change.

Doing business on the Internet is becoming one of the most common ways for owners of brick and mortar companies to extend their customer base. If you’ve been considering taking your business online, there are at least two important things you should consider first.

Does the customer base for your products generally shop online or use computers? If you cater to a young customer base, or sell any technological product, you should certainly take your business online. There are some niche products, however, that don’t have a very technologically savvy group of customers, and might not want to take this step. Even these businesses can sell their products on the Internet with the right marketing, however.

Also consider your own comfort with technology and whether you will be interested in filling orders, providing service online, and routinely mailing out orders. If you don’t feel that you would want to do these things, an online extension of your brick and mortar business might not be right for you.

However, marketing your business online is the easiest and least expensive way to expand your business to new customers. You can take on new accounts across the country, merely by setting up a web page and taking orders through it.

David and I were recently kicking around some numbers about what it would cost for a company to hire all of the people needed to bring an SEO team in house. Wow. Even we were a bit surprised at what we found. Because SEO is comprised of so many different moving parts that must each be powered by a different type of professional, it’s no wonder that the majority of SEO is outsouced!

To bring SEO in-house and accomplish the job successfully, a company would need at the minimum a team that includes:

• Project manager
• Web programmer
• Copywriter
• Link building specialist
• Graphic designer
• AdWords/PPC Specialist

Add to the cost of all of these people’s salaries and benefits the fact that you’ve got to keep the team educated; SEO is a constantly changing business. For us in the industry, education means thousands of dollars worth of conferences each year, (an average SEO conference costs about $2,000- and that’s just the attendance fee), meeting with other SEO consultants, and a great deal of time spent on research.

Outsourcing means that companies have access to a whole group of expert professionals at a slice of the cost. Our team alone consists of

• 3 SEO Industry Expert Trainers & Consultants
• 3 Degreed Copywriters and/or Ad Agency Executives
• 1 Web Developer
• 1 Web Designer
• 1 Link Building Expert
• 1 Pay Per Click Expert
• And a handful of other professionals that we routinely count on

That’s a lot of knowledge! I know David has worked for year to build his team up to where it is now and it took a lot of trial and error along the way. With the exception of perhaps small companies with very limited budgets and very large companies with a heavy full-time workload, SEO is one of those things that just makes more sense to outsource than it does to try and build in-house.

Tell me if this sounds like website publicity that could boost your website traffic and sales:

• A news story on page 1 of Google News and Yahoo News for your keywords the day after implementation

• A full page of content that promotes the interesting things happening within your company

• Links from the article back to your website

• Anchor text on valuable news websites

The truth is that any company can have this winning combination of SEO and promotional elements with an SEO press release.

A lot of people think that press releases are just for big companies with revolutionary news to report. This couldn’t be further from the truth. If you’re excited about a new product, service, or discovery within your company or your industry, chances are that a lot of other people will be too.

Press releases, optimized for search engines, are the ideal way to gain valuable backlinks, get an instant, prominent spot on the big search engines, and do so while promoting your company!

If your current SEO content distribution plan only involves distributing articles where your link appears in the byline, you’re missing out on big opportunities for link building and promotion.

Here’s the difference between articles and press releases in terms of SEO content distribution:

• With articles, the content must be generalized and unbiased. Press releases allow you to promote your products, services and company

• Articles give you a small about the author byline at the end. Press releases are all about your company and give you the opportunity to drive traffic back to your site.

• Articles rarely get picked up on major search engine news sites. Press releases, distributed by an SEO PR expert always appear in Google and Yahoo news

• Articles are generally text-only. Some press release distribution points allow you to include images, file attachments, audio files, and video files

This certainly doesn’t mean that article distribution isn’t a worthwhile SEO content distribution tactic. Articles can be a useful part of an overall SEO plan along with SEO press release distribution, link building, link baiting, on-page optimization, and social networking.

Need an SEO press release? We offer them at a fantastically competitive cost. Pound per pound, SEO press releases provide a great value for both link building and website promotion.

- Christine

Google just recently announced that they will be beta testing a Cost-Per-Action Adwords feature soon. This feature will allow advertisers to only pay for advertising once a sale is made and/or a lead is generated, just like a CPA affiliate program.

According to the details Google has released, the Google Adwords CPA program will work just like most affiliate programs, but will run on the Google Adsense content network. Google will not display the CPA ads on its search network.

How/where/when will the ads be displayed? Google says that “publishers in the Google content network can choose to place your ads on their website. If the CPA ads work like other Google Adwords though, the system will automatically select and display the most lucrative ads to display on a website. This would mean that it will be very, very important that advertisers make their offer as lucrative as possible. It remains to be seen though, how much manual control advertisers will have in selecting ads.

By combining their massive advertiser base, their content network, and the Adwords infrastructure, Google may very well have set themselves up to be the new leader in the affiliate marketing field. We’ll just have to wait and see!

In the search engine optimization industry, many webmasters use Google PR (PageRank) as a standard quality factor when buying and selling sites, building backlinks, doing link exchanges, and more. Google PR is not a good quality indicator, though.

There are two primary reasons that PR is not a good quality indicator of a website, link, etc.

1. Google PR only indicates link popularity. Google PageRank is only an indicator of how many links point to a particular page or site. A site’s page rank does not in any way reflect how much traffic the site gets, how well optimized the content is, how it ranks in the search engines, or any other quality factor.
2. Google PR is not up to date. The PageRank that we can see for a site is only updated roughly every three months. Plus, when Google updates the visible PR, they use data several weeks old. This means that when you see a site’s PR, it’s actual PageRank could be very different from what you see.

While Google PR may make a convenient shortcut to determine the quantity (and to an extent, quality) of a site’s backlinks, it is not a good factor to use to determine a site’s quality.

Business networking is a must. There will be some really strong business building networking advice in this category and much of it will come from Martin Brossman.

For now, I want to discuss blogging for networking purposes. Blogging gives you an avenue online to express yourself while at the same time creating a brand and a following. With helpful free services like Wordpress, it’s so easy for anyone to start a blog. In addition, with the help of a tech guy like Fred Wood, you can get a real domain name set up for your blog and also get advice on using many of the free plugin tools to maximize your blogs bells and whistles.

Just like Business Networking, you have to be committed to it to make it work for you. Although many bloggers post daily, I would suggest that you not bother starting a blog if you cannot at least post weekly. That’s four times per month minimum that you write about a topic that you know and love.

The key way to make blogging work for you in the offline world is to tell everyone you meet about your blog and get the readership as high as possible which in turn can lead to more business for you and even put you in a position to get ad revenues from your blog. I’d suggest putting your blog on your business card if possible or even creating a separate business card for your blog by getting free business cards from Vista Print. However, people take you much more serious with a paid business card which you can get for less than $20 at your local office supply store.

Be sure to e-mail everyone in your address book about your new blog and put your blog in the signature of all your future out going e-mails. In other words, make your blog a part of your regular routine and watch the many long term benefits keep coming from something that is not all that difficult to do.