First, when choosing a domain name, make sure to use a keyword or a variation of one of your keywords in the name. If your first choice is taken (and it likely will be), add a related word before or after the keyword.

For example, if you’re aiming to be the top seller of mardi gras beads online, mardigrasbeads.com is likely taken. Choose bestmardigrabeads.com, or mardigrapartybeads.com or a similar name. Look at alternative Top Level Domain (TLD) suffix, such as .net.

If you already have a company main page, you may want to set up another page to link to your home page and gather more hits. You may choose a blog, an ecommerce page, an article site for expert advice, a landing page or a forum. Any of these can be configured for the best SEO effectiveness.

Some basic hints are to use text rather than pictures when possible. Use text as links, don’t provide an image for the viewer to click. Put labels under the photos that spiders will pick up.

You’ll want to include a sitemap of your page, both HTML and XML. The search engines use the XML graphical representation of your site to gather information about your site; especially important if you have a new site.

Don’t use lots of Flash if you want to be highly ranked on the searches. Google and other search engines still can’t find the links and text hidden in a graphic format like Flash. The worst offenders are those who construct their sites with Flash – not search engine friendly.

Don’t duplicate content. In other words, don’t have the same paragraphs of text or the same articles on two different pages of your site, and don’t post an article on your site and submit the same article to a directory. Pages that duplicate content are ranked lower and a seen as less valid and valuable. Keep your content unique.

The professionals here at Webdatamation can make SEO work for you by using the best SEO practices when building your site.

There are a number of misconceptions in selecting the right and relevant keywords, which, if not checked, can ruin the entire optimization process. Among the various misconceptions, the most common one is that bigger keywords are better. However, this is not true always. Suppose you are a life coach and you are trying to optimize your personal life-coaching website. Therefore, in this case, you can use “life coach” as the appropriate keyword for the site, which is small yet carries a lot of meaning to it.

Keywords should be very specific and should flawlessly relate to the products or the services that are being offered. One can even use keywords in phrases, but the phrases should be in small meaningful sentence format. Moreover, keywords should be such that have high frequency demands and low competition. High keyword frequency can also be defined as those, which are entered in the search bar while searching in any search engine and can draw high traffic. On the other hand, low keyword competition indicates lower number of websites using the same keywords to draw visitors.

Apart from these facts about getting the right keywords, let me share some basic tips that would definitely help you to select the perfect set of keywords for your website. The foremost thing is that you will have to learn to think like a nonprofessional. You might have a thorough knowledge about your industry, but this might not be the case with everyone around. So, while framing the keywords, try to use those words or phrases that a nonprofessional would use who knows nothing about this industry. At the same time, you need to think in an expert’s point of view as well! The product or the service you are offering might need the use of some specific keywords, which the layman would definitely not know. Therefore, it is better to have a balanced perception of both.

So, whenever you are optimizing your website, always remember to pay extra heed to keyword selection, as you certainly know by now, that it is a very important part of this whole optimization process. If you use some rational steps, keeping in mind some basic facts, success might take some time to come. However once it is there, it’s going to be a long lasting one for sure.

Don’t…

Blindly test

Traffic in December is unlike any other month of the year. Conversion rates go up, and cost per conversions go down. If you are running split or multivariate tests throughout the month to see which ads or pages convert the highest, do not blindly trust that the data will carry over into January. It is not uncommon to see the highest converting pages (or ads and keywords) not be the highest performer once the buying excitement of the holidays melts away.

Make major site changes

According to a recent Advertising.com study, 75% of all shoppers are visiting 2-5 sites before making a purchase. We also see many visitors come back to a site a few times during a short span of time in completing their purchases. You do not want to confuse these shoppers. These visitors should be able to use the exact same navigational method to find that product or shopping cart every time they come back to the site. If you are changing a website’s layout, you can confuse those potential buyers and lose their dollars.

Forget to add a recommended gift buying section

We’re all short on time. Choosing the perfect gift takes time. Many of us never know what to buy for our spouse, let alone for the office Christmas party gift exchange.  Offer a recommended buying section. Break the recommendations into several sections. While you should examine your products in determining how to section them out, here are some common categories:

Ladies	Under $25
Men	Under $50
Niece (or young lady)	Under $100
Nephew (or young boy)	Over $100
Mother
Father
Grandmother
Grandfather
Wife
Husband

And the chart could easily keep going. Think of these categories: Infant, Toddler Boy, Toddler Girl, Boys (4-12), Girls (4-12), Teen Boy, Teen Girl. Examine your products, and then see which audience demographics fit best for classifying your recommended gift section.

Treat the Thank You page as just a thank you

Just because someone completed a purchase on your site, it doesn’t mean they are done shopping. If someone gave you their credit card, they put some trust into your site. Offer  additional suggestions for complimentary products, either yours or your partners, on the thank you page. At the least, call out your email newsletter where they can be updated with your latest specials and products.

This marketing should extend past the Thank You page and be included in the confirmation (receipt) email as well.

Forget about first page bids

The holiday season converts well. Bid prices will go up. The ads on the first page receive most of the clicks. At this time, you cannot forget about first page bids. Have your keyword report emailed to you each morning so you can quickly make sure your top keywords are on page one.

Always use the negative keyword ‘free’

‘Free’ is one of the most commonly used negative keywords. However, if you use it, you will not show up for highly desirable searches like ‘last minute Christmas gifts with free shipping’ or ‘free delivery Sony plasma TV’.

Make shoppers register before buying

The fewer barriers to conversions that exist, the higher your conversion rate will be. Forcing someone to register before checking out adds a barrier to conversion. Do not require shoppers to register, confirm an email address, or do any action other than inputting their credit card and shipping address.

Give up too early

Last year, as the days grew closer to Christmas, the online spending grew as well. According to comScore, last year there was $430 million spent on black Friday, $610 million on Cyber Monday, and an amazing $660 million spent on Green Monday.

Do…

Show delivery dates and shipping options

Everyone wants to make sure their package will arrive before Christmas. One of the fastest ways to lose a repeat customer is for your shipment to reach someone on December 26th. Reinforce delivery date options throughout your site. “If you order by today, we guarantee your package will arrive by December 21st”. In your shopping cart, make sure you call out the delivery options and the arrival date for the product.

Offer multiple delivery options

You will have some shoppers who want to ship their purchases to multiple locations. Do you allow your shoppers to ship to either an address that is not their billing address or to multiple addresses?

Offer gift wrapping

This is a quick way to add a few dollars to each checkout. You should also allow the buyer to choose not to have the receipt included in the package in case it’s being delivered to another address. Don’t forget, some people will want the receipt included so that the item can easily be exchanged (especially in the case of clothes).

Offer gift cards

Even if you have a nice recommended gift section, there will always be those who don’t know what to buy. Offering gift cards is a great way to have the undecided audience buy from your store. You should also allow someone who buys a gift card to receive either an email certificate (for those who are shopping on the 24th) or a physical card which they can put inside a nice envelope.

Give affiliates special banners or offers

Do not forget your affiliates. Your affiliate manager should reach out to your affiliates over the holiday season. Special banners, offers, or even some recommended products can go a long ways towards increasing your sales through your affiliate channels. If you have a sale, special shipping offers, or guaranteed returns – make sure affiliates know that information so they can use your offers in their presale pages.

Have wish list options

When we’re shopping for Christmas gifts for others, we often find things we’d like ourselves. Let your shoppers save items into a wish list that they can share with others. Make sure others can easily find wish lists and can search for someone they know. This is a great way to increase your shopper’s interaction with your site.

Save for later

Admit it, you shop from work. Most of us have. However, we’re often reluctant to actually pull out the credit card while sitting at the desk. Make sure that your visitors have a way to save their shopping cart items so that when they return from their computer at home they can finalize their purchase. According to Advertising.com, one third of consumers spend 2 or more days researching a purchase before actually buying. Make sure this third of consumers has a way to easily find their way back to the products they are interested in on your site.

Rather than looking for links obsessively, focus on capping the link flow and internal linking within your own site to seal up any hemorrhages your website may have. By doing this, your pages become less dependent on external links (granted they have authority).

Create Authority:

Naturally the next question is what is authority, to put it simply, an authority website has a great foundation of useful content. By the merit of the content it attracts a steady base of readers or new visitors.

Create Popularity:

Website popularity toggles authority and trust, so without igniting the proper metrics, you can have solid internal links and great content, but without traffic to endorse your site or a few backlinks from the right places, the time it take to gain authority and trust will take longer.

So, authority is great content, strong internal links augmented by popularity, time and trust. But, before you can develop trust, search engines and people have to know your content exists, which is why building links is important.

Link From Within:

Going back to basics the rule of thumb is build links from within to make inbound links more effective. So, here is one simple tactic we use to manage the way a website ranks.

1) Check you server logs for the keywords or the most searched queries your website received.

2) Identify the most appropriate pages to funnel those keywords. Most websites have one relevant page, if there are two or more then make sure the internal links from the 2nd, 3rd, 4th in line all point to the preferred landing page to funnel link weight.

3) Go back and edit older pages that have sprouted authority or page rank and can rank in the SERPs, one good way to find sleepers in your site is look for pages that are returned from your own site using a link:mydomain.com search command in Google or use our nifty little SEO Tool.

Use Internal Link Self -Referral:

Also, sub folders have a tendency to rank like external sites if you use absolute links in your own site http://websitename.com/page.html instead of /page.html

The point is, once you find those pages, edit the first link in the body copy to the root phrase of the anchor text for the most traffic phrases deciphered from your analytics. By doing this, you are invigorating keywords that have the metric of traffic and creating buoyancy within your own site through an internal linking self-referral mechanism.

This is a particularly great method to create surges of link weight into pages starving from link attrition. If pages do not have a sufficient influx of links, traffic (popularity) then the tendency is for them to wane in the search engine result pages as well.

Reflect to Move Forward:

Here are other posts that provide more in depth strategies about this topic:

• SEO Sleuthing – Tracking Your Progress
• A Great Post About Tilling Keywords from the Past
• How to Create Synergy with On Page / Off Page SEO

Hope you enjoy the optimization tips and thanks for visiting SEO Design Solutions.

SEO remains one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies, especially over the long haul. If your site and the pages on it have historically responded well to desired search terms, you should be tweaking your site to speak to the changing market. Here are seven inexpensive strategies to help you win during these challenging times.

Understand the changing landscape

Have the needs of your prospects and customers changed during the downturn? Are there products or a segment of you business more suited to these times than before? Do you need to change how you position some of your offerings? Are the keywords used by your prospects changing? What words are your prospects including now including in their searches that they didn’t include before? The primary words used in queries may be the same, but the long tail of those queries may be different. Does your site speak to the changing long tail?

Tweak existing content

Likely, there are many pages on your site that should be modified to speak to these tough economic times and the changing long tail. Adjust and expand the copy to ensure it resonates well with your prospects’ concerns, and also with search engines when those prospects search for solutions using long-tail terms that reflect those concerns. For some hints on optimizing page content, see 10 Copywriting Tips for B2B SEO.

Beef up relevant content

In addition to tweaking existing pages, you should consider adding more optimized pages to your site’s architecture. Perhaps there are products or services you haven’t strongly promoted but now are in strong demand. There may be some offerings you previously only mentioned in a passing sentence or two that now deserve an organic landing page or perhaps several pages. There are a lot of ways you can quickly add more optimized content to your B2B website, including product/service pages, case studies, white papers, etc.

Manage your landing pages

What would happen if you increased your site’s traffic by 10% or converted just 5% more of your site’s traffic? Chances are you have a lot of potential traffic that isn’t converting, both on your site and in the SERPs. Make sure you understand and manage your site’s landing pages. First, know what your search engine results look like for each desired search term. Remember, you may rank well, but does your search engine result drive click through? Second, look at your organic landing pages. Your search engine result may drive click-through, but is the searcher landing on the right page? Will that page entice them to take action? Do your bounce rates indicate a problem? Solutions to these problems don’t cost much, and they can have profound positive effects.

Drive traffic to your channel partners

Many B2B products and services are sold through channel partners, like distributors and reps. During tough economic times, these partners often pull back in terms of marketing investment, further exacerbating the crunch you may already be feeling. You may not be able to force them to spend money or take action, but you can do your part to drive more qualified traffic to channel partners. It’s probably one of the least expensive and smartest things you can do. Again, when creating or revising pages for channel partners, keep in mind the long tail and how it might be changing in your industry.

Establish thought leadership

People still buy during tough economic times. It’s just that every purchase or investment undergoes far more scrutiny. Fear of making the wrong decision (risk) is a primary motivator in B2B purchase decisions. Thought leaders are perceived experts. Businesses want to hire experts. Experts get paid more, and they get recruited from further away. Why? Because in going with an expert, the perceived risk is lower. One of the least costly ways to begin to establish thought leadership is through blogging. Done right, B2B blogging can both greatly enhance your perceived expertise and offer a way to get found for desired and changing search terms.

Build your links

Quality links drive traffic and enhance the perceived credibility of your site, both in terms of prospects’ perceptions and in terms of search engines’ perceptions. For advice here, I’ll turn to a couple of Eriks. Erik Ward’s recent article on building links during a recession is good advice. And Erik-Jan Bulthuis recently had a great article on B2B link building.

SEO should never be an afterthought, but rather a means to produce a specific attainable goal for generating and measuring traffic to your content which can be monetized through sales, lead generation or advertising/visibility for your brand.

Rankings are Produced by the Page

Keep one thing in mind, rankings are produced by the page, so the more quality pages you have, written with specific intent around 3-5 singular, plural or synomic phrases when interlinked with other related / supporting pages is often more than enough to tip the scales in your favor.

Chronology and authority add trust and reduce the time frame for new content to scale the SERPs (search engine result pages). Those pages however, still must have the needed ingredients to stand on their own once the initial evaluation has gleaned their relevance in comparison to the rest of your site vs. your competitors.

Those whose content fits more accordingly to the guidelines of search engine algorithms will rank higher with the least effort.

Your competition is irrelevant if your contents quality and links are impeccable, authority status is the goal for your website algorithmically, but it must still be appealing for the masses or your preferred audience to “get the clicks is deserves”.

The Fallacy of Keywords

If you elect to target a series of competitive keywords, be aware that the more competitive the phrase, the more time and energy you will have to invest in acquiring it.

This is why you obviously want to allocate a portion of your energy to the top tier keywords and key phrases that yield the mother lode of traffic, yet crafting a number of secondary and tertiary terms is a solid strategy for funneling pre-qualified visitors. The argument about keywords that are too broad not being worth their salt truly depends on the industry.

Most insist that one word keywords typically attract those interested in research vs. consumers that are further along in the sales cycle who use additional descriptive modifiers to hone in on a particular GEO location, product or service.

That really depends on the industry, we know for example that hitting the top 10 for SEO (since our industry is all about placement and results) can drive 70% of the total traffic for your website on any given hour, which is why getting back to the top 10 is our #1 priority. Currently we are in the top 15, but that simply is not good enough to make a definitive statement.

A website targeting the words “real estate” or “shopping” however, may not find the effort was worth it, due to the type of people typing this in are using far too nebulous a keyword they will ultimately require some refinement and additional keywords to zero in on their ideal document / webpage.

One solid method however is to:

1) start with your on page SEO factors and internal linking first instead of trying to put lipstick on a pig and pass it off as relevance. Here is a nifty little internal linking tool we developed in house for finding the best internal link / landing pages in a site.

2) Look for ways to expedite trust and website authority and create a healthy balance of internal and external links. Here are a few references for internal link building and how to augment your site from within.

3) Constantly look for new ways to leverage the internal link dynamo / juggernaut effect your own website is capable of producing like its own superconductor (once it is charged with topical relevance).

In closing, remember rankings are by the page, if your position is low on the totem pole then (1) strengthen internal linking (2) look for authority sites for inbound links (even social bookmarks will do) and (3) create a silo of related content (5-10 pages on the topic) to create the appropriate on page indicators needed to warrant search engines awarding you with a higher position.

Manage these three steps with patience and persistence, choose a tight enough niche of semantically aligned keywords and give each page enough time to find its stride (30-90 days) and your concerns about higher rankings will have subsided as you now have a solid strategy to engage in the even that your position (for your existing content) losing its footing.

The three entities involved in PPC advertising are the visitor, the host that carries the advertisement and the advertiser, who has advertised a product or service on the host website, usually a leading search engine. In this form of advertising, advertisers have to bid on keywords and phrases. Whenever someone searches a product or service using certain keywords, the search result page will feature those advertisements which contain the keywords using which the visitor actually searched in the first place.

The internet is fast becoming the battle ground for business to garner their share of the market. With increasing internet usage, people around the world are searching for all sorts of products and services online these days. It has therefore become important for almost every business to have a significant online presence. Merely having an online presence though will not guarantee business. Websites need to attract traffic and this is where PPC advertising steps in.

PPC advertising is growing rapidly at a mind boggling pace. Its popularity can be gauged from the fact that out of the total amount of money that is spent on search engine advertising, a whopping 81% is spent on PPC advertising. These figures do not come as a surprise to those businesses that have benefited from PPC advertising. There are several success stories of businesses that have been able to make the most out of PPC advertising campaigns.

The key reasons for the popularity of PPC advertising include:

1. The risk involved is low since the investment is minimal.
2. These advertising programs are fast to implement when compared to other media.
3. Advertisers can manipulate ad positions and also control costs with them.
4. Instantaneous results are a good possibility with PPC advertising.
5. PPC advertisements give an opportunity for businesses to test their products for online marketing feasibility.

PPC: A Brief History

Contrary to popular perception PPC advertisements are not a recent phenomenon. They have been in existence for well over a decade now. The term was increasingly heard during the mid 1990s when the dotcom boom happened. One of the companies that pioneered the concept was goto.com which later on was rechristened Overture. In 2003 Yahoo took over Overture. The actual PPC scene began to see hectic activities once Google launched its ‘Ad Words solution to PPC. Almost every major search engine is into this form of advertising these days.

The minimum price for click which is popularly referred to as ‘cost per click’ varies from one search engine to another. It also depends on the competition involved for a particular keyword list or phrase. It is for this reason that particular keywords and phrases are known to cost more on leading search engines.

Steps Involved in an Effective PPC Advertising Campaign

Although PPC advertising can look a relatively simple process, there are several issues that you will need to deal with once you decide on an advertising campaign. From choosing the right keywords to designing an attractive landing page, you will need to take care of several aspects.

A PPC Ad.
Several businesses have taken advantage of PPC advertising to make profits. With proper planning, you can implement a meaningful PPC advertising campaign, which can in turn mean more profits to your business. Let us look at the steps involved in making an effective PPC advertising campaign.

1. Selection of the appropriate keywords or phrases is the first step involved in PPC advertising. Remember, keywords and phrases are the cornerstones of success in a PPC advertising campaign. They are the foundation on which the entire campaign is built upon and developed. If you are already advertising on other media, then you also need to ensure that your PPC advertising campaign also complements them too.
2. Before you implement your PPC advertising campaign, you must first of all decide your budget. Proper planning will ensure that you do not overspend, while at the same time get effective results from your advertising campaign.
3. You must be clear as to who your target consumers are. This way you will ensure that you reach potential consumers through effective advertisements.
4. One way to target your target consumers would be to decide on a niche. Even if your niche market were to be small, a well directed and created PPC advertising campaigns can work wonders for your niche business area.
5. It is not enough if you just advertise and then assume that it would be effective in getting more business. You should constantly monitor your PPC advertising campaign. Always remember that the internet is a dynamic place, where things change very fast. You therefore need to make sure that your PPC campaign is in tune with the changing trends.
6. You must have a close look at statistical reports that are associated with your online advertising campaign. This will help you gauge the effectiveness of your PPC advertising campaign.
7. The best way to go about creating a PPC advertising campaign would be to hire the services of professionals. This is so because they will be experienced in creating the right copy or content for your PPC advertisement. A well written and concise copy can make the difference between success and failure in a PPC advertising campaign.
8. Along with working on your PPC advertisement, you should also simultaneously make sure that your website is attractive and easy to navigate, since your PPC advertisement will be leading web visitors to your website.

This form of advertising ensures a win-win situation of all the parties involved and it is no wonder that it is growing at a rapid rate. With increasing internet connections, the future holds immense possibilities for PPC advertising.

The SEO space is a bit crowded right now. So many people are fighting for attention that it seems like people are fighting without purpose. There may be more people writing SEO blogs than there are reading them. That abundance of new publishers makes it easy for established authors to build links by re-spinning old phrases with new definitions, but if those links don’t create profit what is the point?

There’s no such thing as a free lunch

Looking back a few years, I can see that I was a bit economically challenged. I tried helping many people for free… but then some of those people I helped for free could never get enough, plus when something is free many people simply do not respect it. I remember my wife reading a book about self-made Internet and info-based product millionaires, and coming across a guy who in the past valued my time at nothing, always reminding me of how poor he was (though never reminding me that he is economical with the truth!)

A side effect of this situation was that the people who paid me for my book would only get limited support because I was filtering everything at the inbox level – one of the easiest ways to reach burnout and miss a person or two. I kept answering more email, but only managed moderate growth while the value of what I had learned and the market we are in sharply increased. When you don’t charge for a finite resource (your time) market forces will drive the value of that resource down toward zero.

I am not suggesting that free is a bad price point. When you are new, it is one of the easiest ways to get to know the market and gain attention in the marketplace, but if you start to become well known the burden of free keeps increasing.

The concept of FREE as a business model

Free is one one of the best business models around. It worked well for Google search, and it may be the future of business. When we make economic decisions, we weigh the positives against the negatives to measure opportunity cost. The word free is so powerful that it makes us act irrational and overlook other costs (like our time).

Online publishing is organized by power laws, offering predictable imbalances everywhere we look. The key to making free profitable is to use it on things that are easy to make free – answers to common support questions, open source software, blog posts, white papers, and anything that helps do your mass marketing for you. Cory Docotorow recently described how free ebooks help build distribution by turning customers into marketers:

In an ideal world, people without a lot of discretionary income are given the electronic edition (which costs [nearly] nothing to distribute) for free. They act like the breezes that loft the dandelion seeds — they go around, telling people about the book and its merits. In this regard, they’re better than random breezes, for they undertake a directed distribution of the book, seeking to bring it to the attention of people who are likely to have a positive response to it.

If you want to keep an active voice online while selling information, give away as much as you can bear while charging a premium for things that are scarce (like your time) and build a customer interaction that is remarkable and better than free.

In a market with infinite competition, one of the easiest ways to increase the value of what you offer is to change the format and be choosy with who you are willing to accept as a customer. You have to optimize the experience by limiting the number of social interactions and social connections you are willing to take on.

Skeptical consumers require more from your websites’ proposition to relinquish their reservations. This requires persuasion and persuasion marketing.

SEO, relevant and persuasive copy as well as usability all need to work harmoniously in order to shatter prior expectations about what users need from a website in order to take action. One aspect presented without the proper balance of the other can leave the visitor on the fence when it comes to making a decision to purchase.

Transforming a prospect into a customer involves multiple emotional and intellectual layers to facilitate trust. Often, the resolve of the prospect is weathered by a natural layer of mental and emotional buffers to offset the sales process. Just consider it natural reaction to being bombarded from disruptions from advertisements attempting to breach their awareness from every angle.

If you realize it or not, your pages are waging an argument of relevance, persuasion and validity. If you win, conversion occurs, if you lose, then your just another stepping stone for your competition who has structured a better offer, argument or call to action.

When dealing with new visitors, your website has a 50/50 chance of winning their vote. Visitors, unless endorsed or referred by a third party (like an authority site, or trusted friend or reference), have a tendency to reserve judgment about a new product of service until the argument of value, impulse and need are mitigated and a clear decision is determined by which action to take.

The primary component to sales is security and trust, without it your page is just another website that made the click and run list. Stickiness for your design and visual appeal all play a part, but the tone of your content and context, call to action and supporting information are the logical areas any visitor will assess.

Every time a new visitor lands on one of your pages, there is a mental checklist that occurs under the surface of their roving eyes. They either (a) within 3-5 seconds fast-track the checklist and like the page or the style of information exchange or (b) look for reasons to pick it apart and move on.

Don’t feel bad, this is nothing personal, just call it our new protection mechanism from over stimulation. Going back to the fact that consumers are constantly being bombarded from all sides and mediums available from billboards to bumper stickers and everything in between, it is only natural to protect your psyche from any random or fleeting advertorial or advertisement you engage online.

Making your argument stick is no longer just a sales pitch, it is a mark of distinction your pages wear like a badge that convey a more human element of appeal to your website. Just like a formal business letter in many instances was the norm from a different era, now an informal email works just fine to get the point across. Similarly selling has taken on a more sophisticated yet transparent approach to the methods of yesteryear.

We are now faced with a transition from conditional stereotypes for business as they are replaced with more rudimentary needs such as:

• Why Should I Pick You?
• Are You Qualified? If so, How Qualified?
• Under Who’s Opinion?
• What Credentials and Accountability Do You Have?, Show Me Proof?
• Are You Knowledgeable? and Last but Not Least, What are YOU going to do for ME?

Granted, this dialogue may not be obvious, internalized mental checklists such as these are not uncommon if someone is skimming your content for relevance. Only 17% of all visitors actually read your content word for word, most just skim for a reason to dig deeper.

So, if you are thoughtful enough to offer one part design, one part relevance and one part persuasion you can create the perfect combination for conversion to occur.

Just like clapping with one hand presents its own challenge, content that does not address or convey expertise for your product, service or brand will not sway your preferred audience the competition that understands the premise of persuasion.

So, before you think about how many keywords to optimize your website for, how to reach your target demographic or how many links you need to build to take the top ranking spot.

Make sure you have something worthy and remarkable enough to get your visitors off the bleachers and into the game, otherwise you are just cheerleaders for your competition who has structured the better argument to overcome the inertia of indecision with the fervor of their sales offer.

]]> http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/09/how-persuasive-is-your-marketing/feed/ 0 http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/09/qualified-impressions-translate-into-sales/ http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/09/qualified-impressions-translate-into-sales/#comments Sat, 20 Sep 2008 14:11:32 +0000 Jeffrey Smith http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/?p=326 Its not always the quantity, but the quality of visitor impressions that make the difference. Qualified impressions that translate into leads, sales or click through conversion are the true basis of SEO.

Out of every 100 visitors that visit your site, how many fill out a contact form, pick up the phone, download a special promotional? If you answered 15-25 visitors, then your pages are optimized for lead generation and conversion. Granted not every visitor that finds your site is going to want something from it, the idea is to set the stage for quality vs quantity and the right type of visitor who has a genuine need for your product.