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Over the past several years we’ve found that many clients make the very expensive mistake of taking a “do it yourself” approach to website writing. After all, they reason, who knows their business better than they do? Unfortunately, writing your own website is rarely a good idea.
In fact, we feel so strongly about the difference that professional writing can make in the success of your website that we’ve brought a professional copywriter on board our “virtual” team. Please join us in welcoming Linda Coss to the SoCal WebWorx family!
The Importance of Writing to Sell
Why do we strongly recommend professional copywriting for our clients? Because marketing writing – or writing to sell – is a learned skill, quite a bit different than writing a memo or an essay. While chances are slim that you really know how to write to sell, Linda is an accomplished marketing professional who does this day in and day out.
At SoCal WebWorx we can create a beautifully-designed and easy-to-use website for your business, and then drive traffic to this site with top-notch search engine optimization. But once your potential customers arrive at your site it’s the words that will need to do the heavy lifting of selling visitors on your products or services and motivating them to take action. If the words miss the mark, you’re missing out on a lot of potential sales.
Spending money on a professionally-designed site and then using ineffective and possibly poorly written text is just being “penny wise and pound foolish.”
About Linda Coss
Linda Coss is a freelance marketing writer who specializes in writing targeted and effective words that don’t merely inform – they appeal to the readers’ needs and emotions to engage and sell. Her 15 years in the marketing field include writing and editing everything from websites and newsletters to e-blasts, brochures, articles, and much more. Because Linda brings a wealth of experience and expertise to every job we are certain she will be an asset to both our firm and yours.
At SoCal WebWorx we’re big believers in the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) for your website. After all, it doesn’t do you much good to put up a website if it can’t be found. Your company’s website should not have the internet equivalent of an “unlisted number”!
To help you make the most of your website we’ve put together a collection of 76 FREE SEO Tools for search engine optimization, analysis, and research. These tools make it quick and easy for you to perform a wide variety of SEO-related tasks.
Some of the tools that we think you’ll find the most useful include:
Need help making the most of all this information? Give us a call. We’re here for you.
One way to increase Internet traffic to your webpage, resulting in more potential business, is to introduce landing pages, also known as lead capture pages. These pages, which appear when a potential customer clicks on a link or advertisement, are specifically designed to address a target audience and get them to perform a desired action. They can be optimized to encourage several actions including clicking (which will lead the visitor to another page on your website), purchasing, providing information, telling a friend, learning something, and leaving a comment or post. Landing pages are optimized to display keywords which correspond with terms entered into search engines.
Landing pages improve the visitor’s experience on the website. They are useful in boosting efficiency by establishing target keywords and in converting visitors. Rather than leaving visitors confused and unable to find the services and information they’re interested in, landing pages provide an easily identifiable link to direct users to the most useful page raising the chances of conversion.
Aside from a higher conversion rate, landing pages are useful in increasing overall traffic. By creating several landing pages which cover specific topics and locations, you increase the number of keywords that link to your website. Once you have established these niche pages you can increase traffic by adding content to your page. Adding more keyword headings, keyword text, and keyword links caters to potential customers’ subject interests and captures a wider selection of searches. By combining keyword headings and keyword links you can multiply the number of search-phrases your site will capture.
In summary, landing pages are optimized content pages on your site. They are designed to improve the visitor’s experience through efficiency and increase traffic by broadening the number of search-phrases that will link to your site. Once you have established your landing pages you can track their results and focus on search-phrases that will capture the most traffic.
Websites are the cells that keep the organism known as the Internet functioning. If you and your business want to be part of the information age, then you need a website. It’s as simple as that. Creating a website, however, may not seem quite as simple to those who have not done it before. In reality, though, it’s not hard to create your own website and start using it to generate business. You just have to take things step-by-step.
Starting a Website Step One: Coming up with a Domain Name
The domain name is essentially your website’s address and your brand. It tells potential customers what your site is and where to find it. You should take your time to create the right name that really gets your point across. A good domain name is succinct, unique and to the point. Avoid double letters or words that are tough to spell, or phrases that are tough to remember. Hingesswingsplendiferously.com may seem like a clever name for your door-selling website, but it’ll be tough for traffic to get there. WeSellDoors.com is much better.
Starting a Website Step Two: Getting a Hosting Plan
Hosting plans come in a number of varieties, and different hosts offer their own features. You’ll be interested in a plan with plenty of bandwidth and disk space, of course, but if you’re just starting out, then your main concern will probably be price. A budget hosting plan will only run you a few dollars a month, and it’s probably your best bet in the beginning. More expensive hosting plans mean that you rent the entire server, or the server is partitioned so that your portion of the server functions as its own distinct server. In most cases, you don’t really need these things for your first website.
Starting a Website Step Three: Creating a Great Web Design
Once you’ve got the hosting and domain name web hosting out of the way, it’s time to design your website. You can do this on your own using a program like DreamWeaver, which doesn’t require specialized programming knowledge to use, or you can get a professional web designer.
I was blogging along just fine, minding my own business when someone called and asked if I could help her set up a Flog. “A Flog?” I thought. That’s a new one for me. I ran my fingers over to Wikipedia to find out a Flog is “A fake blog typically used as a sales tool.” Or another way to look at a flog is a page that looks like a blog but isn’t.
I’m not sure how effective a fake blog is as a sales or marketing tool, but I am convinced that a real blog is a great website sales and marketing tool. It is a fast and easy way to post time sensitive news about your company or organization and its interactive capabilities leave the flog in the dust. Another view is a blog is a credibility builder for a website whereas a flog is kind of a fake-out. A flog may look cool but that’s all it can do.
To increase your site ranking and enhance your website interactivity we highly recommend a blog. Don’t be fooled by a flog!
This post covers a few basic rules to follow when thinking of adding backlinks to your site.
First, what are ‘backlinks’? Backlinks are simply links from other sites to your site. The more quality links to your site the better in terms of search engine page rankings. Quality is the key word here. Build links from sites that have High Page Ranking, Keyword Relevance to your site and High Safety Ranking. It’s fine to buy links as long as you can verify they will meet these criteria.
Following are a few important guidelines for building effective quality backlinks to your site.
1. Build Your Links Organically — Register your URL with relevant directories, organizations, trade associations and blog submissions. This method will build your backlinks in a natural ‘organic’ method preferred by search engines.
2. Build Your Back-Links Continually — I recommend setting up a schedule (ie: spend ½ day of each workweek locating relevant high ranking sites and contacting them with an email link exchange proposal). Adding links on a regular and consistent basis is preferred by search engines and will add to the credibility of your site to search engines.
3. Build Quality Links — Stay away from ‘link farms’ and companies selling links to bogus sites including domain names ending in “.we.bs”. The wrong links can cause search engines to perceive your site as a spam site and actually hurt your page rankings.
4. Use Strong Anchor Text — Many link opportunities will allow you to select the ‘anchor text’ for the URL link. Use this to your advantage by selecting keyword rich anchor text relevant to your site keywords.
Adding site backlinks are one of several very effective and popular methods of making your site search engine friendly. For a truly effective search engine optimization campaign, combine link building with other SEO efforts such as adding keyword-rich site content, Page Titles and Meta Tags.
Although we have posted several articles on this subject a recent experience has prompted me to revisit the topic.
A few days ago a client referral called our office to ask about our SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services. His website was already completed and posted by another web designer, but I was certainly open to helping with his SEO efforts to improve his site ranking.
After reviewing his site and the Source Code it was quickly evident that the site was built entirely in Flash. Now don’t get me wrong. I love Flash animation and we incorporate Flash banners into many of or client sites as well as our own site. But the thing is that search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, ASK, etc.) cannot read verbiage from Flash files. Therefore, despite all the content rich verbiage on his site it is of no help in his SEO efforts. Unfortunately, before we could assist in his SEO efforts we will have to convert the site to HTML/CSS so its content can be seen by search engines.
If only he had asked me when to perform SEO on the site before going so far we could have saved him several hundred dollars and been a few days further along. So to answer the original post question, it’s never too early to incorporate SEO efforts into your site development. If you think of website design and development as building an automobile and On-Site SEO as labeling the auto parts, it should be obviously more efficient to do both activities at the same time. You certainly wouldn’t want to build the car first and then try to reach all the parts to label them. That would be an obvious duplication of efforts wasting both your time and money.
So again, at the risk of being redundant, start your Search Engine Optimization efforts early as you develop your site concept and keyword phrases in tandem. Incorporate effective SEO techniques into your verbiage and content formatting as you design and build the website.
What is a website backlink? Simply put, backlinks are links to your site from other websites. If added properly backlinks to your site will boost your page rankings in search engine results pages. Google and other search engines will determine the page “popularity” by the quantity of and page rank of the backlinks to that page.
Once you’ve decided to add backlinks to your site it’s important to consider the advantages of building links versus buying links. At first, buying links may be very appealing for its convenience and economy of effort. When purchasing backlinks you can generally specify the page rank of the landing page your link will be on. The higher the PR number the stronger the backlink will be. Of course the higher the PR of the backlink page the more expensive the link will be.
When buying backlinks you should consider the following factors:
Building backlinks is a more time consuming way to go although in many regards it is more effective. Backlink building can be done in several ways:
One very common and straightforward way to build backlinks is to identify relevant high-ranking websites and send an email to solicit interest in setting up reciprocal links. You can also setup links to your site on many blogs, forums and social networking websites.
When making your decision, remember when it comes to backlinks, quality is more important than quantity!
Proper SEO HTML coding is crucial for maximum search engine optimization results. Of course, building backlinks and using Social Networking sites will also boost your SEO efforts however they will not always get you to the top of the search results and keep you there without proper page coding.
Search engines looks for specific tags and keywords within an HTML page and uses the contents of these tags to evaluate page importance and relevance. Your keywords need to be present in ALL of these tags so that Google or other search engines can index and catalog your page correctly. For instance, let’s say you wanted to optimize an HTML page for the keywords “Custom Website Design”. This EXACT term must appear in the following tags: Title <title>, Description <meta name="description">, Keywords <meta name="keywords"> and the First Heading <h1> on the page. In addition, the keyword string must also appear in the first fifty words on the page and also needs to be spattered throughout the page content. It also helps to close the page with the keywords. An example would be to add it to the end of the copyright line and place it as the last, flush right, item on the page like this: “© 2009 ABC Company All Rights Reserved | Custom Website Design”.
Now that you have a basic idea of what is necessary to optimize an HTML page for specific keywords, I’d like to now offer more detail about how to work with each tag individually.
<title>:The <title> tag designates what gets displayed in the top “windows-bar” of the browser window. This is also the text that search engines will pick-up for the search listing title. This tag is the most important part of your page in terms of Search Engine Optimization. For proper SEO, you must include your most important keyword phrases in this tag. However, there is a limit to how much you can squeeze in. Your page title should not be longer than 80 character including the spaces. This means you’ll need to choose your words wisely to get the best results.
In addition to important keyword strings, you should also include your geographic location in this tag. Many searchers will include a geographic location in their search queries. This will help offer an additional relevancy to help move you closer to the top of the search results. It is also recommended to NOT use your personal or company name in the title unless it contains your important keywords. Vanity doesn’t amount to anything when it comes to search engine optimization. Here are examples of GOOD and BAD <title> tags.
Example of a GOOD <title> tag:
<title>Video Production Services | Video Special Effects | Hollywood | California</title>
This title tag is SEO rich. It contains two strong keyword strings as well as the geographic location of this business. Notice the usage of the “|” character or also known as a “pipe”. By using this character instead of a comma or a dash, it makes the keyword strings easier to read in the search results.
Example of a BAD <title> tag:
<title>CreativeVids, Ltd. - Established 2009</title>
The above title tag offers no SEO value what-so-ever. The only way a searcher would find you is if they already knew the name of your company. You won’t pick-up any new traffic this way.
1. Follow the fundamental rules of design and composition including webpage balance, focal point, ratio of positive to negative space, use of either a complementary or analogous color scheme.
2. Use an industry relevant color palette. Check the sites of competitors and trade organizations. Use a reliable color selection program, such as Color Schemer Studio, to sample and identify colors and to quickly create full color palettes.
3. Follow a simple navigational button layout. Its good advise to keep the button layout simple and predictable. You don’t want people having to struggle to find their way through your website.
4. Include sticky elements to capture viewer’s interest and email addresses. Commonly used sticky website elements include free newsletters or special pricing sign ups, free white papers or e-books and interactive tools relevant for your products / services.
5. Build in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO). On-Site SEO primarily involves editing the site textual content and HTML coding, therefore the easiest time to do this is while developing the website. A great time to write the SEO titles, tags and description is in conjunction with the development of the website page verbiage.
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