It is vital to ensure that your website is optimised for the search engines, but whilst doing this it is important not to lose sight of just who you are actually seeking to attract - real human beings to buy or inquire about your products and services.

Writing copy that sells

When optimising your site, you should ensure that the content not only includes the keywords of most importance for searches and getting high SERPs, but that it also “sells”. Whether this sale is a call to action by your website visitor, eg call us today, sign up to our email newsletter, get the RSS feed from our blog, or it encourages the website visitor to look further at your products, buy, or recommend to a friend, you need to ensure that your copy achieves this. This should be a higher priority than focussing on what the search engines are looking for.

Creating keyword lists of the most searched upon phrases which will deliver traffic to your website is important, as are long tail keywords and terms, but when you incorporate these into your website copy, you should be doing this with a view to ensuring that your copy makes sense and is compelling for your site visitors, rather than satisfying the search engine spiders.

Where to place keywords

Your keywords should be specific to each page, rather than generic for the whole website, and need to be placed in certain places to ensure that they are indexed by the search engines, whilst answering that all-important visitor question:

“What’s In It For Me” - often abbreviated to WIIFM.

Each visitor to your site will have arrived on your website either through a search engine results page, through a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign, a link, or through additional marketing methods which have brought them to your site seeking the answers to their questions or research.

It is commonly believed that you have only about 10 secs or less to convince the visitor that they are in the right place on the right website, and after all, the rest of the Web is only a click away. Your headlines, words in bold, copy and images need to answer the WIIFM question in a matter of moments for the user and will therefore also do the job of search engine optimisation.

Landing Pages

In order to ensure that a website visitor is directed to the information they are seeking, the creation of landing pages is important. These are usually single issue pages eg about a specific product or with a defined call to action. Directing visitors to these landing pages means that their search yields precisely the results they would expect, answering questions quickly and, when carefully designed, these can ensure that users follow the call to action without being distracted by too much information or too many navigational choices.

A landing page should be specifically optimised to tie into a set of keywords for your PPC and marketing campaigns, as this will help to deliver maximum results from your actions and budget.

Remember also the importance of a single call to action rather than a cluttered page which confuses the site visitor. Do you want them to buy, inquire, call you, fill out a feedback or contact form, take part in a poll, download a white paper, sign up to your mailing list? Whatever you need them to do, make sure there is only one call to action on each landing page. This will also help you to clearly track conversions and results.

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A CMS for your Corporate Web Site

There has been much talk about enterprise CMS and search engine optimization recently. Since search marketing and search engine optimization are now playing a larger part in the main marketing objectives for big and little companies, a little more consideration and care must be given before you decide on any such Web CMS solution.

As people today look to purchase things online or require info on a specific topic, usually the go to the Internet search engines. Never the less, recently, some businesses creating their own web sites and are adding new content with software called enterprise CMS. Some of the enterprise CMS programs available could possibly negatively affect the availability of their website in the search engine results.

Some of these solutions were not made with search engines in mind. They had been made for exactly what they were meant to accomplish: document management! That said, how can a business that has made extensive use of such a web CMS be sure that their new site will rank well in the search engines?

A few well-designed Web Content systems which kept in mind the search engines at the time they were built could possibly help out search optimization efforts by standardizing its layout, marking its content and to some extent, its layout which is essential to most search engines when evaluating how a particular page or page area should position in its rankings.

Whichever CMS you may be analyzing, make certain that none of them create their own title tags, which are most of the time off-topic. An example of this might be the coffee products manufacturer that is implementing a web content management system that writes title tags such as: page 1, page 2, page 3, etc. These are totally of no use to search engines. If the CMS program is well-designed for the search engines, it will let the user write informative and effective title tags.

This detail may seem like negligible to some people, but it is very serious info for the engines and will impact the results. An added bonus to these search engine optimization techniques is it will promote faster and simpler maintenance of the website. When buying your CMS program , make sure it is search engine friendly and you will be thankful down the road.

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Many small business owners and internet marketers fail to realize that search engine marketing doesn’t have to be general. Local SEO marketing options are available and preferable in many cases. There are many reasons that you might wish to market your website locally rather than globally.

First, many businesses only operate in a specific area. When you market these websites globally, you run into the problem of wasting time answering phone calls and emails from people that are a far cry from a qualified lead. For these websites, local SEO marketing is the only effective solution that makes sense.

Secondly, it is much easier to get your site seen by those who need to see it when you use local SEO marketing. When you do not gear your marketing toward your local area, you risk your site being lost in a sea of other sites. If you want your customers to find you easily, you have to gear your marketing toward a local standpoint.

With the knowledge the local SEO marketing is available and necessary, you now must determine how to best use this information. The first thing you need to do is make sure that your locale is mentioned in your title and the first paragraph of your site. Add your location in all of your internet marketing activities, including ads and pay-per-click campaigns.

In other words, treat your location as another keyword. Make sure it appears at least three times for every three hundred words on your site. One way to make sure that your locale is included in your site is to add a tagline to your normal logo and slogan. For example, “serving Las Vegas since 1994″ can be incorporated into your usual tagline.

Finally, you can gear pay-per-click advertising to those searching in your location. Almost every pay-per-click marketing solution offers this option, and you should use it. It will cut your SEO costs in half, and get your site seen by targeted, qualified leads.

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Background

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings. SEO primarily handles what is known as organic search results, also known as the results the search engines present users, excluding paid advertisement.

The main reason people seek high rankings in the organic search results is to increase targeted traffic to their websites. SEO offers a very cost effective alternative to obtain that traffic. Other means such as pay per click advertisement or banner advertising can potentially be expensive, particularly with competitive terms where the cost per click can be several dollars.

Targeting the Right Keywords

As a small business this is particularly important. Traffic for itself is not necessarily the ultimate goal. Targeted traffic is. Selecting common generic search phrases can be a poor marketing strategy for a small business because it can generate a large volume of low-quality inquiries that cost money to handle, yet result in little revenue.

A small business will probably obtain much better results when targeting highly specific keywords that indicate a prospective customer who is ready to buy their product. Moreover, the more specific a keyword is, the lower competition it has, therefore the higher chance to ‘win’ that keyword for a relatively low cost.

Result Driven Approach

Let’s leave all the marketing pitch aside for a moment and really get down to the facts. What really makes an SEO firm affordable? Well, we can start by looking at what is NOT affordable. Paying thousands of dollars upfront certainly does not make sense for a small business, where every dollar spent has to provide a clear return on investment (ROI), especially since the marketing budget is not too high to begin with.

That leads us to next big question – how should we measure the ROI for SEO? SEO has one objective – that is to generate targeted traffic to your website, period. The good news is that traffic can easily be measured. Every web hosting company provides visual server log files that record and analyze the website’s traffic across time. So SEO effectiveness can be easily measured.

Affordable SEO is first and foremost based on a result-driven approach, meaning you should only pay when you see results. Results can be measured in various ways, for instance top page placement in the major search engines or a certain increase (%) in your website traffic. Think of it as placing an ad in a newspaper, it serves exactly the same purpose as SEO – that is generating targeted traffic to your business. So why should it be any different?

If an SEO firm is as good as they claim to be, let them bite their own bullet and guarantee your money back if they fail to deliver top page results within a reasonable time frame (usually 4-6 months). It is only fair.

How Much Should You Pay?

So things are starting to feel right. Your website finally appears on the first page of Google when you type in your search phrases and you are starting to experience a significant increase in your website’s traffic. How much should you pay?

This is a tricky question. My belief is that every keyword has a price tag. It consists of two main factors: keyword popularity and keyword competitiveness. Obviously, you should strive for keywords with the highest popularity (number of searches per day or per month) and the lowest competition (number of web pages competing for the same keyword, knowingly or unknowingly).

Keyword pricing is not a straightforward task. It takes into account multiple data sources that measure popularity and numerous elements to evaluate the competitiveness in the major search engines. At my company, we have developed a mathematical formula that takes all the relevant elements into account and set the right price tag per every chosen keyword. Bottom line, it has to make sense to you, the customer, in terms of ROI. For example, if you pay $300 a month for a specific keyword – you want this keyword to generate revenue higher than $300 a month.

As a small business, this method offers you a modular approach that can be expanded over time. You can start with a single keyword, and pay as low as $100 per month. Then gradually, upon success, add additional keywords to increase your traffic and your income. This way, you decide what is affordable to your business at every point in time.

To conclude: SEO can genuinely take your business to the next level if done right. Keep it simple, make sure you understand what your money buys and make sure you can measure the results before and after.

Many times as home entrepreneurs,we like to believe tiny re our share of the market. While many times our business is contained to a local marketplace, we think only of that little, highly local marketplace.

Many great marketers say that you should think outside of the box and in a much bigger scope to get things done and I’m in agreement. So, how should a small enterprise think outside of the normal growing businesses box, and entertain a much bigger audience of clients? The answer’s easy - the Net.

This hasn’t occurred by any means, but has transformed SOHO in such a manner, selling can be more successfully performed, and for a lower cost.

SEO Is a term that all home businesses not only be conscious of, but closely embedded in their minds. SEO stands for SEO, and what it implies is that your customers can find you simpler on the web. Many little companies don’t realize the sheer volume of people who are on the lookout for their services each and each day. As an example, I live in a city of only eleven thousand in rustic Ohio, and there are tons of people who look for property agents in this city. There are only about one hundred homes that sell in a year’s time, but there are many thousands of folks that scan the area for potential houses.

You can get more folk to take a look at your product / service and think about the difference between your business and others. It is a very difficult story, but comes down to just a couple of things.

#1 Having a website optimized for specific keywords.

You need to do some planning in terms of goal keywords. It’s advisable you consider Google’s Keyword tool to determine search volume. “MyCity Dentist” is different than “Find a dentist in MyCity”. The keyword tool will help you determine volume. Once you’ve found something that has decent volume, go to the next step.

#2 Optimize the page’s use of the keyword.

Don’t overuse your keyword, but utilize it in such a way it flows on the page. Make your desired keywords a part of the page.

#3 Get links to your site.

This is the trickiest, but doing so will help you greatly gain in rankings. Find other websites that have one-way links that can be pointed to your website. Be sure to use relevant text on those links to point your website. It won’t be effective if every single link to your website says “Click Here” , it will be much more effective if you use your desired keyword for the text.