SEO – Sofas, End Tables & Ottomans

If you want information on SEO, there is a plethora of valuable material available to you on the internet (and easy to find b/c it’s undoubtedly seo-optimized). What I’m going to talk to you about is my SEO – Sofas, End tables, and Ottomans. No, I’m not going to tell you I’ll sell you all three for under $1000 and even throw in matching lamps and a dresser.

I’m going to ask you to visualize these images as you go about marketing your business.

What room are these things in? Of course – the living room. And they’re all together. Why? Because they go together of course. That’s why when you go into a furniture store and are offered these three things for one flat sum, so many people opt in. The items are congruent with one another.

Keyword – Congruent.

Now a furniture store sells more than just sofas, end tables and ottomans. They have beds, dressers, armoires etc. But if the salesman threw in a free nightstand or dresser with your living room set, it’s not going to bring any extra value to the deal he’s offering you. You’re not furnishing your bedroom. If you already have a dresser, it might even seem excessive and stressful. “What am I going to do with another dresser?” “Can I get something instead of the dresser?” “I need an ottoman, I don’t want a dresser.”

Offering a nightstand or a dresser is NOT congruent with sofas, end tables and ottomans. It’s an entirely different target customer.

Just because you have something DOES NOT mean you have to sell it in every piece of literature you put out. And you’re diminishing your chances of a sale by stuffing your copy with as many benefits as you can think of.

Not only is it futile, it sounds extremely hype-y.

This is a BIG oversight in most copywriting out there. As the proprietor of your business of course, you want to say, “everything” about your business and what it has to offer a prospective customer. It’s natural. The More the merrier, right?

No. This is a total misconception.

In your copy, you HAVE to have Congruency. What you say, where it’s placed, when you introduce something. These elements have to complement one another.

Now extend this principle to your general marketing. Your whole marketing plan needs to stay congruent. Reinforce your points rather than detract from them. Keep it simple.

When your web presence, article marketing style, PPC marketing and whatever else all coincide, you become unstoppable. You’ve got your hands on a well-oiled machine, and that machine will work for you time and time again.

If you’ve captured the reader’s attention, everything is jiving with them, they’re nodding their heads, getting deeper and deeper into the buyer’s trance, and you throw in some other thing that doesn’t quite belong. BAM!! The flow is cut off like a shot to the aorta, the attention shifts, and the sale is lost.

It’s probably the saddest of all unconverted sales. You had a match, a person who saw the value of what you had to offer, but whose attention was diverted…and for that reason alone you both lost out.

I don’t want to see you or your customer lose out. Keep in congruent. Congruency is a powerful thing.

What does this have to do with the real SEO? Well if your offerings are all over the place, your keywords are going to be so diluted as to be nearly invisible.

And now…a big thing-

Don’t go counting your keywords, your sofas, your couches, your end tables. Let them be. If you’ve written copy about one congruent topic, you will naturally mention that keyword and closely related keywords a decent number of times. If you’re thinking too broadly of your topic as a whole, your language and vocabulary is going to be all over the place. And if you just slap your keywords into your copy for the sole purpose of optimization, you’re going to sound like a machine. Trust me-that is not the way to Google’s heart.

Backlinks are far more superior to your site or article than keyword overload. Leave the percentages and ratios behind. I’ll talk more about backlinks in a later post, but for now take away this: Copy pregnant with keywords won’t deliver. Keep it congruent. Keep the copy tight. Keep the excess information to yourself.

Hang tight for some info on backlinks. Can’t include it in this post because it’s not quite congruent.

Gina Nero is a freelance copywriter and marketing resultant specializing in the alternative health and wellness industry. You can tune into her blog at http://wholebraincopy.com/Test/wp/blog/ or check out her website at http://www.wholemindcopy.weebly.com

For a free 15 minute consultation, she can be reached via email at gnero@nero-ink.com

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How to Add a Video to Your Blog For Video Marketing

This article is going to show you, for free, how to embed a video into your website or blog. Most of the video sites are very similar so if you learn how to do it at YouTube, then most likely you can go to other sites and get the embedded code there. So first you will learn how to take any video and embed it into your website but there are a few things that you need to watch out for when you are inserting it in either one.

So, in your YouTube account, you would locate any video that you have the legal rights to embed the video. Click on the video and if you scroll to the right of it you will notice that it has some information and also the embed code. With YouTube you have the option to customize and this is something not everybody does. You can change the border to a different colour which makes it stand out, then you can choose do/do not include related videos after your video has been viewed. Once you have finished customizing the look and the video, you will need to copy the embed code which you can then paste into your blog or website.

To embed the code into your WordPress blog, in WordPress click on ‘write’ and enter your title. In the ‘post’ box, make sure you select ‘HTML’ not ‘visual’ and then paste the embedded code in there. You can add tags and then click on ‘publish’ then click on ‘visit’ site if you want to see the video in action.

You can pretty much do the same anywhere else, as long as you have the ability to enter the HTML code. Here is how you would go about doing the same, but for your website:

Go to the c-panel of your website or you can use FTP if you like. In c-panel, go to ‘file manager’ then click on ‘new folder’, enter a folder name and click ‘create’. Once in that folder you will notice that there are ‘no records found’ because you just created a new folder. Now you will need to click on ‘create a new file’, enter the file name (index.html) and click ‘create’. Here, you are going to basically take a blank page, and embed that code onto the blank page. Select the index.html file and click on ‘code editor’ then click on ‘edit’ and then paste the embedded code, then click on ‘save changes’. Go to your website and if it has been done successfully, you will be able to see the video and play it.

Ruben Paixao has four years in commercial video production and three years in video marketing. He has helped many companies increase their sales conversion rates that presell. For further useful information and to secure your Collection of FREE “Underground” Videos That Reveals Every Single Tip, Tactic And Secret To Market Persuasive Videos That Make You Money NOW!, visit: http://www.videosmarketing.biz

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http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ruben_Paixao

Why Even Worry About Optimising Your Website?

SEO Statistics

• 67% of Australian households in 2008 had internet access (ABS.gov.au)
• Almost 87% of businesses said they accessed the Internet during the year ended 30 June 2008 (ABS.gov.au)
• The majority of pre-purchase search activity (searches and clicks) involves generic terms, not brand names. (DoubleClick.com “Search Before the Purchase” report, 2005)
• 87% of people who are ready to buy use the normal (‘natural’ or ‘organic’) results, not the sponsored/paid listings
• 85-90% of Google users don’t look past the first page of results. In fact, number one spot hogs around 40% of the clicks.

In Australia, Google.com.au gets 76% and Google.com gets 14.5% of searches, while Bing manages 4.5% and Yahoo around 2%.

When we look at what these statistics mean, we can see that people are searching for information – not usually brands. They mainly use Google.

A search on the internet is often the first place people go when researching something they want. So it makes sense to provide good content based around a specific need, whether it be to get inexpensive blinds delivered, find cool Harleys, or be informed about good web design.

Natural listings, rather than paid listings, result in a highly qualified visitor. This is the kind of visitor your business wants and needs to survive.

Why Do People Carry on About Keywords?

You could think of keywords as niche target terms. Keyword phrases are the words people use to find services. e.g. “american soda” brings up the website of American Soda Company and their brands.

All of our small business clients found that their website enquiries increased once I had placed certain keywords in their page title, meta description, and dotted among the actual pages. Not only did I not have to make anything up — just using the full and various descriptions of their niche — I also highlighted the areas they want to service in these three places. A website makeover also helped increase the leads.

Have you ever heard of “long tail” searches? Long tail roughly means that people searching put in a string of very specific words, e.g. “concrete retaining walls Brisbane”. Promoting to a hot ‘niche’ market using the basic principles of marketing will always net better results than trying to be just another online retailer flogging all manner of goods, or a local business with generic services who forgets to mention where they are.

You can keep paying for ads in the newspaper, on radio, in print, and Yellow Pages if you wish, but if you just spend a little more to get your website optimised, and keep it refreshed with a little new content every three months, you will start to reap the rewards of ongoing enquiries. Don’t let ‘em get away — monitor all your emails coming in and make sure you ask phone enquirers how they found you.

Jennifer Lancaster is an Australian copywriter and runs Power of Words. She helps small business build a marketable identity. How can she help you? See http://www.pow.net.au. Her partner is Red Planet Design, a web designer in Brisbane, helping small businesses to makeover or complete their website and branding. http://www.redplanetdesign.com.au.

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Getting Your Site Indexed by the Search Engines

Following the development of your website, one of the early stages of ongoing SEO is ensuring that the search engines index all of your pages. Until a page is indexed it won’t appear in the search rankings but, fortunately, there are several methods to index a website. Before you start developing links or submitting sitemaps you first need to check the structure, menus, and linking of your site.

Search Engine Spiders

A search engine creates its index by deploying spiders to follow links from one page to another and from one site to another. When a spider finds a new page that has yet to feature in the index, it records relevant information and indexes the link and the page. Should a spider find an existing page through a new link, the page will gain any added benefit from the new found link. Once a spider finds its way on to the pages of your website, it’s vital that it is able to subsequently navigate around and index every single page of your site.

HTML Text Links

Spiders are more capable of following HTML or text links, as a pose to Flash or graphics based links, although the search engines have made impressive strides in this area. Ensure that your website offers simple menus or a text link to a compliant sitemap. As well as following links that they naturally find, search engines also offer website owners the opportunity to submit a text based sitemap for inclusion in the indexes.

Link Building

Link building is a major attribute of any SEO campaign, and should be an ongoing process. Links and linking pages need to be relevant and based on a similar topic to that of your own page. The better the quality of the linking page, in the eyes of the search engine, the greater the benefit to your own page. Social media marketing, or social networking, as well as article marketing can both be used to provide beneficial links to each of your pages.

Using Social Sites

Social media marketing requires a lot of regular and ongoing input but can create an almost viral buzz about your site, product, or service. Social media sites are generally indexed very regularly by search engines so gaining a link from a public page on a social media website can get your site indexed equally quickly.

Using Article Marketing

Writing an article, including an optimised resource paragraph with HTML links directed to your site, also enables you to submit this article to the many article directories found online. Because of how frequently new articles are submitted, this also offers a very quick method to get new sites indexed with the major search engines.

Using Sitemap Submissions

Sitemap submissions are also offered by the big search engines as part of their suites of Webmaster tools. Compile and upload a sitemap to your domain that includes every page of your site. Ensure that you link to the sitemap from your home page using a text link. The link can be placed in the footer, the header, or on the template of the page as long as it can be accessed by the search engine spider. This method can also help to highlight any problems that exist with your website and your pages in general.

The Importance Of Indexing

Before a website can be properly ranked and gain the benefit of any SEO content writing and link generation it needs to first be indexed. Search engines typically employ spiders to crawl the Internet and find links to new pages so generating a link from a site that is indexed regularly will help ensure your own site gets indexed quickly. The more frequently a site is updated, the more frequently is is updated in the search engine index. Therefore, building links from popular social media sites or article directories can prove a very quick way of getting your site listed in the search engine results.

The Long And Short Of It Is That These Two Sales Techniques Are The Same

With the Internet beginning to stand up and be counted as an online business medium, many are beginning to realize that selling online is not only possible, but very profitable. People are seeking ways to improve their sales technique online and close on more of their website visitors. It was bound to happen. The problem now is that there are thousands of different companies telling you that their way is the best way and that you should follow their advice. I don’t subscribe to all the thousands of new and fangled ideas to sell anything. This article describes two methods described by many as ‘new’ online sales techniques, which many people call the long copy versus the short copy debate. It’s actually simply a mix of the ways we’ve all been selling stuff since print was invented.

The long copy versus short copy debate

There is the camp on the hill that say “long content is better”. They really don’t understand what they’re talking about in my opinion. What they’re doing is looking at other people’s (often good) results and making assumptions about the technique. It’s never about length of copy, it’s always about whether you have communicated your offer to your audience effectively and answered their wants and needs. That’s all. If you can do that in one line then why write a saga about it?

There are some equally ridiculous theories about short copy and using embedded links within page content to get people to move through your website and be subjected to more short pages. People mistakenly assume that if I have to scroll down a page that it’s bad from a usability perspective. Let me ask those people, when was the last time you went to a website page you were really interested in and stopped reading because you had to use the scroll bar? It simply doesn’t happen. I know we’ve measured it.

So who’s right?

To quote a line from Winston Churchill, “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results”. The following six tactics are used by successful marketers whom advocate writing long copy, embedded linking or a mixture of both. The main objective of these tactics is to get you to point 5 with a plan of action to begin writing your content so you can then do what Winston suggests, measure the results.

1) No-one sells your product or service better than you do.

The fact is you do. The first lesson of selling online is to always listen to why the guy selling the product or service is in business in the first place. I have worked for people who sell embedded hardware the size of a matchbox that works with a GPRS router (of course you know what that is don’t you?), to people who sell nebulizers (an easier one) and I knew nothing about either of those products when I started. By the time I had finished it was a different matter, because they taught me everything I needed to know. As a direct marketer it’s what you need to do with each product or service, learn about the target market, the product or services features and benefits. Then you need to learn how best to communicate those benefits to the target market.

2) Target your market.

By doing this you find out how best to write for your audience. The best way I can describe this is with an example. One recent client of mine sold niche clothing for women in New York. She knew her target market was women, young fashionable women in fact. Is that going deep enough? I told her it might not be. I said that a girl in her late teens might be affected by the description of a fashionable dress in a different way to a woman in her later 20’s. So who really is the target of that dress? Who buys it? Is it the young lady persuaded by “suave chic and sophisticated for a night out on Madison Avenue” or is it the young lady persuaded by “Cool, hip and sexy, a fashion statement that screams NYC”. Work out who the people are within your target group and write your copy and content for them. Rarely does a product or service have only one specific reason to be bought by one specific type of person.

3) Define your product or service features and benefits.

A feature is tangible. It’s evidence, it’s true and not disputed by anyone. It’s the steel case on the embedded hardware, it’s the weight and size of the nebulizer, it’s the acrylic material in the dress. Features of products or services are not what you sell to the customer, you might list them, but you don’t sell them. It’s hard to sell acrylic to a young lady but you might list it so she knows she won’t be allergic to the material (or knows that she is allergic). Benefits on the other hand are what you do sell. The weight of the nebulizer (12 oz) means the product fits into your brief case, purse, diaper bag or back pack. Notice how you’d communicate with 4 audiences there, the brief case for the business man, the purse for the housewife, a diaper bag for the mother and the back pack for the outdoor traveler. Again this targets people within a target group. Asthma affects all kinds of people, so while asthma sufferers are the target market, you’re communicating the benefits to as many different people within that market as you can.

4) Define potential psychological barriers and tactics.

Your people profiles at this point will require that you overcome different objections. Some will want to know how the service or product works and you need to answer their questions. Some will want to know why they should buy from you and not your competition so you need to show your differentiation. Some will need to know whom else you’ve worked with because they don’t want to be the “guinea pig”. Others will want to see more of what you do and see some 3rd part evidence maybe. You’ll need to offer guarantees, re-assure people about what happens when things go wrong. There are all sorts of psychological barriers to a sale that need to be thought about and catered for within the content. You can also use psychological tactics to help you, like instilling urgency in the buyer, or offering bonuses and incentives to persuade your visitor to take action.

5) Only now do you begin to write.

Once you have completed steps 1, 2, 3 and 4 you have the base material you need to write compelling content. How you break it down depends on what method you think will work best and like all good direct marketers you should measure to see which has the best outcome. If it’s a simple book sale then you might test a single sales page with a single call to action. If it’s a difficult to describe service with lots of reasons to back out or there is a whole plethora of products then embedded linking is not only necessary it’s very useful because you know what variables you can test.

6) Measure the results.

When you’re talking about websites you can measure everything. Copy and content changes can be measured on a page very accurately. You shouldn’t just look at improvements in conversion (for a sales page for instance) but also improvements in the bounce rate, the click through to the page (if embedded links from other pages are used), as well as time spent on the page. The reason is that these (in this very simple example) three key performance indicators (KPI’s) will affect that conversion rate. The lower the bounce rate, the better the initial reaction to the page and audience relevance. The better the click through to the page means more exposure to the offer. More time spent on the page means more chance that the offer will be accepted. Improving those KPI’s will increase conversion overall, it’s why they are called ‘Key’ because they affect your bottom line.

In Summary

The point of this article is to illustrate that these so called “two techniques” when done correctly are simply the same thing presented in a different way. The direct marketer who writes a single (often long) page usually addresses all these points and a lot more that is out of the scope of this article. Similarly the guys that swear by embedded linking and doing it well also address all of the above in their content. They are both doing the old as print marketing technique known as direct marketing, except that they’re using it in different ways.