Friday, June 25th, 2004
The importance of well written copy on your web site
Your web content – the written text on your web site is very important and plays a key role in your search engine rankings and visibility. By analyzing and structuring your web site’s written content you can create powerful results for your business.
You need to look at your web content from two viewpoints. How it relates to:
- The search engines
- Your target audience
To write winning web copy, you need to find keywords and phrases that not only specifically describe what you offer, but also are the exact search terms that your audience uses to find you on a search engine. These terms should correspond with your meta-tags. Keyword rich content immediately tells your audience that you have what they are looking for and that your site is worth exploring.
Accurately researched and placed key words and phrases make your web content both customer focused and search engine friendly.
You should be aware that there are important differences between traditional marketing copy and web content. Web content should be:
- Keyword rich
- Hype free
- Conversational
- Scannable
- Have short paragraphs with clear headers
- Include one idea per paragraph
- Concise
- Starts with the most important facts and conclusions
- Updated often
Credibility of text is another important attribute for site visitors. There is no actual face-to-face contact and so they have to feel that they can trust the person or company behind the site. The challenge is to make sure your content is credible but can also do the job of selling your product.
When a prospective customer clicks on your site you only have a few seconds to gain their trust and show them how you can be of benefit to them. By looking at the words you use and the message of your web site you can improve both your search engine optimization and your customer retention once they are on your site.
What you say within your web site can be one of your biggest challenges and also one of your most important assets. It plays a crucial role in the success of your web site. We at Elixir Systems are experts in this field and can help you to develop winning content for your web site.
Originally authored: 25 June 2004 - James PeggieWell written web content will help turn visitors into sales and also get you ranked well
in the search engines. This articles gives some information on how to satisfy both audiences -
the search engines and your visitors.
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Thursday, June 3rd, 2004
One Way Non-Reciprocated Linking
Or how to maximize your page rank and minimize your outlay
Linking is critical to a successful online marketing campaign. Gone are the days of getting great rankings purely because of the number of reciprocal links and rightly so. We followed the practice of creating lots of reciprocal links for our customers as it was a huge part of the strategy to get ranked in Google and it was necessary to ensure we were following what our clients competitors were doing. Things have calmed down considerably in this area and credit for links has reverted to good quality relevant links from on topic sites. Also, links buried on links or resource pages are no longer as valuable. The best links for your site are one way non-reciprocated links in other words a vote for your site from another site. Remember that your site is primarily for visitors and you should always cater to them they are your customers not Google or Yahoo, having said that is important to deploy a sensible linking strategy. In next months newsletter I will go into further detail about organic linking strategy. Some SEO companies are starting to advocate paying for links on high page ranking sites. This does not sit well with us and we feel that if you build a great site on your subject you should not have any difficulty getting links from other sites who see a link to you as a benefit to their visitors
One Way Non-Reciprocated Linking
Search Engine Optimization not yet in the budget? Perhaps you’ve seen those too good to be true emails offering to submit your site to 75,000 search engines and directories for $20. Are there even 75,000 search engines in the world, and to submit to even a dozen for that price it would have to be done mechanically. It has been our experience that only hand submission to search engines and directories works, and there are only a few search engines and directories that actually matter. We recently tried an experiment with one of our own brand new sites. We set up what we consider 5 great one way links without reciprocating and within one month the site had a Google page rank of 5.
Why not give your site a boost by submitting to this list of directories and search engines
Some are free, some charge a small fee and the upper end is Yahoo! directory at $299 per year. All of the websites Elixir Systems owns are in the Yahoo! directory and we have not seen any real benefit since the split from Google. We still get credit from Google as a backward link but $299 per year is a very expensive link! At this time we would not recommend you pay to be in the Yahoo! directory, we will provide updates to this information via our newsletter and on our site. All customers under contract to Elixir Systems are submitted by hand to this list and are given the option of paying the fee when fees are applicable. Our start up price also includes Gimpsy, and Searchsight.
Some of my personal favorite directories are Business.com, Canlinks, Gimpsy, Go Guides, Skaffe and Search Sight. Search Sight is a new and innovative search engine which is currently sending us more referrals than Yahoo!
Regards
Fionn Downhill
Director Sales and Marketing
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