127 Power Words That Trigger Action

Doug Williams @ 2:45 am

This blog entry was posted on March 31, 2010.

The key to a successful website is compelling and motivating website copy. These are words that grab your visitor’s attention and then spur them on to take action. Have you ever wondered why some sales copy converts like crazy while other leaves the reader snoozing?

There are a few power words that drive people to do something. These create an emotional impact. Use power words to trigger action in your website copy. Use these in your headlines and prominently on your website to grab attention. Use these phrases in your writing when you need results.

advice
affordable
alert
announcing
approved
astonishing
attractive
authentic
bargain
beautiful
better
big
bonanza
bottom line
breakthrough
colorful
competitive
complete
confidential
daring
delighted
delivered
direct
easy / easily
edge
endorsed
energy
enormous
excellent
exciting
exclusive
exploit
fascinating
focus
free
fun
genuine
gift
greatest
guarantee / guaranteed
health / healthy
high tech
highest
how-to
imagine
immediately
important
innovative
insider
instructive
interesting
introducing
just arrived
largest
last minute
launching
lavishly
lifetime
limited
listen closely…
love
lowest
luxury
magic
mainstream
mammoth
miracle
money
monumental
more
new
obsession
odd
opportunities
perspective
pioneering
portfolio
powerful
professional
profitable
promising
proven
quality
quick / quickly
rare
reduced
remember
results
revolutionary
reward
safe / safely
save
scarce
security
sensational
simple / simplified
solution
special
special offer
spotlight
strong
sturdy
sure fire
survival
technology
terrific
tested
the truth about
tremendous
unconditional
under priced
unique
unlimited
unlock
unparalleled
unsurpassed
unusual
urgent
valuable
value
wanted
wealth
weird
willpower
wonderful
yes
you/your

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What to Do When Your Website Attracts the Wrong Traffic

Doug Williams @ 4:27 am

This blog entry was posted on March 29, 2010.

You want to attract interested and motivated visitors that are likely to take action. Simply attracting visitor traffic is not your goal. What do you do if your website is attracting a lot of visits, but nothing is happening? First you need to determine the cause.

Is it your visitors or your website? Are attracting the wrong visitor or is it that your website is poorly designed to convert the visitors that arrive?

Website: Start by looking at your website. Look at it in the way a new visitor would. Within 3 seconds can you clearly understand what it is that you offer? Is there a clear action for visitors to take that is visible without scrolling down?
Traffic stats: Look at the traffic stats for your website. The three things I look at are: 1) which keywords are they finding my site with? 2) What is the bounce rate? 3) How much time are they spending on each page?

Keywords: If the keywords are not relevant to what you are offering, then you may need to rewrite your content or at least tune up your optimization. Look at which keyword phrases cause your visitors to spend the most time on your site. These are the ones that have the highest relevance and interest to visitors.

Bounce Rate is the percent of visitors that leave without moving deeper into your website. These people leave directly from the page they entered on. A high bounce rate usually leads to a lower conversion rate. Make changes to your website and work to lower your bounce rate.

Avg Time on Site: Is your website interesting to stay and read? Which pages have the longest time spent on them? These are your best pages. Which have the shortest time? These are the ones to change and improve.

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Filed under: SEO Strategies,Web Usability

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Video is Now Hotter than Search

Doug Williams @ 4:42 am

This blog entry was posted on March 27, 2010.

U.S. Internet users watched 32.4 billion videos in January 2010 according to a release of video rankings by ComScore. Yet the total search volume for January was 23.1 billion searches, according to search engine rankings also released by ComScore. This means there are 53% more video views online than searches for information.

More interesting stats

YouTube was the dominant video website with 12.7 billion videos watched by Americans in January. The average YouTube viewer watched 93.4 videos. This represents a 50% increase over a year ago. The duration of the average online video was 4.1 minutes.

The top video sites were:

YouTube 12.8 billion videos
Hulu 903 million videos
Microsoft 492 million
Yahoo 435 million

Google is the dominant search engine with 65.5% (Feb report) share of US core searches. Core searches are searches done on the 5 major search engines. Core searches account for approximately 65% of all searches done by US online users. Other sites such as YouTube, Craigslist and eBay account for the other 35% of searches.

The 5 core search engines for February were:

Google 9.5 billion searches
Yahoo 2.4 billion searches
Bing / MSN 1.7 billion searches
Ask 0.5 billion searches
AOL 0.4 billion searches

What does all this mean?

Video certainly does not replace the need for search. Videos are easy and free to place on sites such as YouTube and then easy to embed in a website. Website owners need to recognize that their web visitors expect video to help them understand your offering and your value proposition. Video is a conversion tool that should be used by every business today.

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Does Google Trust Your Website?

Doug Williams @ 4:36 am

This blog entry was posted on March 25, 2010.

Why doesn’t your website rank well on Google? Perhaps it is a lack of trust. Google looks at a number of factors that separates web spam from legitimate websites. Is your website getting caught up in these?

There are many factors that Google uses to determine if your website is trustworthy and deserving of a good ranking. These are the signs of trust you should work on for your website.

Domain Age: New domains (under one year) are unproven businesses. Older domains are a sign of an established business.
Domain Renewal: By registering your domain for a long time you show that you have long term plans for your website.
Backlinks: Sites that have a higher number of relevant links from other websites are considered more important. The quality of the linking site is also important, after all good pages rarely link to bad ones.
Privacy Policy: The presence of a privacy policy indicates you take seriously protecting visitor personal information.
Bad Neighborhood: If other websites on your same server are spam websites, Google will assume you may be one of them. This is a problem on cheap web hosting where spammers are likely to locate.
Visitor Time on Site: How long do visitors stay on your website from a Google search? If most of your visitors leave immediately this indicates your website is not relevant for a particular search term.
Content Quality: Is the content on your website original content that is updated regularly? Or is it content that is duplicates of other articles or web pages?

Building trust is key. This is important with your visitors and with Google. Focusing on trust building is a fundamental part of website marketing.

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Filed under: SEO Strategies

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A Brief History of Blogs

Doug Williams @ 3:50 am

This blog entry was posted on March 23, 2010.

So when did blogging begin? Although blogs are a recent invention, the idea is not new. Blogs evolved from online diaries that people kept from the earliest days of the Internet. Blogs as we think of them today are a combination of a personal journal, a message board and a news site. Let’s look at the milestones of blogging.

1994 – It is uncertain who started the very first blog. Justin Hall is credited by some to be the “founding father” of blogging for starting his “Proto-Blog” in December 1994 while still a student at Swarthmore College. Justin maintained this online journaling for 11 years.

1997 Jorn Barger first used the term “web log” to describe a simple website where people post interesting links that they found while surfing the net.

1998 Open Diary launched their website which would grow to thousands. Open Diary is credited with adding the ability for readers to make comment.

1999 Peter Merholz jokingly breaks weblog apart into “We Blog.” This was quickly adopted and shortened to blog. Blog became adopted as both a noun and a verb. LiveJournal and Blogger.com were launched as the first hosted blog tools.

2002 Heather Armstrong is fired for discussing her job in her personal blog which was named “Dooce.” Dooced becomes the term that means “Fired for blogging.”

2004 Merriam-Webster the prominent dictionary publisher announced that “Blog” was the word of the year.

2004 marked a turning point where blogging became adopted into everyday life.

2007 there were over 100 million blogs being tracked. Millions of people look to blogs as their source for information, news or just a good laugh.

Blogs have become a driving force in grass root breaking, and shaping of news stories. An example is known a Rathergate where Dan Rather presented documents on 60 Minutes that conflicted with accepted accounts of President Bush’s service records. Bloggers declared these documents forgeries and applied extreme pressure to CBS. This exposed reporting irregularities that lead to a public CBS apology.

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Filed under: Blog Marketing

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How to Set Your Website Apart From the Rest

Doug Williams @ 8:26 am

This blog entry was posted on March 21, 2010.

If you want your website to succeed, you need to think strategically about your customer and what action you want them to take. Most other companies don’t do this. This is what sets apart a great website from the rest of the pack.

Customer: Focus first on your customer. When a visitor arrives to your website, they are looking for something to help solve a need. This could be to buy or it could be to solve a particular problem. You need to understand what your best buyer is looking for and then make sure you address that clearly on the page they arrive on.
Image: Design your website around your customer. If you sell to Baby Boomers, design your website with a high contrast design with a larger font. If you are selling to Gen Y, then a trendier look is in order that integrates social media elements. Your design needs to be consistent with your branding and your industry. If you are selling to corporate customers, then you need a professional and polished look.
Action: What do you want your visitor to do? Buy? Sign-up? Call? If your page has no clear path to action or even worse, too many possible actions your visitor will leave. Make decisions easy. Make it clear and easily visible for the arriving visitor. Design a single primary action into your web page.
Trust: People are cautious buying online with good reason. Write your website text to address the needs of your visitor in their language (not industry jargon). Make it easy to contact you with a phone number and an actual street address (not a PO Box). Post your privacy policy, shipping procedure and your refund policy. Include a trust building About Us page.

A website that gets results focuses on the needs of your visitor. Remember, it is not about “you”… it is about “them”.

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Filed under: Blog Marketing,Internet Marketing,Website Design

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10 Steps of Optimizing a Website, Quick and Easy

Doug Williams @ 4:17 am

This blog entry was posted on March 19, 2010.

What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization is the process of preparing a website or blog to rank highly in the organic results on Google, Yahoo, or Bing. You can get hung up on the technical details, but it really comes down to doing two things. Having lots of keyword rich content and getting other websites to link to your content.

These are the 10 steps needed to optimize your website the rights way.

Create a Plan: Create a master topic plan for your website that is narrowly focused on offering solutions to your market that matched the products or services you offer.
Choose Keywords using a keyword research tool such as Google’s keyword tool which is a free tool. Follow your master topic plan in selecting your keyword phrases and choose phrases that have a good traffic volume.
Use your keywords in the actual structure of your website. This means using keywords in your domain name, page names, folder names, etc. Use keywords in your navigation links.
Use keywords in the Meta tags. Use them in the Title, Description and Keyword tags. Each page should have about 4 keyword phrases that are highly relevant to the content on that page.
Write pages: Write your pages using your keywords you selected. Each optimized page should have 400-600 words of test and use each keyword phrase 1-2 times in the body text. These should be used as close to the top of your text as possible. Words used in the beginning of your content are considered more important by the search engines. In addition, use the keywords once in the page headlines and once in link text. This should link to another relevant page.
Emphasize keywords: Use the keywords phrase(s) in the Title Tag and where possible, use them in other emphasized text such as bold, italics, ordered lists and numbered lists. This signals the search engines that these phrases are important.
Links: Do get links back to your website from highly relevant blogs, authority sites, directories and other websites that are part of your industry.
Add a Blog to your website such as worpress.org. Adding a blog and writing original keyword rich content is one of the best ways to increase the size of your website and to attract links from other bloggers. Look here to read more tips about blog marketing.
Use Web Analytics to monitor progress. Watch not only your overall visitor count, but which keyword phrases are bringing visitors and from which search engines. Use feedback from your Analytics to make changes and improvements in your optimization.
Be patience. Search engine optimization is a long term commitment. The more competitive the phrase, the longer it will take to get top rankings.

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Structure of the Power Blog Posting

Doug Williams @ 4:38 am

This blog entry was posted on March 17, 2010.

SEO blogging requires keyword focused writing. It requires writing interesting and original material to attract links from other bloggers. It then requires linking using keywords as your anchor text (link text) that deep link into your website. Use your keyword plan as a guide every time you prepare to write a blog posting.

Each time you write a blog posting you will go through a three step process of planning.

First you will select a topic that interests you and that you think your readers will enjoy. This should be in line with the theme of your blog.
Select one primary keyword phrase that you will center your entire posting around. If you don’t have a keyword in your list that fits, then you need to make a decision. Does this posting belong in my blog? Does it fall within the theme of my blog? If the answer is yes, then you may need to add another keyword phrase to your keyword list.Your keyword plan should be seen as a living document that will grow and change over time. The plan will cause you to keep focused on your plan, it won’t control what you can write about.
Sometimes there will be no keyword phrase to fit what you feel you need to write about. That’s OK. Note every blog posting needs to be a power posting. Remember that your plan is a guide; it does not control what you can and can’t write about.
Use your keyword phrase in your blog posting. Use it in the title of the blog posting, use it one time within the first 25 words of your text. These first words are the most important text in your posting. Use your keyword phrase one time within a hyperlink that links to your planned page within your website.

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Filed under: Blog Marketing

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The Social Media Marketing Obsession

Doug Williams @ 3:47 am

This blog entry was posted on March 15, 2010.

The rise of blogs, social networks, social bookmarking and other social media has created a new source for traffic for websites. A top story on Digg can drive much more traffic than a top search engine ranking. This has created a new process called Social Media Optimization (SMO).

Social media optimization is a form of word of mouth marketing through the use of social networking, social bookmarking, and media sharing (photo, video) websites. The essence of SMO is giving people a reason to visit and link to your site because of great original content.

Use social media to build your brand and your reputation, not to sell products. Brand yourself as a leader. Your brand is what you represent, what you care about and your connection to others. You want to be the unique and persuasive voice in your market. Your goal is to create a cultural following.

Social media optimization is different than search engine optimization. Social media markets directly to your target audience and search engine optimization markets to the search engines. SEO is about building rankings while SMO is about building a community.

Today we live in a world where you can’t hide. The world will become more transparent… not less. There is no more lurking in the shadows. Social media shines a light on everything and everybody.

The online marketing landscape has changed tremendously in just the past 5 years. It is getting increasingly chaotic. The old style of controlling your market is dead. It is about interacting and conversing with your market at a grassroots level.

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Filed under: Social Media Marketing

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SEO Blogging: The Right Keywords Lay a Solid Foundation

Doug Williams @ 6:56 am

This blog entry was posted on March 13, 2010.

SEO blogging is the method of blogging used to raise your website rankings. Choosing the correct keywords is the first step .

Empirical List: Prepare a list of empirical keywords from your topic that you can use in your posting titles, links and in your content. These are the words or phrases you think people may be using. These phrases should very accurately describe your blog topic and the website you are working to build the search rankings on.
Competition: Check out the websites and blogs that you consider your closest competition. Look at the topics and phrases that they are using. Look at what is being used in the page headlines and the blog titles. Add these to your empirical list.
Keyword Tool: Use a keyword research tool to check your empirical list. Use one of the keyword research tools to determine the level of interest and competition for your subject. Filter first for relevance and then look for a large number of searches with only a limited competition.
Keyword Plan: Once you have a list of the best keyword phrases, you then need to develop a linking plan. Develop specific pages each phrase will link to. It is these keywords used as link text that is especially powerful in building search engine rankings.
Using Keywords: Use keywords in your blog titles, in link text, in naming images and videos and in your body text of your postings. Keep your keyword plan handy as you do your blogging and it will help keep your blogging focused on your end goals.

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Filed under: Blog Marketing,SEO Strategies