site bytes

You’ve finally made the decision to get started with your website. Now you just have to come up with what you want to say – which often is not as easy as it sounds. A good place to start is with any existing brochures, postcards, letters or other sales material that youve already developed. If you’re starting at ground zero, here are some things you can do to pull your content together:

First, start with the facts. Who are you, where are you located, how do people contact you and what products or services do you provide? Those are the basics that must get onto your website.

Now stop and think: why you? Not in the dramatic, “woe is me” sense, but why should people want to work with you? Since small businesses usually don’t have the economies of scale to make them the lowest price seller, it’s all about what makes working with you unique. Don’t forget that good products and great customer service aren’t selling points, they’re expectations, so you need to think about what else differentiates you from the rest of the pack. Is it your craftsmanship? Your expertise? What makes you better able than the next guy to deliver a quality product or service? This is the information that should motivate your prospect into making a call or sending an email to you.

Next up: images. Images can have a powerful visual impact, but they also take time to load. Website visitors are impatient, so make sure that the photos you do have on your site are relevant and convey your business image or message. If you’re an artist or if manufacture a product, then people are going to want to see what you can do. If you sell a service, images can help break up the text and make your website more visually appealing. There are lots of places from which you can acquire inexpensive images. Here are just a few: shutterstock.com, istockphoto.com or dreamstime.com.

Still at a loss for words? Don’t try to compose it all at once – start by listing the facts and your differentiators. You can always take advantage of copy writing or editing services to help you bring it all together – and a good writer will take the time to learn a bit about you and your business before attempting to put pen to paper. Those lists will help them get started, too!

Last time, we talked about the basics of writing content to help attract relevant traffic to our site. Now that you’ve put some thought into your keywords and phrases, where should they go?

text: You’ve heard it before, “content is king.” If your keywords and phrases aren’t in your content (that’s the text on your pages), then a search engine will think that those words aren’t important for your site and won’t rank you highly for them.

title tag: These words are what appear at the top of a user’s browser when they view a web page. The title tag is one of the most important places (to a search engine) to place your keywords.

header tags: Your content probably has a layout designed to sell your product or communicate your message, with important topics headlined or emphasized. Similarly, you can add labels in your code to help search engines understand your content. Search engines see headings which are labeled as <h1> as being the most important, and <h2> as the second-most important and so on.

anchor tags: Anchor tags are the words that you use to link to your (or others’) web pages.

alt tags: Alt tags are used to label graphics/images. They appear in place of the image when a user has their graphics turned off, or when the graphics take time to load or if someone is using an assistive device to surf the web.

other meta tags: The meta “keywords” tag can be used to highlight important terms within your content – the ones that should bring up your web pages when a user enters them in a search box. The meta “description” tag gives a search engine the words that you would like to be displayed when you come up in its results. A search engine may index up to 250 characters, although fewer characters may be displayed in the results.

Note that different search engines display results in different ways, so at best, these tags can influence results displays only in the search engines that support them.

focus on what’s important

No matter how much research you do on keywords and their placement, don’t forget that, first and foremost, you’re writing for your clients and prospects! Use keywords when you can, but keep your writing natural and appealing to your target audience.

Got a new website or looking to develop one soon? Great!! Now…if only your customers could find it on Google or Yahoo. To attract good traffic to your site, you’ll need great content and to do some homework on keywords. Keywords are those words (or phrases) that your potential customers are typing into that search box to find something on the internet. Here are some steps you can take to make sure your content matches up with what your customers are looking for:

speak their language

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Are your customers looking for “low fares” or are they looking for “cheap flights”; for “property insurance” or “home insurance”? Use the words your customers would use, rather than industry jargon, and you’ll stand a better chance of getting them to your website.

understand their concerns

When people shop on the internet, they might be looking for general information as well as for specific products. What questions are they likely to ask (and that your product or service can help them answer)? What problem are they trying to solve? Again, put yourself in their shoes: along with looking for “financial planning services,” some customers might instead ask “how to retire early.”

make a list

Start your list of keywords by answering the questions above, and, if it makes sense, get local. If you sell to a specific region, adding that region’s name to your phrase can help get more focused results. For instance, “IT support” gets thousands of searches every day, but if you live in LA, “IT support Los Angeles” is likely to get your site more relevant traffic.

Need more help generating keywords? Try Google’s free keyword tool to get your creative juices flowing!

prioritize

Once you’ve got a good list, prioritize the items according to what is most relevant to your product or service and, last, incorporate them into your website.