Copywriting for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

So you have your new website design up and running...

You purchased a nice web CMS (Content Management System) to go with it so you can get an upper hand with your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) by providing the search engine crawlers with fresh content.

Congratulations!

You’re on your way to having a successful website that people will visit without you having to shell out an arm and a leg for PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising.

How can you ensure that your website copy helps with your SEO?

Follow these five tips:

Title Meta Tag: Always place a title tag on the page that describes what the page is about. If you are selling rare tropical fish, your title tag can be:

Your Company | Rare Tropical Fish

Description Meta Tag: Always make sure that you include the description of what your page is about. Your description will be what is shown when someone performs a search using the keywords that your page includes.

Keyword Meta Tag: Many of the search engines still do put weight on the keyword meta tags even though it has been rumored that they no longer place importance on them. Be wise and include them, but don’t overdue it, only include the relevant keywords to the particular page.

Header Tags: Using a header tag, you are telling the search engine crawlers what your page is about. They place weight on these words and you should use them to present your important keywords.

Internal Links: Use your keywords and keyword phrases in the links on your site to other pages on your site. Don’t use “click here” to link to other pages, use “Rare tropical fish” to link to another page on the site.

There are so many things you can do to get noticed and all it takes is a little time and effort. Look through my previous posts for more SEO tips. You can read them by clicking on the archives on the right hand side of the page.

Wishing you the best with you new site –

Joanne

8 Website Essentials

It doesn’t matter how much money you spend on your website design if people aren’t going to see it.

As I’ve said many times before, SEO (search engine optimization) is key to your website success.

Keep the following in mind if you intend to utilize your website to attract more business:

1. SEO. Your website must be able to be crawled by the search engines. If the spiders, robots and crawlers cannot read the content on your page, you are not going to be found. 2 common examples of sites where the content cannot be read are websites created entirely in flash and websites that rely on images in order to create a great “look”. Big name corporations who have the advertising dollars can afford to have an artistic “flashy” website, unless your brand name is known nationwide, don’t risk it.

2. Content is king! A common mistake many first time website owners make is to use their company name and “welcome” as the site description. “Welcome to My Company!” Refrain from using your site title or company name for your main site description. Search engine crawlers consider your site description in the formula for SEO. You want to have meta tags that convey whatever product or service that you are selling so that when people search for those keywords, they will find your site.

3. Links. You should include a resource section on your website that links to other websites that are relevant to your industry. You also want to have inbound links coming to your site, these help tremendously with search engine optimization. How can you find how many links you have to your site? You can do a Google search: link: yoursite.com to find out. Remember your search engine results rely on links as part of the algorithm.

4. Anchor text. Always use proper anchor text in your linking strategies. For example: “click here” simply doesn’t have as much weight as “read our small business tips”. Search engines read those words and they put weight on those links.

5. Articles. Having articles on your website with your keywords in them can help tremendously to get you noticed by the search engines. Do not stuff your articles with keywords; instead use the proper keyword density for the size of your articles.

6. Blogging. Blogs are a wonderful way to drive traffic to your site. While your website is your online brochure, your blog is your connection to the public. Blog posts are indexed quickly and a great way to get noticed on the Internet. You can gain a large following by posting helpful tips, links to other resources of interest and interacting with other bloggers.

7. RSS feeds. RSS feeds are a wonderful way to distribute your site updates as well as contribute to your site by including related industry news on your website.

8. Analytics. You need to keep track of your website analytics and monitor what is working and what isn’t. Keeping track of whether or not your website is converting visitors into buyers can help you tweak your site to create a working sales funnel. If you are using PPC advertising, you’ll be able to easily assess your ROI. Don’t forget to utilize A/B testing!

Good luck!

Joanne

SEO Tips

I just sent this to a potential client and since I wrote it all out in an email, I thought I'd just cut and paste into here. Yeah...I know...it's not exactly something new and fresh, however - I was thinking about you! I thought you might need a gentle reminder of some basic practices you can do yourself to help with your SEO.

For your inbound links, the search engine algorithms rely on several different factors:

1. Quality keyword rich content (including using your keywords on pages in the headline ‘H1’ title of your pages)
2. Inbound links from relevant businesses/sources using anchor text and ‘deep links’ going to different pages within your site (this also applies to links within your site)
3. Meta tags and descriptions including text in the title tag and also in the body of the pages (although some argue that Google doesn’t count them, many other engines do)
4. Sitemap (one that you submit to your webmaster account and that you continually update when new content is added)
5. Articles (relevant to your industry and keywords with the keywords in the urls)
6. Analytics (having a good analytics program in place that you monitor)
7. Alt tags for images
8. Manual submission to search engines (and submit only once)
9. Once your articles have been added to your sitemap and indexed by the search engines, article syndication is a great help as many of the syndications keep the link to your article on prominent pages (thus encouraging more click-throughs to your site)
10. Have a blog on your site where the content is updated frequently

More small business tips to come, I promise!

Joanne

How to Rank Better with Keywords

We’ve discussed this before, but of course I like to always go back and talk about subjects that were "hot" for our new readers.

Do you have a keyword strategy? If so, please weigh in and leave a comment. If not, check out some steps you may want to consider:

Quality Content
Your number one goal should always be to create quality content for your keywords. It will drive traffic to your site if it is useful and your visitors recommend your site to other visitors.

SEO
There is a lot of advice out on the web regarding SEO and many arguments about what does and does not work but one thing remains constant, if you take the time to optimize your pages for the search engines, you will receive better results than if you didn’t. One popular method is to have your keyword in the headline or H1 title of your page. Make sure the keyword is included in the first and last 25 words on the page. Pay attention to keyword density and don’t overstuff your pages with your keyword, it won’t work.

Blogging and Web 2.0
Your site should have a blog and an RSS feed attached so that you can use them to boost your keyword ranks. Make sure you tag your posts too, Blogger has a form where you can put your keywords (tags) for each blog post and WordPress uses categories that will automatically be seen as tags.

Article Marketing
If you want to be found using your keywords, try writing an article and placing it in a relevant section on your site. Once Google has indexed your site and has found your article (you can speed up the process by uploading a new sitemap and letting Google know about it), go out and syndicate that article by submitting it to other article sites.

Long Tails
You can work off of your master list and use related long tail keywords. Use one of the free keyword searches to find out what the daily searches are and go for the ones that aren’t in high competition if your site is relatively new. If you don't know what a long tail keyword is, please let me know and I'll do another post on that!

Domain names, URLs and Titles
If you haven’t purchased your domain name yet and you know that you are going to have a specific keyword that will relate to your site, buy a domain name with the keyword in it. Make sure that you have your keyword in your URLs to your pages and in your meta and title tags for the page.

Links
Use anchor text incorporating your keyword to link to your page. What that means is, instead of “click here” put the keyword so that it is the underlined linkable text. In addition, try to get quality one-way links from other websites that are related to yours. For instance if you sell baby clothes, try to get a website for moms to link to your site.

Useful Links for keywords:

Google Keyword Selector Tool is great, it can scan your site for existing keywords as well as give you suggestions for related keywords.

Want to see what people have been searching for in the past on Google? Try Google Suggest and start typing in your keyword.

Enter your site url and see what sitereportcard.com has to say about your optimization or keywords. It’s a fun and free tool for you to use.

There are many other tips for getting your keywords to work for you and I’d love to open up a discussion here so that we can help you grow your business. If you are one of my blog readers and you have some advice to share, please post a comment and give us your opinion.

Joanne

Search Engine Results Pages - Content is King!

I just finished going over our analytics and comparing the results with my SEO efforts for the month of December. The results are in…CONTENT is the number one driving factor to our website.

I know I’ve said that before, but I don’t know if I’ve really driven it home for our clients. There are so many “do’s” and “don’ts” in search engine optimization. All the information that I keep up with including newsletters, groups, articles, companies, books, etc.., all have their basic set of rules (formed a long time ago) and they change periodically when everyone starts to follow the new trends and the search engines change the algorithms, but the bottom line is – if you have good content and your site keeps evolving, traffic will come. Period.

Yes, there are tricks that dishonest companies use to try and get you where you want to be, but you end up being penalized for them. Rather than waste time and money on those efforts, why not just go for the honest way? Good old-fashioned work. We don't always follow the practices we should because of sheer lack of time. We're busy bees! But one thing is for sure, the things that we take the time to do - work.

Speaking of work, how about the people that work at deceiving you in your search in order to gain a buck? Grrrr. Nothing is more frustrating to me than when I do a search, a result comes up that is supposed to be relevant, I click on it and it’s just another damn directory site of another search using the keywords I just put in. It's like those little boxes within a box, O.K. the first time you experience it...but do you want to relive it every time? I don't.

I also get severely irked when I search for something and the results clicked on are just a page full of paid advertising. What's worse than that? When they have nothing to do with what I searched for at all. I read an article during the holidays (I’m sorry I don’t remember who wrote it and I didn’t save it) that kids were for sale at Target. Hello? Really? I just Googled “kid for sale”, here’s what I got:This is precisely why I hardly EVER click on the sponsored links. It’s most likely not what I wanted in the first place. The corporations who have an endless budget will have surely invested in SEO as well for the PPC ad. They end up wiping out the little guy by bidding top dollar for the PPC campaign. (Those of you who understand PPC may complain I'm leaving something out by not explaining the actual CTR, but that's not what this post is about.) Little companies just starting out try to jump in the big pool and they quickly drown.

My advice? Write some articles, start a blog and publish content that is relevant to whatever it is your selling. When we search for your product, we’ll be grateful to land on a website that is what we were looking for in the first place. Isn’t that what all of us want?

Joanne

2007 Recap

We're still out of the office for the holidays, but I felt compelled to post something on the last day of this glorious year.

Here's a list of our best articles for the year:

How to Get Traffic to Your Website for Free
Writing the Perfect Ad
Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) Explained
Google Vs. Wikipedia
Top 7 SEO Mistakes to Avoid
Small Business Holiday Survival Guide
Branding...It's Not Just for Cows!
Make Sure to Take Time Off
What is Hosting?
TV and Radio Advertising
Help with Analytics
What is Web 2.0?
Learning Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Link Popularity
Business Branding
New Business Website
Starting Your Small Business
Domain Name
Web CMS
Website Keywords
Website Analytics
Writing a Winning Press Release
Promoting Your Small Business Affordably

Happy New Year to you and your loved ones and I hope 2008 brings you happiness, health and success in all you do!

Joanne

How to Get Traffic to Your Site Without Paying Through the Nose!

Happy holidays! Can you believe I went to the store at 5:00 am to try and get the kids a Wii on Saturday? Well, I didn’t get one – I guess they’ll just have to play with the boxes their clothes came in!

We’re gearing up for some much needed time off coming up next week, and I for one am excited! We are closing for the week, but I imagine we’ll end up working some – we always do.

I know, I know… you clicked on this because you want to learn how to get traffic, not read about me and my holiday plans!

When we started our business, we had a tiny marketing budget and really couldn’t afford traditional advertising. How did we gain clients? We got them through website visitors. When we started out, we knew we needed to attract people to our website. More importantly, we needed to keep them on the site once they were there.

Here are the main ingredients we cooked up for our plan:

1. Keyword research. We decided which keywords we needed for our online business success and then we wrote keyword rich content for the site.
2. We named specific pages/url’s for those keywords
3. We wrote meta tag descriptions for those pages
4. We submitted our site to major search engines and directories
5. We installed Google analytics and signed up for a webmasters account
6. We added a sitemap to our website and one to the webmaster account
7. We wrote articles with subjects that included our keywords and updated our sitemap with each new article
8. We began passing out business cards and posting them whenever we could.
9. We printed bookmarks with our company information and placed them in libraries and bookstores in books relevant to “Starting Your Own Business”
10. We posted ads on free classified sites
11. We wrote press releases and distributed them to online wire services (hoping to get picked up, which they were)
12. Once we verified that Google had crawled and indexed our content, we began submitting our articles to article syndication sites.
13. We sent out emails to friends, family, and past business colleagues to let them know about our new business. We asked them to refer us to anyone in need of our services.
14. We created a MySpace page and began social networking (albeit slowly, as we were busy running our new business)
15. We joined the local chamber of commerce (well this wasn’t free, but it didn’t cost but a drop in the bucket)
16. We started a blog (again, we were really busy in the beginning and our blog posts were few and far between – we ended up trashing the first blog and starting over and have great hopes for our new blog)

I know that there are many other things we have done that were absolutely free, and I’m sure I’ll remember them tonight at 3:30 in the morning! If I do, I promise I’ll comment.

One of the greatest joys we have had is to watch our analytics and see where our traffic has been coming from. Nothing gives us a greater thrill than to see that an article we wrote about search engine marketing or TV and radio advertising has brought us visitors.

If you’re a steady blogger, you know that it takes time to cultivate relationships and read all there is out there to read. Sometimes you can get so caught up in it all that you look up and can’t believe the day is half over. It’s so much fun that it’s almost sinful that you’re getting paid to do it.

Sometimes there are days when you’re tired and don’t feel much like writing anything or commenting, but you fear if you don’t write something you’ll lose subscribers/visitors/fans. It’s best not to post if your heart isn’t in it. When we have those days, we’ve learned not to post anything. It keeps the blog fresh, informative and entertaining.

I hope the information I shared can help you if you’re just starting out and struggling to get things going. We’re here for support, if you want to comment – we’ll write you back. We’ve been there, and we “get it”.

Have a great night!

Joanne

The Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) Explained

Every year my family publishes a “Bad News Letter”. Ever experience the annoying high achieving family newsletter that comes in the mail from a distant relative? That’s not the case when it comes to my family. We love to highlight and laugh at the bad things that happened throughout the year. You won’t find any braggarts in that gem. I've been busy after work hours getting it together to pass out to relatives on Christmas Eve.

On to the subject…

Last week I was conversing with a client over the phone and she mentioned that she wanted her new website to be on the top of the SERP’s page. When I started to explain to her the logistics of being listed at the top for her search terms she was fascinated. She is a very intelligent woman with several websites already, and it got me to thinking that I should probably do a post for people who don’t quite understand it all.

So, with that in mind – let me just explain (gently) how it all works:

Whenever you go to a search engine such as Google and you type in a keyword or phrase (the words you are using to search for something), after you hit “Search”, the items that come up are broken down as follows:

Take a look at the image below with the results in red:

Those are the top paid results. To get in that position, you have to be engaged in a PPC (Pay Per Click) or (Adwords) campaign with Google and you have to be the top bidder for the keyword phrase that was searched on. In this case the phrase was “complete business cards”.

In the next image, look at the results in red:

These are also paid or “sponsored” results from a PPC campaign. The results on the side are not the top dollar advertising. Again, the person in charge of the campaign has a choice on what keywords to bid on, how much they want to spend per word or phrase and what position they want to be in.

In the next image, look at the results in red:

These are the natural search results. Meaning, the results that are showing up here are based on SEO (search engine optimization) and not a paid advertising campaign. This clearly demonstrates how important search engine optimization can be to your marketing budget.

I can get into more about PPC campaigns and how they work in another post. Next time we can have a look at Yahoo or MSN. I hope this was helpful to you.

Joanne

Top 7 SEO Mistakes to Avoid

You've got your new site up and you’re ready to get it optimized for search engines. Where should you start? There are plenty of articles and advice on the Internet on how you should go about it and there's a lot of information to absorb. When applying your SEO practices, make sure you avoid the following no no’s:

1. Omitting the Title, Description and Keyword Meta tags. I’ve seen it first hand many times – potential clients contact me interested in a re-design because their site has been up for over a year and they have no traffic or page rank. I check their source code and sure enough, they don’t have any tags. If you go to Google Webmaster Help Center, you’ll see they encourage you to have title tags.
2. Leaving “Under Construction” on your pages. You want your site to be seen as something that is evolving and continually changing so people will come back? Don’t put up “under construction” or “continually under construction”. The search engines will ignore you.
3. No Links! This is a must for your website, you need to have them. Link to relevant sites from your site and have some incoming links from relevant sites too.
4. Keyword stuffing. Cramming your pages full of keywords is going to shoot you down in the SERPs. You need to do research on keyword density and keep your pages within those ranges.
5. Hiring a dishonest SEO service. You get what you pay for. If you want to have legitimate results, hire an expert service and expect to pay anywhere from 2-5 k per month. Do your research and make sure to check references by speaking to the former clients personally over the phone. If you hire a service that “guarantees” top placement, you are most likely getting ripped off.
6. Using important text in images. The robots and spiders don’t recognize the text in an image. If you have something important you want shown on your page, use text!
7. Dead links. Make sure you check your links frequently. If your links aren’t live, guess what? The crawler is leaving your site – dead end.

You can use free services such as SiteReportCard.com to check on your site optimization and find areas that need improvement.

When doing SEO for your site, be honest and provide information to your viewers that is of value and is true to your product or service. If you stick to those guidelines, you’ll come along just fine. Remember, it’s not a lightning process and it can be done without spending a great deal of cash. Do your research and get started today!

Joanne

Another Great Resource - MerchantCircle.com

MerchantCircle has over 300,000 business members and is a great tool for promoting your business.

We created a holiday coupon last week and the CTR has been great:

We love MerchantCircle.com for many reasons, just a few of them are:

1. Networking!
2. SEO
3. If you don't have a blog, you can start one free with your account
4. You can create, publish and distribute newsletters
5. Create coupons and ads that are shown on your network connections websites

Create your business profile today and start making connections!

Joanne

Help with Analytics

Most businesses consider their website an integral part of their marketing campaign. However, simply putting up a website and hoping for the best just isn’t enough. It’s essential to track your site’s traffic. This will let you know which marketing campaigns are working. For example, is your new website copy helping you make sales, or causing people to leave your site right away? Without tracking your visitors, you’ll never know.

Once you have your website analytics installed, and can see all those visitors coming to your site, you need to interpret the visitor activity information. What does it all mean?

Let’s break it down:

Hits: Many people confuse hits with visits. They are not the same. Hits are the number of times that an http request is made to your server. For instance, if a single visitor visits several pages on your site and pulls up images and other files on each page, the visit can count as several hundred hits.

Unique Visits: Tracking a visitor’s IP address, browser and operating system will measure the number of actual unique visits generated on your website. A visitor can browse several pages on your site, but their activity will only be counted as one unique visit. This number is the one you want to pay attention to, as it will give you the most accurate representation of how much traffic your website is generating.

Bounce Rates: Pay attention to your pages’ bounce rates. This number measures the number of visitors who come to your site and immediately exit. A high bounce rate can indicate that your page isn’t capturing your visitors’ attention. The page is either in need of updating, or is attracting visitors who are actually looking for something else. You can experiment using A/B testing to see which designs, content, and graphics work to lower your bounce rate.

Top Entry Pages: Where are visitors entering your site? Often, you’ll see direct hits to your site without a referrer. You can use the top entry page statistics determine how your visitors are arriving at your site. They may be coming from an online article or blog you’ve written. Make sure that your visitors will be able to easily navigate your website, no matter which page of your site they arrive on initially.

Top Exit Pages: This statistic shows the pages from which the majority of your visitors are leaving your site. Factors such as page content, graphics, navigation, and even color can affect a visitor’s decision to exit a website. Altering your website’s pages can work to keep a visitor’s interest in the site. Again, using A/B testing will show which design works best to retain your visitors.

Traffic Sources: This is by far my favorite in the analytics toolbox. I love checking our analytics every day to see which one of our ads, articles, or campaigns is driving the most traffic to our site. Use this resource to find out which of your marketing efforts are most effective.

Keywords: Another fabulous tool that will let you know what search terms or phrases your visitors are typing in to arrive at your site. Use this information to create articles and page content to drive visitors to your website.

Map Overlay: This tool will reveal where your visitors are located geographically. You will be able to see if the majority of your traffic is coming from the United States, or other countries. It will even narrow down tracking to certain cities or territories. This is extremely useful for honing your marketing message, as well as for scheduling staffing and determining your business hours.

Browser/Capabilities: It is essential to know how your visitors access your site. Do you have a slick flash website with Javascript? If so, visitors who are using dial up, or don’t have Java installed won’t be able to see your site. Viewing browser information will tell you which browser the majority of your site users are using. You can then make sure that your site is optimized for that browser. It’s also important to note here that you should always test your site to make sure it has the look and functionality that you require, in all browsers.

If you’re using Google Analytics, you have the added bonus of the site overlay, which is a fun tool that shows you how visitors found your content, and moved through your site, as well as funnel visualization and conversion goals.

All in all, it’s crucial to have analytics for your site, so you can maximize your marketing efforts by determining whether you’re reaching your target audience and converting visits to sales.

Joanne

Link Popularity

What is link popularity and how can you build link popularity to help your business?

Link popularity plays an important role in the visibility of a web site among the top of the search results.

Wikipedia defines link popularity as a measure of the quantity and quality of other web sites that link to a specific site on the World Wide Web.

There are all kinds of website design and search engine optimization terms out there that can be confusing especially when you are just getting started with your small business website.

Lets break down some of the definitions for easier understanding:

Link Popularity
Link popularity is the measure of the number of hypertext links coming into a website from other websites on the Internet. Although you obviously want to have several links incoming and outgoing, but it’s important to pay attention to the quality of your website inbound and outbound links. For instance, if you have several incoming and outgoing links to sites that aren’t relevant to your website, your links aren’t quality links. When browsing the web and you stumble upon a site with great information and you click on their resources, would you rather be directed to more information about the subject you originally searched for and related items, or links to widgets?

Anchor Text
The anchor text is the text that you click in a hyperlink. Many times you’ll see “click here” to view our pricing. Using click here rather than a keyword such as “widget pricing” takes away from your natural search engine optimization. The search engine algorithms use anchor text and can get you better ranking if you are using it correctly.

Reciprocal Links
Reciprocal links are two-way links from one website to another. Basically, you place a link on your website to the other company website and they in turn place a link on their website to your website. Often times you are allowed to include your anchor text in the link you are placing on the external site, other times – you can include your company name, website and a brief description. Again this practice is another important part of search engine optimization.

Non-reciprocal links
Non-reciprocal links are sometimes referred to as one-way links. It is just as it sounds, a link to your site, or a link from your site that isn’t returned. Meaning, I often link to Wikipedia for definitions to help explain items in my website articles. Wikipedia doesn’t link back to me for my articles.

Link Exchange
A link exchange involves reciprocal links and usually occurs when you or your Webmaster receive an email from a company that would like to exchange links with you or you can initiate a link exchange with a website that you think has valuable information and would benefit your site users. Always fully check out the sites that are requesting link exchanges with you to make sure that they aren’t part of linking farm or using practices that Google and the other search engines frown upon. You don’t want to accidentally get your site banned from the search engines!

Paid Links
Paid linking involves buying and selling links to improve a site’s ranking. Google and other search engines use linking in their algorithms to determine a sites “importance” which effects the site ranking. Google frowns upon the process in particular as well as other search engines and there has been quite a bit of controversy over Google suggesting that webmasters report paid links to them. There are instances where it is okay to purchase a link for advertising and you can check out the guidelines in Google’s Webmaster Help Center.

Now that you’re familiar with the terminology, it’s time to get out there and start building your link popularity! Remember quality and quantity and watch your website move up in natural search engine results.

Joanne Pele is the Vice President of Operations at Complete Business Systems. Complete Business Systems provides a ready-to-go branding package for your company, including website, logo, business cards and letterhead. Additional services include postcard design, databases, press release and web content writing. For more information, visit CompleteBizSystems.com, or call 800-479-9186

Joanne

Business Branding

Whether you are just starting a new company, or have been around for a while and need some marketing tips, branding your business should be on the top of your list.

Marketing your business by building a brand name isn’t just for large companies. Branding your business is essential for growing your company, no matter what size it is. Repetition, consistency, and visibility are the key to success in achieving brand power.

What is branding?

Wikipedia defines brand as including a name, logo, slogan and /or design scheme associated with a product or service.

If you are in business today, it’s imperative that you brand your business first-rate including logo, website, business cards, letterhead, print ads, television, radio and signage.

Let’s break down the key elements for branding your business:

Logo

An effective logo should reflect your business. If you examine successful brands that have achieved instant recognition, you’ll notice they all have one thing in common – simplicity. It’s important that your logo design can be used in many different forms, not just on your website design, letterhead and business cards. Think of how you may want to advertise in the future – will you want to place print ads? Will your logo reproduce well in black and white, and in varied sizes? What about apparel? Will your logo hold up when printed on the t-shirts you’ll be passing out at the next trade show?

Website

Your website is your online business card. Your logo should be presented on each of your website pages. Your website design should have intuitive navigation, clear navigation and valuable content. Once your website is up and ready to go, you should promote your site online via press releases and business networking sites. Don’t forget to register your site with Google and most importantly, your contact information should be visible on every page – especially your phone number.

Business Cards

Business cards should have a clean, uncluttered design. Make sure they display your logo and present a professional image of your company. Include all forms of contact, and don’t forget your web address! Some people choose to purchase double-sided business cards, and print just their web address on the back, so it stands out.
Business cards are often your first point of contact with a potential client, and we all know first impressions make all the difference.

Letterhead

Your letterhead should also include your logo and contact information. Use your company letterhead for all correspondence with potential and current clients.

All of your branding elements should coordinate with one another and present a consistent reflection of your company.

You now have all the tools you need to project a professional image and start getting your company name out there. Don’t try to cut corners and save money on these paramount items. Remember, you’re building a company brand!

Joanne Pele is the Vice President of Operations at Complete Business Systems. Complete Business Systems provides a ready-to-go branding package for your company, including website, logo, business cards and letterhead. Additional services include postcard design, databases, press release and web content writing. For more information, visit Complete Business Systems, or call 800-479-9186

What are Keywords? Why Do I Need Them?

Keywords are words that may be used by viewers searching for information, search terms or phrases that are related to an advertisement or ad copy.

In search engine marketing the keyword or search phrase is crucial. Keywords can be a single term or keyword phases can be used which contain multiple words.

To appear on those first few pages of a search engine a website must contain a density of keywords or phrases related to the search terms used. It is an imperative part of search engine optimization for any website.

When you go to a search engine such as Google and search for something, you are using a keyword or keyword phrase. For example, if you do a search for "website design" you are using keywords for your search. The results that come up will be as follows:

The top two results are paid advertisements (a company paid for you to see their ad when you searched using those words).

The results listed over on the right are also paid advertisements

The results listed on the page underneath the top two are your natural search results. The words that you chose for your search are listed within the content of the websites and Google is showing you the most relevant results. (This is a simplified explanation, more information can be found in SEO articles.)

If you have ever tried to figure out keywords or keyword phrases, you know it can be a daunting task.

Some websites make the mistake of just listing anything and everything under the sun for their keywords. Major search engines take into account many factors. If you are listing a keyword that has no relevancy to your website and there is no copy on your website to back it up it will not be taken into consideration. Another mistake often seen is the over-use of keywords on a page. Again, if you are using a word over and over on your site, (when it isn't needed) in order to get higher rankings - you are barking up the wrong tree. It won't help you get any closer to the coveted "Top".

Keyword density is key. We'll write another blog on that subject soon.

Back to keywords and how to find them...

There are many tools out there, and even services you can enlist to help you choose your keywords. I suggest going with the freebies.

Here are three that I like to use:

1. Google Adwords - Keyword Tool
This is an excellent source for figuring out what your keywords should be. Simply type in a keyword or phrase that is relevant to your website (make sure you check synonyms) and get your information. Another excellent tool is the next tab over "Site-Related Keywords". You can simply enter your site url and see what keywords you should be using based on the content that's already on your site.

2. Overture Keyword Selector Tool
This is Yahoo's PPC campaign (Overture) tool. You can enter a keyword and search and you will be shown the keyword phrases and how many times they were searched for on Yahoo for the previous month. This is a fabulous way to see if you are on the right track. If people aren't searching for what you are advertising, you may want to take another approach.

3. Google Suggest
This is a fun tool that guesses what you're typing and offers suggestions in real time. It also shows you the number of times the phrases were searched for. It can be useful to give you ideas of what other searches were performed using one of your keywords and inspire you to find new phrases.

Remember, it's not just about what your keywords are, but how you use them on your site and in your advertising.

Joanne Pele is the Vice President of Operations at Complete Business Systems. Complete Business Systems provides a ready-to-go branding package for your company, including website, logo, business cards and letterhead. Additional services include postcard design, databases, press release and web content writing. For more information, visit Complete Business Systems or call 800-479-9186.