So, you have become the proud owner of the online store. Well, I wish you achieve your online business objectives. Certainly, you must have worked really hard, invested a lot of money, and took real pain in planning, designing and developing your e-commerce website. Here, I would like to ask you a few questions which are: “Are you sure your online store will enjoy web traffic that can fulfill your business objectives and goals?,” “Do you think your e-commerce website or online store would get higher ranking from search engines?” and “Have you integrated your marketing message in this online store and is it perfectly made to get this message across?”

Well, it is not enough to have an online store or e-commerce website made. In this age of fierce competition, online marketers have to leverage the online marketing strategies available to promote their business and generate leads. Such strategies require hard efforts from the marketers and are really crucial. If you do not implement online marketing strategies then you won’t enjoy web traffic, cannot generate leads and moreover your website will be lost in this virtual world of Web.

Following common online marketing strategies must be used to market your products or services over internet and attract web audiences.

1. E-Mail Marketing –
   Very important and still a gem for marketers. E-mail marketing gives you a platform to get in touch with your target audience and customers. It helps two way communication between you and your clients or prospects. All you need to do this build a list of e-mail ids of your visitors and send them, newsletters, information about offers, schemes and events on a regular basis. E-mail marketing is a direct form of marketing and connects you well with your audience.
2. Search Engine Optimisation –
   Importance of SEO or search engine optimisation can never be ignored. SEO is a long term process and help your website get higher search engine rankings. Today, almost 80 percent of web audience refers search engines to find out a website that serve information, products or services they are looking for. If your website is search engine friendly then it will certainly get good traffic volume which you can convert to achieve your business goal.
3. Pay Per Click Management –
   After you successfully launched your online retail store, the first online strategy that you can utilize to market your store is PPC or Pay Per Click. It is an exclusive advertising model or a type of paid search marketing. It is really cost-effective and offer promising results quickly. In PPC, a marketer has to pay only for the clicks that online visitors make to get redirected to your website from search engines.
4. Banner Advertising –
   It is a type of display advertising on internet. The primary idea behind banner advertising is same i.e. to get a stream of web traffic flowing into your website. Marketers advertise with the banner ads of their website on popular websites. The idea is to get your information or marketing message exposed to a lot of online visitors and attract them to visit your store and convince them to buy your products or services.
5. Social Media Optimisation –
   In the present web scenario, the best way to market your business online is social media optimisation. Today, the trend is social networking through several websites. Social media optimisation (SMO) is almost no cost way to advertise or market your business and build a solid customer base. You can reach masses and enhance your online presence and brand reputation. Also called as Social media marketing (SMM), SMO gives you an opportunity to interact with web audience and let them form opinions about your store or business. It helps you create buzz.
6. Video Marketing –
   Sometimes words fail to paint pictures and impress your target audience or your online visitors just browse through your website and do not read content. In such condition, you have only a few minutes to impress your audience and get your marketing message across. To do this video marketing serves as the best online marketing strategy available. Simple, you can upload a video of your product or message to your website. Web audiences, usually watch videos and understand what you want to express. It is an impressive way to address your online visitors personally and convert them.
7. Online Press Release –
   Just like traditional press releases, online press releases help you share your news / views, opinion or information about events, products, services, etc. with online visitors. Press releases help you generate traffic to your website which gets redirected from PR directories or websites. Online press releases help you build and maintain strong public relations.
8. Blogging –
   Blogging is not a new online marketing strategy. However, it could help you tremendously with your marketing objectives. Blogging help you share your views, information or news with web audience. It gives you a platform to interact with them directly. By blogging you can inspire online visitors to participate in online discussions and provide you an opportunity to find out what your web audience thinks about your products or business.
9. Viral Marketing –
   Viral marketing is nothing but a new form of traditional word of mouth advertising. Here marketer can create a buzz around his website, products or services and business. Viral marketing give opportunity to marketers to improve their brand awareness. It creates a buzz and inspires audiences to share your marketing message with their friends, family or relatives on social networks and through other mediums. It is very effective medium but requires close monitoring otherwise you may end up with ruining your brand image.
10. Web Analytics –
    It is not an online marketing strategy as such but it is the back bone of all your online marketing efforts. The best advantage of marketing your business online is that you can track the performance of your campaigns and make necessary changes as desired. Web analytics help you understand visitors’ behavior, their responses towards your marketing efforts. Web analytics can measure the effectiveness of any of your online marketing campaign.

So, once again I would like you to congratulate for your online store and remind you to use online marketing strategies discussed above to be successful in all your endeavors.

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As a business owner you spent a considerable amount of time and effort on search engine optimising your website. But how do you guarantee whether this investment is really paying off? Are you thoroughly confident that the surge in performance is due to your SEO efforts or evidence of a corollary marketing campaign? While there are several ways to stay competitive by assessing the returns on your SEO spend, I have outlined below 6 key tips that enable you to measure whether the time and money spent on your website’s optimization campaign are working well for you.

1. Track organic results through non-branded keywords
   Ideally, the success of a Search Engine Optimisation program should be measured in relation to organic searches rather than through branded search results. Especially since SEO returns are based on the number of people who reach your website through searches for general and relevant keywords. Hence, your analysis must separate branded and non-branded keywords to evaluate the impact of your natural search strategy.
   Take for instance, if a sports clothes manufacturer, ‘ActivX’ converts a sale through an organic keyword search for ‘lycra tights’, then the sale should be attributed to SEO. However, if the same sale was converted through the keyword, ‘lycra tights ActivX’, then it’s possible that a previous sale or another marketing initiative resulted in this search.
2. Chart search data progress
   Review your natural search data trends on a weekly basis to understand the type of changes online or offline that are positively influencing it. You can do this by correlating updates to your website such as keywords, content addition, architecture and technology changes and SEO best practices, to understand which changes are significantly impacting your search results. It can take around 4 weeks for search engines to index your website updates and a couple more for these changes to translate in traffic behaviour.
   Another important thing to do is to track your branded keyword performance immediately after you launch a marketing campaign to assess whether or not the campaign is working.
3. Onsite conversions
   Traffic and high rankings on search engines are important; however they are not an effective gauge of SEO success. You could be attracting the wrong traffic and not successfully converting the right traffic. What is needed is a smart combination of drawing in the right traffic and succinctly converting it into a lead, sale and profit. Conversion rates will not rise without successful SEO elements like search engine referral rates, rankings, usability and site content, to name a few. While we’d like to focus solely on increasing conversion rates when optimizing a site, we have to lay the foundation that ensures conversion rates increase.
4. Offline conversions
   Businesses that generate sales leads through natural search must track and monitor the leads’ performance on a keyword basis. While the amount of leads generated by each keyword is easy to monitor, it’s difficult to assess the ultimate conversion rate of those keywords.
   A software company can judge a keyword’s true performance by validating its conversion rate. If this company drives natural search traffic to a landing page that involves filling out a form to request a quote. The sales team then follows-up on this request and try to gain the sale over phone or in person. Information on whether or not the sale materialises should be linked back to the original keyword. This data will help in accurately representing the success of your overall natural search campaign as well as your keyword’s performance.
5. Micro analyse keywords
   If you feel certain keywords should perform better than others, then it’s important that you minutely analyse the metrics associated with these keywords and their landing pages. Keep your eyes open for bottlenecks in the click-path and percentage drops in visitors proceeding to the next step, which could be associated with the design or content problems with the page, or irrelevance to the keyword.
6. Increase in-bound links
   Engaging online communities by participating in forums and creating blogs, as well as
   disseminating press releases, are effective means of building inbound links to your site, which can increase your search engine rankings and traffic. Monitoring these inbound links will not help you understand the amount of revenue your natural search strategy is generating. Instead, it will enable you to assess whether you need to adjust your outreach strategy, an important component of good SEO. You can gauge your SEO efforts by tracking the number of links it earns you.

At the end of the day, to ensure your business success, you have to constantly keep measuring and tracking your SEO efforts. It’s a never-say-die attitude that draws in the winner.

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Unlike traditional media, the online world moves at dizzying speeds as information travels instantly across time and geographical boundaries. While this bodes well for marketers who spend time and effort to improve their visibility on search results, it can transform into a double-edged sword when the search results are negative. As an increasing number of unhappy customers, ex-employees and nasty competitors take advantage of the quick and easy online forums, blogs and message boards to vent their frustration on companies and individuals they are unhappy with.

Why Online Reputation Management (ORM) is Important

Your customers are no longer passive receptors of the information you disseminate to them through your website. However, with perceptive online marketing you can convert critics and disgruntled customers into your advocates and evangelists. While most customers make purchases offline, they take advantage of the internet to make purchasing decisions based on online research and reviews of customers who’ve used your products and services. Hence, it is very important to ensure that you have an ORM process in place to protect and advance your online reputation.

ORM involves tracking and managing how the online world perceives your product or service through the various online forums. When people say bad things about your product or service, you don’t just delete the negative comment and retain the positive ones. Displacing negative search results is not the solution to the problem, since it only resolves an overt issue, even as the root cause of the problem remains to be addressed in detail. A bad online reputation can reduce customer confidence and plunge profits. However, you must take a proactive ORM approach and incorporate good business practices by placing the right messages through focussed social media marketing and simultaneously deliver excellent customer value online and offline.

Through ORM you can protect and manage your reputation by being actively involved in the outcome of search engine results and incorporating a 4-step process.

Analyse Your Online Space

The goals of ORM are high rankings and indexing in search engines for all positive content on associated websites. This will ensure an increase in your overall positive web presence, which will enable you to own top spots in search engine rankings for your brand. Thus, as a first step, you need to understand where you are placed in relation to your use of social media, search engine positioning and what the buzz on you in the online world is all about. In the same vein, you should analyse the core elements of your website and the online activities you are involved in that negatively affect your reputation.

Monitor Activity

People Googling your company name will often skim through all the links that appear on the results page and not merely the ones that lead to your website. There could be both positive and negative listings about your company on these links. At the end of the day, the general public moulds its opinions on how your brand is viewed through blogs, podcasts and opinion forums, necessitating that you monitor these online conversations. However, since it is difficult to continuously monitor everything that is being mentioned about your brand, you need an advance information system to alert you of all news relating to your brand, so that you can remedy it if the need arises. You can do this by:

• Setting up Google and Yahoo Alerts to track your brands mention in the news including the names of company, products/services and key employees
• View how your brands fare in blogs by participating in sites such as Feedster, Blogpulse and Technorati
• Monitor industry-related sites
• Customize RSS readers for brand tracking

Even as a monitoring system for your brand is set in place, you should also track news on competitor brands, companies, industry terms and general industry news. While monitoring is an essential strategy for addressing adverse information within your search engine space, its effectiveness is best realised through proactively influencing what people read about your brand in your space.

Optimise Content

You can protect your brand’s online visibility by optimising your content. Ensure that all your digital communications is optimised. This includes PR, marketing, SEO, HR, investor relations and related electronic content, which is publicly available on the web as well as across social media sites viz. text, images, audio, video; to enable listing of more branded content in the search engine ranking pages. This does not effectively put your brand in control and above negative backlash, but it places you in a much better position if such a situation arose. The more branded content in the search results, the more diluted any negative brand content will be.

Influence the Influencers

Finally, get actively involved in online conversations by participating in them to improve your brand’s perception and eliminate negative feedback. Regularly participate in your industry’s conversation by contributing to blogs and forums that cover consumer opinions and complaints, competitor attacks, social networks, counterfeit products and trademark infringements.

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Do you think you’re the small fry competing with the big fish for eyeballs and stand no great chance? Well, granted you may be small, but the good news is you can think big, really big armoured with the right SEO strategy. I believe, as a small business you have several advantages over large businesses – so let’s just focus on them.

Carve your niche

Big businesses have big requirements to cater to and larger markets to target. You can transform your small business size into an advantage by focussing on a niche market and profit from it. First, identify the niche you are able to best service. This makes your life much easier as you can rank for keywords that are directly relevant to your narrow niche. Even if your niche is already a competitive one, you can still figure ways to attract traffic to your website.  Take for instance the entertainment industry, which is by far a very competitive arena. However, were you to market your rock fest within a clearly-defined geographic area, the level of competition would be much less.

Personalise customer interaction

Mainly because of the enormity of the scale of business, big businesses tend to lose touch with their customers, who more often than not end up being dissatisfied because of poor customer service. As opposed to a small business, where customers can connect directly with decision-makers. You need to capitalise on this facet of personalised service, instead of shying away from the fact that yours is a small company and trying to impress your customers by portraying the image that you are way larger than you are. Use your advertising copy and title tags to emphasize the benefits your customer gains because you are a small enterprise viz. ready availability, personalised service, accountability, etc. If you take pride in your business and walk the talk, you’re bound to succeed.

Innovate and adapt according to market trends

It’s much easier for a small business to change their plan-of-action based on market dynamics, compared to a large business. Try to gain the first-mover advantage in spotting the latest trends through which you can target new markets and gain new customers. Make use of keyword tools and other research mediums to gather insights in markets that show great potential.

Self-fund the business

Generate a self-sustaining business process where the growth is aligned with your revenues. Looking at this approach from the lens of SEO implies focusing on revenues. In a pay-per-click optimisation scenario, you research your profitable and weed out the unprofitable ones. Following which, you pay only for keyword clicks that draw in revenues even as you cut back on clicks that don’t attract conversions. Based on the research output, you can confidently launch an SEO strategy that focuses on profitable keywords.

Partner to progress

While big businesses face several hurdles like legal hassles and indefinitely prolonged tie-up procedures, small businesses because of their lean framework are the ideal candidates to partner with. There are manifold advantages such alliances can deliver on the SEO front – link to their website, issue a press release to announce the partnership, join forces through common sales literature to market joint offerings. Get proactive with your partners, respond to their needs and they will more than happily link market for you.

Working at staying small can actually be a profitable business strategy – With agility, speed and personalisation on your side, there are things you can do which a large business would find great difficulty implementing. Eventually, size does help make a positive difference if you’re a small business with a smart SEO Strategy.

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Financial downturns do tend to get businesses down, more so for search marketers as marketing budgets are the prime targets for cost-cutting measures. However, instead of cost-cutting, it makes sense to ensure that our marketing investments earn high returns.

It is in our interest to ride the wave of optimism despite the current global financial meltdown that’s trying its damndest best to turn us into pessimists.

We should take a lateral view of our SEO strategies and demonstrate the clear value that can be derived through them. For instance, unprecedented but regular shifts in ranking algorithms by major engines are passé for most of us; however it’s time we took a closer look at the shift in the search audience’s criteria during a downturn and in general.

Searches focussed on price-sensitivity and value

You must think like a searcher and understand that your customers are bound to tighten their wallets across all sectors. Consumer searches will shift dynamically, making price sensitivity a popular focus on search engines. Thus it makes better sense to optimise for phrases that incorporate terms like ‘special sale’, ‘20% discount on A’, ‘cheap B’; especially if you are in the commodities space. Other sectors can modify searches by incorporating terms like ‘compare’, ‘recommended’, ‘best’, etc to get more eyeballs. Top ticket items like luxury goods will take a backseat on searches for a while.

Stress on measurable results

As against traditional advertising which lacks a viable measuring mechanism, search engine marketing offers a tracking system that’s bang on target. Be it PPC, email marketing, SEO, listings, etc; online marketing gives you detailed metrics on how your customers can find you, what they’re doing on your website and whether they are making purchases through you. You must take these RoI benefits into consideration when you have to make a choice between traditional and online advertising.

Negate risk

Even a small element of risk can turn customers away from you, doubly so during a recession. You can overcome this by gaining your customers trust in varied ways, reassuring them by showcasing certifications, awards and favourable reviews on your website. As well as through customer testimonials, expert opinions, whitepapers and case studies on your product or service that validate the fact that you are a trusted, safe bet during a crisis economic situation.

Strengthen surrogate marketing – drive traffic to channel partners

A lot of B2B products and solutions are marketed through channel partners, like distributors and representatives. However, during a financial crunch most of these partners don’t feel compelled to make any investments in the partnership. It makes prudent investment sense for you to drive qualified traffic to your partner’s sites. A cost-efficient measure, it is a smart online marketing strategy.

Bear in mind the changing industry horizon while optimising or revising pages for channel partners. Focus on targeting prospects who are seeking to purchase your products and services by including buyer’s guides, FAQs, checklists and consumer evaluations.

Let me know if you experience an upswing in sales after incorporating these recession-friendly SEO suggestions. Till then, hold the fort!

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In my past posts, I have touched upon the importance of optimising eCommerce websites to attract search engines and users. As the main objective of any eCommerce website is to attract visitors to purchase products or services. Thus every eCommerce site should be created bearing this objective in mind. This time round, I’d like to focus on the necessity of conducting a thorough research and analysis while creating an eCommerce site.

A) Strategize

Do a thorough analysis of your current website design and marketing strategy and establish the areas you need to focus on. You must source information or ideas that will help in future website ranking efforts. Without an initial analysis it can be difficult in the long run to establish the outcome of your efforts.

B) Competitor analysis

Understanding your competitor’s niche is critical in enabling you to create your unique selling proposition. Study the varied keywords your main competitors are showing up under on various search engines. This will help you determine how you want to position yourself as well as select additional keywords or phrases to use on the search engines.

C) Keyword research

Everyday millions of keyword queries are carried out on search engines. Analyse different keyword and phrase combinations that are apt to include within your site copy and design elements. You can collate keyword data using industry keyword tools like Wordtracker, Overture Suggestions, Google keywords etc.; as well as through site query statistics and actual search engine queries that users use to search websites.

D) Design basics

A fulfilling online shopping experience is a fundamental requirement for an eCommerce website visitor. Visitors should be able to access the appropriate page in a minimum of one or two clicks. The focus of an eCommerce web design should primarily be about the layout. It is crucial to catch the visitor’s attention and the areas that attract them when accessing a web page. Research on this topic suggests that the middle left side area draws great attention, followed by the portion at the centre of the page. These layout techniques create a simple navigation path for the visitor.

E) 1) HTML Sitemap

Create an extensive HTML sitemap for visitors to navigate as well as for those who are disabled or use text-based browsers. Sitemaps are web pages consisting of your most important and content rich pages. A sitemap will also assist search engines in discovering all your website content, so that they can scan it to include within their search results. Large eCommerce sites have several pages that need indexing and can really benefit from a sitemap.

2) XML Sitemap

You also need to include an XML sitemap to enable search engines to regularly track your content and product updates. These sitemaps are special files that contain links to the most important sections and pages of your site. XML sitemaps can be transmitted electronically to major search engines. While dynamic sitemaps are optimal, manually updated sitemaps can also be useful. eCommerce stores that require updates of their catalogues at regular intervals must consider incorporating an XML sitemap to enable search engines to find new products and the updated old ones.

Finally, ensure that you include simple and clean navigational elements and a site search that are easily accessible. Link all your pages back to your homepage and help pages like FAQs, forums, blogs, etc. Cross-link your topical content across your website so that search engines can pass the value to other content rich pages and users can easily find the content they are looking for. Google transfers the Page Rank (PR) to other pages on a site if you link one page with PR to another page with related content.

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A well-designed search engine friendly website can go a long way in improving user experience and advancing your profitability. By focusing on facilitating a pleasant online user experience, you enable users to accomplish their goals and greatly improve your chances of retaining them as satisfied customers. The internet is replete with websites that cannot be indexed owing to poor design choice, poor url structure and back-end programming.

While it is essential for your website to be visually appealing, it is even more important for it to be search-engine friendly. Let us explore visitor and search engine friendly design tips that you can incorporate while creating websites.

Unique IP address

Every website must have a unique IP address. However, if your website is hosted on a shared platform, ensure that you have a unique IP address. Most search engines block websites that try to manipulate rankings. Thus if your website is hosted on a shared server that utilizes a single IP address for all websites on that server and a website using that address is blocked, then your website will be blocked as well.

URL keywords

Your webpage names should reflect the content of the page. You must keep page names within a reasonable length and avoid using special characters unless they form part of your keyword. URLs are a great place to showcase keywords. If you utilize a sub domain structure, sub domain names should also reflect your selected keywords.

Graphic relevance

Effective website designs balance HTML-formatted text and graphic images. Be prudent about how you use graphics. Ensure that they are relevant to your content and insert an alt tag with relevant keywords for search engines to understand, as they cannot read graphics. Do the same for your visitors, so that they can view something while waiting for the graphics to load.

Standard software use

Create the website using standard HTML. As software like FrontPage, Dreamweaver or a WYSIWYG editor will add unnecessary scripting codes enlarging the page size, making it difficult for search engines to crawl. At times such software adds codes that are unreadable by search engines, resulting in the website not getting indexed. In case you need to use these web page creator software, exercise discretion and manually avoid or delete unnecessary scripting codes.

Ensure quick downloads

It is important to make use of external Cascading Style Sheets and Java Script files in order to reduce the page size and quicken the download time. This will enable search engines to index your web page faster as well as improve your rankings.

Don’t get framed

Avoid using frames as major search engines don’t list websites that utilize frames. Try creating standard HTML non-frame companion pages that are search engine friendly. Also, input relevant text containing keywords on your FRAMESET page between NOFRAME tags for search engines to parse. It isn’t uncommon for search engines that index frame websites to link to individual, non-relevant frames. To avoid displaying individual frames, provide JS in each frame to call the parent frame when a child frame is selected. For instance, if (top == self) self.location.href = “default.asp”;)

Link back

Ensure that every page on your website links back to your homepage. Several search engines estimate pages based on the depth level within the website. Root-level pages are considered more relevant to the website by search engines than pages in subsequent levels. Create a site map page to help search engines find your content and post a link to it on your home page. Dynamic websites that don’t hardcode page links should always provide a site map.

Link colours

In general search engines read tags and are not bothered by what colour you use to define the link unless you create a transparent user link. This means that the colour used for the link is the same as the background colour. Most search engines are equipped to recognize a transparent link and will lower your page ranking for their use. So be careful not to use transparent link colours.

Customer focus

Websites must be created with designs and words that your target audience types into search queries. As meeting the target audience needs is the main reason for the origin of your website in the first place. The needs could be varied: branding, direct sales, customer retention, trust, communication and online visibility. Your site must gain the user’s trust and be persuasive enough to address those needs.

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SEO myths keep proliferating by the day, almost sounding surreal in their pretensions of the truth. While some have their origins in reality, for the most part these myths have spread because of the difficulty involved in verifying whether a specific SEO practice resulted in a search engine reaction. New SEO’s have a field day propagating myths resulting from the confusion between cause and effect. Sadly, the imprudent usage of these myths by many businesses has resulted in their websites being banned by several search engines.

Out of the several scores of myths that make their way into accepted SEO practices, I will focus the most popular top 5 myths.

Guaranteed! Top Search Engine Rankings

You better be on your guard if someone’s guaranteeing you no.1 rankings on Google, Yahoo! and other search engines. Such SEO companies focus on creating vague and long keyword phrases that most users will never use to search for your company, but are easier to rank for. When instead they should work on delivering rankings on competitive keywords that are relevant to your business. No one, but the search engines can guarantee top results in organic search listings. Even Google, in its ‘help center’ mentions that ‘No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.’ You must always verify the SEO company’s results for other customers to ensure that you’re not being had for.

Meta Tag Mania

Meta tags were incorporated at the dawn of the internet to assist webmasters as well as to enable search engines figure out what a website was all about. Soon enough, its original intent was abused as people started incorporating useless keywords into their meta tags hoping to trick search engines into ranking them higher. Search engines soon got the wind of this and now place less importance on the presence or absence of meta tags and don’t spider or index them anymore.

Multiple Domain Dominance

The most abused and dangerous SEO strategy is the folly of owning multiple domain names in the belief that it helps maintain high search engine rankings. If you own multiple domain names which point to the same site; search engines will penalize you, as according to them they are ‘mirrors’. It is advisable for you to build sites corresponding to each separate domain name, if you have multiple domain names and desire high search engine rankings. However, if you own a large business, based on your company strategy, you could have a main website devoted to the overall company and used the balance domain names to focus on your various product or service offerings.  My take on domains is focus; concentrate all your efforts on improving SEO for one website rather than doing it for several.

Lowdown on Frequent Site Updates

Updating your site so that it has fresh content and will ensure that you rank high on search engines is a myth perpetrated by some SEO’s. While regularly updating your pages can increase the search engine crawl rate, it does not necessarily increase your search engine rankings. Statistics are testimony to several high ranking sites on Google that were not updated for a long time. Thus, what serves to increase your website rankings are the inbound links to it. However, if you have quality content, feel free to update your website – it will encourage search engine bots to crawl it regularly.

PPC versus organic SEO

There is a lot of confusion on whether PPC improves your search engine rankings much better that organic SEO. The fact is that while PPC can rank your website high on search engines in the short-term, in the long run, if your organic SEO ranking is good, users will definitely visit your website. Besides, most users trust organic listings as compared to sponsored website listings.

My advice, test any SEO technique several times over on various websites to see if it really works or whether it’s still another myth that is effective because of a host of other factors.

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Get Back to AIDA and the Basics of Copywriting

Copywriting is a creative process that involves conceptualising and creating sales and marketing content to promote products and services. The art of copywriting commenced as a medium on the print platform and has since evolved to the online world. However, the principles of good copywriting never changed. Good old AIDA, (this is no woman) always did the trick. So let’s use the AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) formula to teach a new dog, the web world some old tricks.

Grab Attention -What’s in it for him?

We live in an instant gratification world, it’s now or never most of the time. The moment a visitor reaches your landing page, you have 3 seconds to clear his mind about what you are offering. Your USP needs to come out upfront and hold him riveted. If your headline or visual confuses him, your prospect will move on. Don’t make the mistake of simply tom-toming your products or services; you’ll have lost your prospect in the blink of an eye. Instead, your homepage should appeal to his emotions and instantly tell him how your product or service can benefit him by providing solutions to his pain areas.

Even as your headline grabs his attention, it should be strong enough to keep his interest pinned to your website.

Spur on Interest – Tell a compelling story

You’ve got to build your visitor’s interest and keep him hooked to your website. How do you do it? Enthral them by painting a visual picture of how exactly your product or service will fulfil the promise you made to them when you attracted their attention. However, you must be factual while being unique, emotional and persuasive in telling your story. Remember, you can’t sell on a false premise – it’ll backfire on you later and you stand to lose more than you gained. Don’t use high-sounding words and phrases, it may turn-off some of your visitors. Use simple, straightforward language, as if you are having an honest and pleasant conversation with a friend. While you may want to wax eloquent on the tech specs or salient features of your offerings, be warned that even the most fanatic gizmo freak will want to know how your cutting edge technology translates into benefits or advantages for him. By all means, flaunt your tech specs, but in relation to how it will be of use to the user.

Desire to gain confidence – provide the proof

Now you can add more grist to the mill of your story. Egg on his desire with living proof in the form of customer testimonials, people who are more than satisfied with their purchase of your product. You need to gain your visitors confidence; prospects must buy into what you’re saying before they buy into your products. In addition, bring out your unique points in terms of expertise, success and experience that justify your qualifications as the preferred source. You can further spur on his desire by smartly providing a limited-period bonus offer, a free trial, limited edition product; anything that makes him want to take action.

Action Packed Engagement – bring in the bucks

Now that you’ve convinced your visitor of the many benefits he stands to gain by purchasing your product, you need to clinch in the deal. Give him directions as to how he can take action and purchase your products or services. There’s no time to waste – if it is available through your website, you need to tell him so with a quick directive. Click here and Save! Buy Now!  If he cannot purchase it through your website and shipping is involved, give him all the relevant details, from credit facilities to payment options delivery modes and timeframe. In short exclude any risk on the part of the customer in the purchase of your product.

Finally, it’s always about ‘what’s in it for me’, for your target audience. Commence your website content on that premise with the AIDA formula and you’re sure headed in the right direction.

I’ve noticed that most writers who’ve been writing good copy for a long time don’t consciously follow the AIDA formula. It’s something that they imbibe unconsciously and incorporate automatically into their copy. Something akin to learning to drive a car, one gets better at it and masters it over a period of time, so the process just happens naturally.

Have you tried any interesting website copywriting tips that have worked in your favour? Do let me know.

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9 Tips to Creating Compelling Title Tags

Just as fish take to water so naturally in the aquatic world, your task in the online world is to attract prospects to click on your company’s search engine listings. I believe that the key to top rankings is to select a title tag/keyword that will earn you higher profits monthly, over and above the cost of achieving and maintaining your ranking. Because, if your keyword is wrong, you may just end up spending several thousand dollars to achieve a top 10 page rank, only to discover that the top ranking is not bringing in the desired business.

Hence, your title tag must be compelling enough to attract prospects to click on your company’s search engine listing. Title tags are the most critical element of your search engine listings. As they’re the first and perhaps the only sentences users will read prior to scanning through the search listing page for anything that attracts their attention.

Most often than not, title tags are created by web designers, who are generally clueless about the engaging effect of Google snippets, as well as the English language. Listed below are 9 tips to create compelling title tags to draw quality traffic to your site.

Engage at entry point

I did a random search for ‘affordable sport shoes’ on Google. Look at what the top 10 search results threw up:

Search no 1: Useful Links – FindMyShoes :: Womens Shoes :: Mens Shoes :: Ladies …

Search no 2: Sport-Shoes – Company from australia -Manufacturer, Supplier …

Search no 3: Pauls Warehouse

None of the three search results above are enticing enough to make me click through them, simply because they don’t answer my search query. The first search result gives no indication of whether sport shoes are being offered. While the second search result doesn’t indicate affordability in the sports shoes on offer. The third search result merely makes a mention of the company’s brand name.

Let’s now recreate those title tags to read:

Search no 1: The $15 sports shoes that all kids want to wear!

Search no 2: Does your sports shoe offer durability with style?

Search no 3: Nike Sports shoes: Affordable; guaranteed, FREE home delivery within10 days

In all probability, you would click on these compelling titles. You must start equating the functioning of your search engine listing to a television commercial. Look at it as a do-or-die situation for you to make an impression on your target audience or for them to click straight through to your competitor’s website. I believe that an engaging title tag is as important as a high search engine ranking, as it can cover up for lower search engine rankings. However, holding no 1 position is obviously good, but if it doesn’t draw prospects further into your website, the whole effort is indeed a failure.

Emphasise brand identity

Research shows that most search engine users dig further down the rankings to click on a ‘reputed’ brand and will pay more for a branded product than an unbranded item. It makes sense to include your brand or website name at the beginning or end of every title tag to enable searchers to figure out where they’re heading and encourage return visits.

Keep 65-character title limit

Instead of breaking off the last word and replacing it with a ‘…’, it is prudent to keep the 65-character title length limit (this includes spaces too). Search engines keep fluctuating on stuff and Google now supports around 70 characters in several instances.

Include keyword phrases

If your keyword research cites a specific keyword as being valuable in capturing searches, include it prominently in your title tag. While it need not feature as the prime word, it should ideally incorporate the semantic and be the focus of your title tag.

Divide and rule

When dividing the title tag, i.e. the main brand from the description, you must create breadcrumbs by using the ‘|’ symbol (aka the pipe bar) or the arrow ‘>’ or hyphen ‘-’ to enhance your message flow. It also makes sense to sometimes use the arrow or hyphen inside a title tag, as in, ‘Mitash |Blog and News > Is your title tag compelling enough for them to tag along’?

Check CTR and conversion rates

You should go about creating a title tag akin to how you would write an ad for paid searches. This should get you the desired results, the only difference being that unlike paid searches you will be unable to measure or improve click-through rates or conversions as statistics are not so readily available.

My advice is, if your market entails a relatively stable weekly search volume, it makes sense to test your title tags and improve click-through rates. Review your analytics and purchase search ads on the page to test your click-through and conversion rates. Be prudent not to focus totally on CTR, but on measuring conversion rates, as lower CTRs are acceptable if you command high conversion rates.

Mind-mime target users

Think of the search terms your target users would use to arrive at your site when you begin the process of creating title tags for your web pages. Whatever the intent; research, purchase, download or any other action, it should be evident in your title that the user can perform this function at your site. For instance, ‘Nike Sports Shoes | Compare Prices Chart’

Consistency is king

When you have ascertained a title tag that works for certain sections of your pages, you must stick to it. As over time you are bound to grow into a trusted and reputed brand in the SERPs as you fulfil user expectation in a particular area through your pages.

Repeat title tag in headline

It is crucial from a keyword targeting standpoint and a user experience improvement perspective to reuse the title tag of each page as your H1 header tag. Most users who visit a page from the SERPs expect to find the title they clicked or else they’ll get confused. As they clicked on your title tag in the first place because it could fulfil their needs. You can expect your user to stay on your page only if you’ve met their intended goal or query by fulfilling it on your web page.

If you invest time and effort in researching and meticulously creating your title tags, you can definitely expect a surge in quality traffic to your site, as well as increased search engine marketing RoI. Do let me know if I’ve missed anything that may have occurred to you in creating title tags. I’ll be happy to comply and glad for the knowledge.

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