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Guest Post by Jon Wuebben
Every small business has a ton of things on their plate every day, especially in today’s economy. Prioritizing and allocating the appropriate time to each can be a challenge. So, we need to find shortcuts. In my marketing consultation work with over 200 companies in the past few years, I have determined that there are ten important, high priority things you should do from a site content perspective to improve rankings and conversion. Here are two:
1. Do Your Keyword Research: The importance of this step cannot be overstated. The surprising thing to find out is how many companies have never done this or rarely do it. If you do business online, it’s absolutely imperative. And, of course, you want to do your research correctly. So what’s the process?
The first thing you want to do is look at your competitor’s sites. What keyword phrases are they using? Find out my looking at their Meta tags (see next point). Then, use Wordtracker’s Free Keyword Tool. http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ This is incredibly easy and can be very insightful. Plus, it’s free. I use it a lot myself. If you want to find out more, get a subscription. Its money well spent.
Keyword Discovery is another good tool to use. Be sure to try them out to see what the differences are. If you are a local, brick and mortar store, and get most of your business locally, be sure to use the local city names in your keyword phrases.
2. Dig into your HTML Code to Analyze Meta tags: Do this right now: go to each page of your site, right click on the page, select “view source code” and look for the words “META” near the top of the page. You want to look for the Title tag and Description tag. See them? What do they say? There should be some phrases there. If not, then you definitely have work to do.
The Meta tags are where you want to use your important keyword phrases, and they should be different for every page on your site. I recommend 2-3 unique keyword phrases/page tailored to what that page is about. For each page, use the same keyword phrases in the title tag as you would in the description tag.
Of course, there are many more things you’ll want to do…and continue to do to improve site optimization and ultimately, conversion. But to improve online lead generation, these are a couple of the more important ones. Good luck as you work to build your online presence and move the sales needle in 2009!
About the Author: Jon Wuebben is a veteran copywriter, speaker, entrepreneur and online marketing leader. He is the author of Content Rich: Writing Your Way to Wealth on the Web, a book reviewed here on this blog in November. The book is an excellent resource for creating website content. The Marketing Spot blog has three copies to give away.
How to win a free copy of this book? Simply comment on this post using your complete name and include a link back to your website in the comment form. (deadline for entry is 5pm CT this Friday, April, 10th) I will announce the winners this weekend on this blog. Leave a comment by clicking here.
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