In hindsight, I entered the SEO copywriting niche almost by accident. Back then, I provided general copywriting services for online and for print. As I settled into my new found profession and increasingly focused on web content writing, I noticed that I was receiving more and more requests for “keyword articles.”

The premise was simple: Write an article (or ten) and use a particular keyword or keyword phrase a predetermined number of times. Some clients wanted the keyword to appear five times in an article. Others specified that the keyword must appear in bold, headings, italics, or near the beginning of a paragraph. Often, the keyword also had to be included in the title.

These assignments made me curious, so I started researching SEO to better understand my clients’ goals. After realizing how SEO could positively impact traffic to a website, I started testing SEO copywriting on my own sites, and finding the endeavor successful, I eventually added SEO services to my repertoire.

What is SEO Copywriting?

SEO copywriting is the practice of writing material for online publication that uses keywords strategically in order to attract traffic from search engines. The most targeted search engine is Google.

Ideally, extensive research is conducted to determine which keywords are a good fit for the website to which you want to draw traffic. This should be done before the SEO copy is written.

Also, there should be a strategy for implementing the keywords not just in the copy, but in the website’s code.

Understanding Keywords

Many business owners request written copy for their website and when asked about keywords, they just list keywords off the cuff, without truly understanding that in website copywriting, a keyword is more than a word from the dictionary that relates to your website or your business.

For example, a restaurant owner might suggest the keyword “food.” I don’t even have to research this keyword to know that it’s highly competitive, and it probably would be impossible for a small business to rank on a search engine for this keyword. Also, it’s extremely nonspecific. Folks searching for “food” could be looking for a grocery store, recipe, or dietary information. In fact, I’d guess it’s quite unlikely that a searcher looking for “food” is actually seeking a restaurant.

Keywords can’t be pulled out of thin air, and website or business owners should never make assumptions about keywords. Take an entrepreneur who calls herself a beautician. She’s attached to that title and requests it as a keyword in her site without doing any research. Would she be interested to learn that the keyword “beautician” generates about 110,000 searches per month through Google alone?

How would she feel about her keyword choice if she learned that “hairstylist” gets 165,000 searches a month? Or if she were to discover that “hair stylist” (two words) gets 368,000 searches?

Imagine her surprise when she finds out that “hairdresser” is searched 823,000 times a month.

Which keyword should she use?

Keywords, SEO, and Assumptions

It’s easy to assume that the beautician should target the keyword “hairdresser” because it gets the most searches. However, a good SEO continues to ask questions.

• How competitive is the keyword?
• How much research, copywriting, and other resources will it take to rank for this keyword?
• Can my business handle the amount of traffic that this keyword could potentially draw?

A large chain of salons might have the budget and resources to hire an extensive SEO campaign in the tens of thousands of dollars. Such a chain could also handle the number of customers that a massive campaign could attract.

However, an independent, self-employed beautician may prefer another strategy. It could be more beneficial to rank high for a beautician-related keyword that gets a lower number of searches and for which it will take less time and resources to achieve high rankings. This is especially true if she is intent on remaining independent and cannot handle a clientele roster that numbers in the tens (or hundreds) of thousands.

The Art of SEO Copywriting

The actual practice of SEO copywriting involves writing copy that contains keywords. This is neither as simple nor as straightforward as it sounds.

A good copywriter knows that the first priority is to create copy that compels. That means understanding the primary intent. Should this copy incite website visitors to buy a product? Encourage them to hire someone for a service? Register for membership? Click to another page?

Compelling copywriting is clear and easy to read. It speaks to the target customer and it is concise. Usually, it’s formatted to be scanable. Often, it’s balanced with descriptive and interesting images (or video).

Keywords have to fit into good copywriting, and this is tricky writing. If you build copy around keywords, then the copy will be keyword-driven rather than customer-oriented. A talented or skillful SEO copywriter knows how to work keywords into great copy, much like a chef works herbs and spices into a gourmet recipe.

Hiring an SEO Copywriter

The goal of SEO copywriting is to increase a website’s rank in search engine results pages (SERPs). A professional SEO copywriter understands this and wants her clients to succeed.

A good SEO copywriter may or may not provide keyword research and other SEO services. Some copywriters only do the writing. However, any professional SEO copywriter has a thorough understanding of how SEO works.

When you hire a copywriter, you may already have a list of keywords. Perhaps you hired a professional SEO and just need someone to write the copy. Or maybe your site has been optimized for some time and now you just want to update the written content.

In any case, both an SEO copywriter and a client should understand that SEO is not as simple as plucking keywords from one’s vocabulary and then casually applying them to written copy.

It usually starts with your website, but web content can include any online content that represents you or your business. It consists of text, images, audio, and video that live on the Internet.

Establishing an online presence can be challenging, and it can be fun. If approached thoughtfully, it can be quite helpful in terms of marketing your business.

In other words, smart web content development can lead to success. And if a business operates mostly or entirely online, content development can make or break it.

The Importance of Web Content Development

Almost every day I am confronted with websites that were not properly developed. In some cases, it’s unclear what the website’s purpose is – the concept has not been clearly established. In other cases, the content is out of sync with the design – the planning and building were poorly executed. Many more are outdated, and have never been maintained.

Businesses that take their online presence seriously, and want to establish a strong hold in the online market must take web content development seriously.

Whether you need a simple, three-page website or an elaborate site packed with content, you will find the process easier and more fruitful if you take the time to develop content that works, content that helps your business reach its goals.

The Five Phases

There are five basic phases in the web content development process. Each phase can be broken down into smaller stages, and each of these could take several weeks or several months, depending on how extensive you want your online presence to be.

1. Conceptualize
2. Plan
3. Build
4. Launch
5. Maintain

Each phase is critical. Leave one out, and your site will suffer from poor development.

The Nitty Gritty of Content Development

Let’s take a more detailed look at each of the five phases in web content development. Keep in mind that this is a general overview.

Concept

Concept begins with an idea or a vision, but it has to have purpose. In this phase, you establish the purpose of your web content. Why do you need an online presence? Are you trying to build a platform, find customers, or sell more widgets?

Plan

The planning phase is the most critical, and it may take the longest. Start by deciding what web content you need in order to achieve your purpose, and then build that into a design plan. Remember, content first, then design. Your business’s marketing plan (your business does have a marketing plan, right?) comes into play here as you work your image, branding, and other marketing collateral into your website plan. In your plan, don’t forget to include methods for driving traffic to your site. This is phase in which you might want to look at working SEO into your content.

Build

Building is when you put your concept and plan into action. You may have many components being built simultaneously – a website designer creating your site while a web content writer prepares the text. A careful plan will lead to an easier build. Toward the end of the building phase, you’ll start working on your launch.

Launch

It happens in a flash. After months of web content development and website building, your site launches (or relaunches). Some launches are quiet. Others are loud. Once the site goes live, you can start driving traffic to it. This is also part of the launch – spreading the word about your site. You might have an entire marketing campaign in place for the launch, in which case, you would have included the preparation for that campaign during the planning phase.

Maintain

After the launch, it might feel like all the hard work is over. That would be wrong. Every website needs maintenance. Some sites are maintained constantly and updated several times a day. Others are updated weekly or monthly. A small few are only updated every year or so, though this is only a good idea in rare cases. Making updates to your site and maintaining it (by tracking your traffic, for example) are critical to the success of your online presence.

Common Mistakes – The Don’ts

There are plenty of mistakes that people make with web content development. Here are a handful of things you don’t want to do:

• Don’t plan your design before you plan your content. They should complement each other, but the design should be built to hold the content.
• Don’t start driving traffic to your site until it’s complete.
• Don’t launch until you’ve thoroughly tested the site on all platforms and browsers.
• Don’t forget future updates to your site. If the site is going to expand, then make sure the design is flexible enough to handle growth.
• Don’t expect your site to be an overnight success. Building a site is hard, but getting traffic to a brand new site is much harder. Be patient, stick to it, and success will come.

Make sure you stay focused on your site’s primary purpose. Web content development can get messy. You’ll have lots of great ideas, but they won’t all lend themselves to the goals you’re trying to achieve. Make sure you plan sticks to your purpose and try not to get sidetracked.

Web Content Services

Scribizzy provides a host of web content services, including web content development. If you need help planning the content for your site, or developing a new design and fresh content for an existing site, we can help. Visit our Content Development page to learn more.

Plenty of people sell web content and related services. You can hire a web content writer, developer, or manager. You might bump into web content consultants, specialists, or experts. You may even happen across someone who creates and then either publishes or sells web content as their entire business model.

But what is web content, anyway?

Defining Web Content

Generally speaking, web content is anything that you find on the web. It can include text, images, audio, and video.

In the early days of the Internet, which weren’t so long ago, web content was extremely limited. You could share files, but it took a long time for them to transmit. Text and light images comprised most of the content online.

Today, thanks to high-speed internet access and ever-evolving technology, web content has grown to include high-definition (HD) video, streaming audio, and clearer, crisper images, including photos. Innovations in web programming are constantly changing the way we build and access web content, and it just keeps getting better, broader, and more accessible.

Your Web Content

So, if web content is everything on the Internet, then which portion of that is yours? Is your web content limited to the contents of your own website? What about your social media presence? Your emails? The message boards you frequent?

In short, anything online that serves to represent you (or your company) in any way, shape, or form, would be construed as your web content. This is not limited to the material on your website. If you upload a video to YouTube, that’s your web content. Your photo and bio, and your entire Facebook page is also your web content, as is any message you leave on a forum or any comment you leave on a blog, and of course, any tweet you post to Twitter.

Basically, if it’s on the Internet and it can be tied directly to you, it’s your web content.

That doesn’t mean you own it, however. Let’s say you write an article for a well-known blog and they accept it, so you get a publication credit. That’s your web content, but it also belongs to the blog where it’s published. Specific details about the (copyright) ownership of the material may vary, depending on the publishing contract between writer and publisher.

You may also have some web content that the public cannot access, such as password-protected sections of your website, friends-only access to your social media networks, or private networks (intranets) not accessible except through internal, secure means.

Why This Matters

Understanding what constitutes as web content is important for anyone with an online presence for several reasons:

• For marketing purposes, it’s helpful to understand the many places where you can publish web content and therefore promote your work.
• Conversely, be wary of misrepresenting yourself or poorly representing yourself. If it’s online, people may find it, and if it casts you in a negative light, that could mean trouble for you and your business.
• Once you know what web content is, you will begin to understand that though it’s simple by definition, it’s complex in its capacity. There is no end to the ways in which web content can be created, shared, and used.

Anyone with an online presence, and especially those who use the Internet to conduct business, would do well to protect their own web content and keep a sharp eye on how the web is used to represent one’s work or business.

Web content is a wondrous thing. What used to take days or even weeks, now can be accomplished in just a few minutes. Want to watch a video? Listen to a song? Read an article? Chances are, you can find what you’re looking for online in a matter of moments.

This means that for professionals, the marketplace has expanded, and so has the marketing field. You have countless new opportunities to promote your product, but there are also countless new ways in which you can get yourself into trouble – either by not having a solid plan for web content, or no management system in place.

In future articles, we’ll talk about web content development and management, and discuss why having a plan and maintenance method are essential to online success.

photo credit: Dave Malkoff

This post was originally published on Writing Forward (May 5, 2008). It has been slightly updated for republication here.

Freelance writers live in their own special universe. It’s a universe full of words, clients, and bottom lines. Many people dive into this universe headfirst and find out fast that it’s sink or swim. Doesn’t it sound tempting? Setting your own hours, having control over your income, making business decisions, trying to find clients, and establishing yourself as a worthwhile contender in the galactic enterprise that is your one-person business.

Make no mistake, freelancing is a business. Visions of lounging on the sands of your own private island quickly evaporate into late nights spent staring groggy-eyed into a computer screen that has become the center of your world. But there’s a light at the end of the tunnel and the light is success. Before you reach the light, before you even step into the tunnel, you have to ask yourself, are you cut out for freelance writing?

Skill

Some people will argue and claim that skill is not really a requirement for freelancers. Have a look around the web. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation are fairly optional here. Proofreading is unheard of, and most web writers seem to have never discovered the editing process. That’s fine. They can peddle $1 articles at the bidding boards. If you have serious writing skills, you can actually earn a livable wage as a freelance writer.

Drive

You’ll need someone who can pilot your space shuttle into the freelance universe and guess what? If you’re freelancing, it’s going to have to be you. This is a business, not a hobby, and it requires a considerable amount of ambition. You’ve got to want it. Bad. You won’t have a boss or any coworkers asking how that project’s coming along but you will have endless distractions and temptations vying for your attention. If you can’t commit your energies, then your ship’s going to crash.

Sacrifice

I bet some people slip into freelancing and never notice a change in their work hours. Don’t ask me where these people are. I’ve never met them. You can call yourself a freelancer until the sun spins out of its orbit, but what you really are is an entrepreneur and you know what entrepreneurs do? They work hard, long hours. They give up social activities and hobbies so they can throw their energies into the business and make it succeed. Is the sacrifice forever? I don’t think so, but expect to have very little free time during your first year or two.

Educability

Perfect! I thought I was making up the word “educability” but it turns out that it already exists. And that’s my point. You have to be willing to learn. You have to be willing to grow. I’m now in my second year of freelancing. I love it and one of the things I love most is that every single day I learn new things. I learn new stuff about writing, about people, about business, and about the universe. I learn what works, what earns money, and what kind of limits or goals I need to get myself to the next level. Much of freelancing is trial and error, especially in the beginning. Learn and live. Live and learn.

Flexibility

Some freelancers still probably operate in the real world but most of us are living and working on the Internet. The Internet changes at a rapid pace and if you’re a web-based freelancer, you have to be able to keep up. Sometimes this means adjusting your rates. Other times it means offering new services. Usually, it means updating your website so it doesn’t look like an antique UFO from the 1990s. If you like a fast pace and think you can keep up, then freelancing online might be right for you.

Acumen

Not just any acumen, you’re going to need business acumen. Can you balance a checkbook, manage a spreadsheet, keep track of your income and expenses? Do you know what marketing is? Can you negotiate? Pitch yourself? Convince a client they need your services? Do you know the difference between being in the red and being in the black? Can you always have a backup plan? Sure, you can start freelancing and learn the business stuff as you go, but it’s good to have an advance grasp on the basics.

Spine

People will try to take advantage of you, so you’re going to need a spine and some thick skin. Aliens will ask for special discounts. People who make five times as much money as you will ask for special discounts. Space invaders will steal hours and hours of your time going back and forth ironing out project details and then they’ll never sign the quote because they found someone else who offered a better discount. Negotiating a little is fine but if you agree to give everyone from ET to R2-D2 a discount you’ll find yourself working for pennies and then you’ll scratch your head wondering why you don’t have enough money to pay rent even though you had plenty of work all month. Can you say no?

Love

Okay, so some freelance writers probably don’t love freelancing. Or writing. But I do. People ask me how my business is going and I tell them I’m exhausted and overwhelmed. I’m working longer hours than ever before and until recently I was making much less money than ever before. But I absolutely love it. This is a big, wide open universe and it suits me perfectly. If you don’t love business, or writing, or working on a computer all day, then you probably won’t be happy doing this. And that is really the goal, right? To find happiness.

What are some other qualities that a successful freelancer needs? Have you thought about quitting your job and taking the plunge? What’s holding you back?

If you ask someone what WordPress is, there’s a good chance they’ll tell you that it’s a blog platform, but it’s so much more than that.

Since it first hit the web in 2003 as a blog application, WordPress has evolved into a fully functioning content management system. It stores your content, keeps it organized, and makes your website easy to manage and navigate. Best of all, it’s free.

For those of us who once coded websites by typing HTML by hand, WordPress is a monumental blessing. It doesn’t have the same restrictions and complications that programs like FrontPage or Dreamweaver present because it’s highly customizable and flexible enough that a website designer can take full control of the design and layout while simultaneously giving consideration to the actual content.

About WordPress

Most website hosting providers offer one-click installation for WordPress. That means once you’ve signed up for hosting, getting WordPress installed on your website is just a click away. Only a few, outdated hosting providers still require manual installation, which involves uploading the WordPress files and database to the server on which the site is hosted.

The code and files include instructions that tell a browser how to display the WordPress website on the screen. This is done through WordPress themes, which are templates that drive the design and layout of each site.

The content of a WordPress site is managed online, from the WordPress control panel, which is as easy to use as web-based email. From the control panel, you can compose pages for your site as well as blog posts, and add media including text, images, audio, and video.

WordPress Themes

Often, people are turned off when they hear words like “themes” and “templates.” But WordPress themes can be customized to the point that they don’t even resemble the original look and feel, and there are an enormous variety of themes available.

Most people want a completely original and unique website, especially if they want their business to stand out from the crowd, so it’s understandable that themes or templates don’t sound too appealing. However, there are a number of benefits to using these themes on a website.

For example, many themes have certain standardized components. A navigation menu across the top of a website, a clickable header, and sidebars are familiar to website visitors and make them feel at home. This makes any website easy to navigate and therefore more attractive to visitors.

Also, since the themes are so customizable, it’s entirely possible to strip down a theme and make it look completely different. You can even start with your own design, find a theme that loosely resembles it, and then tweak the theme to match what you had in mind. Or, you can choose a theme you like and tweak it until it has a look and feel that satisfies you.

Some of the available themes are premium, and these you must pay for. However, most themes are free. Many premium themes are available via license through designers who have purchased the right to customize and resell the themes. If you have considerable HTML and CSS skills, you can learn how to customize a WordPress theme quickly and easily on your own. And if you don’t have those skills, you can simply hire someone to do it for you. Chances are, it will be a lot cheaper than hiring a website designer to code your site from scratch.

Problems with Traditional Websites

Traditional websites, which are coded with HTML, present a host of problems and frustrations for business owners:

• If you don’t know how to code your own site, you have to hire someone to do it for you, which means every time you need to make a change or update (no matter how small), you’re reliant on someone else. And you have to pay for it.
• Large amounts of content can be difficult to manage, add to a site, and keep track of without some kind of content management system.
• Small changes to a site’s structure could be costly and time-consuming. For example, you may need to change your URL structure to optimize the site for better search engine performance. That could be tedious and expensive for a larger site that’s not running on any kind of database.
• Designing a site from scratch without a theme or template costs more than customizing a theme because it takes a lot longer.
• It’s difficult to switch designers once your site is up and running. Because a WordPress site runs on a theme, if your designer is unavailable or unsatisfactory, you can easily find another who can update your site for you.

WordPress Benefits

WordPress solves many of the problems presented by traditionally coded websites:

• Once your WordPress theme customization is complete and your site is launched, you (or any of your employees) can quickly and easily add content or make changes. It’s literally as easy as composing email.
• WordPress uses a database to manage all of your content, and through the WordPress control panel, you can view and manage that content with great ease.
• With WordPress, changing the URL structure, for example, is just a matter of renaming pages or categories, and that can all be done in a matter of minutes.
• Because the site’s design starts from a theme and most coding is done by amending the style sheet, a WordPress website will probably be a lot less expensive than sites rendered the old-fashioned way. The code is already there and it just has to be customized.
• Once your site is up and running, anyone with knowledge of WordPress and themes can make changes to your design or content. This can be done from within the control panel.

In addition to solving problems that traditional website design presents, WordPress offers a host of perks:

• Plugins like All in One SEO make keyword optimization a breeze, and are easy to learn.
• Other plugins make website management much easier. Google Analytics plugin automatically installs on every single page of the site.
• Still more plugins make the site attractive to visitors, especially when your site includes a blog.
• WordPress tells you which other websites are linking to yours.
• Using categories and the blog feature, you can generate categorized blog posts or articles, which is a great way to communicate with your customers, connect with other professionals, demonstrate your expertise, establish credibility, build transparency, and generate content that will help your site perform well on search engines.

Website Design Solutions and WordPress

Of course, there are plenty of other content management systems out there and WordPress is not appropriate for all situations. Mammoth sites might need a more powerful (and costly) system. WordPress is ideal for small to medium sized websites and may even be appropriate for some large, content-oriented sites.

One of my favorite things about WordPress is that it allows you to grow your site so easily. I can continually add content, and WordPress handles it seamlessly. I don’t have to keep track of all my files, file naming conventions, folders, and directories. WordPress handles all that for me.

I also appreciate being able to update my site from any computer with an Internet connection as well as from my mobile phone. That definitely comes in handy.

For starters, you need to have a solid content development plan. What topics will your blog cover? Just news and announcements about your business or industry? What else could you possibly write about on a business blog?

Fortunately, there are plenty of areas to explore in terms of topic. The main ingredient you need for any blog is a good writer – someone who can produce compelling content. A clever and talented writer can make the dryest subject in the world juicy and interesting.

Blogging for Business

Blogging for business is really no different than most other blogging endeavors. Bloggers are often working to grow their subscriber base, readership, and traffic. Businesses are looking for ways to grow their customer base and doing so through an effective online presence can be highly beneficial.

A business blog provides a number of opportunities for improving your online presence and increasing your online success. You can grow traffic to your site, gain rank on search engines, and publish quality content that other websites will link to.

But how can you also harness your blog to grow your business, to increase sales, and connect with your customers? What can you blog about?

Business Blogging Ideas

From lengthy blog posts that feature your products and services and describe them in great detail to shorter posts that showcase photos or videos that depict your merchandise in action, blogs offer ample opportunity for sharing news and information about your business offerings. Here are just a few ideas for how to use your blog to promote your business:

Products and Services

Write posts with images and descriptions of your products and services to help people better understand what you offer. Be sure to include a mix of newly launched products and your core or staple products.

Customer Service

Every business has tons of stories about customer service. Good service, bad customers, and vice versa. Use your blog as an opportunity to showcase how your business has helped customers. Offer a question and answer format to allow customers to send in questions, which you then answer on your blog. Or, invite customers to send in brief letters or testimonials and post these on your blog.

Specials and Discounts

A blog is one of the best places to inform customers about specials or discounts that you’re offering. You can design promotions especially for your blog readers or subscribers, or you can offer open specials and simply promote those on your blog.

Features and Benefits

Do more than describe your products and services. Explain the features they boast and the benefits they have for those who use them. A business blog is a great place to go into greater detail regarding how your product or service will improve people’s lives and solve their problems. Use examples. Tell stories. Compel people to buy.

Multimedia

You can post a wide range of media on your blog – images, audio, video, and text. This means there’s no limit to the content you can create and share on your blog. Did you recently do a radio spot or TV commercial? Make sure you post it on your blog. Have you run an ad in the local paper? Post it.

Blogging for Business is Beneficial

Once you sit down and start brainstorming the material you can showcase and information you can share on your business blog, you’ll be surprised at just how much fodder for blogging a business actually provides. There are great benefits to be had through a business blog, so what are you waiting for?

This smart strategy puts businesses in a position to target a smaller and more well-defined pool of customers.

Niches are effective for business models in the brick and mortar world, but they’re even more effective when you’re doing business online.

Niche Businesses

You can be a florist. Or, you can be a wedding florist. As a general florist, you are looking at a huge range of customers – people who buy flowers for anniversaries, funerals, Valentine’s Day, and a host of other occasions, celebrations, and holidays.

As a wedding florist, all you have to think about are customers who are getting married.

In fact, your entire business is built around people who are getting married, so your entire business model shifts and becomes a lot more focused. You don’t need a shop because you’ll be doing most of your work on location. You don’t need to worry about having enough red roses on hand around Valentine’s Day. You can focus on a single service for a very particular type of client, and in that niche, you can quickly and easily become an expert.

Niche Marketing

As a wedding florist, you can market exclusively to your target customer. You’ll go after features in bridal magazines, set up a booth at bridal fairs, and build your entire marketing campaign around a single event: your client’s wedding.

Even as a general florist, you can certainly launch a wedding-themed marketing campaign.

Team up with other wedding professionals and offer packaged services. Connect with bands and DJs, makeup artists and event planners. Develop cross-promotions, referral programs, and venture partnerships. Whether you offer your products and services to the public at large (anyone who needs flowers) or just a small segment of the population (people who are betrothed), you can always use niche marketing to promote your business.

Doing Business Online in the Niche Marketplace

The Internet provides a venue in which you can take full advantage of niche marketing.

For example, you don’t have to limit yourself to one website. The Friendly Florist may have a shop on the corner that carries a wide variety of flowers for sale. There’s probably a Friendly Florist website that features seasonal arrangements, provides options for ordering bouquets online, and lists the shop’s location and hours of operation.

But the Friendly Florist can also launch a second website: Friendly Florist Weddings. The entire website can feature services that are designed especially for weddings and bridal parties, thus drawing very specific visitors to the site (ideal for SEO) and providing information that is more relevant to those visitors.

Venture partnerships are also effective marketing techniques for doing business online within various niches. Exchange links and referrals with other wedding professionals. It doesn’t cost either partner a thing and has the potential to double all partners’ business.

It’s also fast and easy to run special promotions online with other professional in your niche, and you can build an entire team of professionals for a special promotion or for an entire website. Get the DJ, the makeup artist, the wedding planner, and the caterer all on board. Call it Friendly Weddings. Split the cost of the website and the advertising, and then everyone can enjoy greater revenues.

The Benefits of Niches

Nothing compels a perspective customer more than feeling like the business she is patronizing caters exclusively to her needs. A young bride has a problem. She’s getting married in six months and she’s going to need flowers. Lots of them. You might have a flower shop, but she’s going to take greater notice if you’re a wedding florist, because what you’re offering is a direct solution to her particular problem.

Niches also make it easier to identify target customers and then send them a message that is appropriate and relevant. Compare a slogan like “flowers for all occasions” to one such as “perfect flowers for your perfect wedding day.” If you’re about to walk down the aisle, which business would you choose?

There are lots of businesses that offer a wide range of general services, and niche marketing may seem too small or limited at first. But it’s much easier to identify and market to small groups of customers than to try to appeal to everybody. A business can launch as many niche marketing campaigns as it wants.

When it’s time to put together your next marketing plan, take some time to consider the benefits of niches. You may have to divide your customers up into smaller groups and pay more for branding, advertising, and other promotions, but doing so could have a positively exponential impact on your bottom line.

When visitors come to your website, they’ll sum it up in a flash based on what they see. Content is important, but aesthetics are a close second.

Whether you’re designing your own website or hiring someone to design one for you, you should have a solid idea of how you want to portray your business. If you have already started establishing your identity with a logo and marketing plan, then you’ve got the foundations you need for your site’s design.

However, there are still many considerations to keep in mind, and throughout the process of designing a new website (or redesigning an existing one), you will need to make decisions about how your site will look and feel so that it represents your business appropriately.

Here are seven key components of website design with tips for making choices so that your site captures visitors’ attention while maintaining the integrity of your company’s identity.

1. Build Your Brand with a Logo

Design is an excellent tool for brand building. If you have a logo, it should be prominently displayed on your home page and all subsequent pages as well. If you don’t have a logo, you should get one immediately. If you’re an independent entrepreneur using your name to do business, consider developing a signature-style logo, using a particular font and possibly your photo, or some other simple visual emblem. Logos help to build familiarity, association, and reputation, and they are the foundation of your brand.

2. Color Choices

Often the color choices you’ve made for your logo will drive the design of your website. However, simple logos, or brand designs that are flexible enough to adapt to a broader color scheme may lend themselves to a wider variety of designs. You should already know the objective of your site, so choose colors accordingly. There are an unlimited number of color combinations that can work; a good way to find out what direction you want to go in is to spend some time surfing around the web looking at sites that target the same audience you are going after, and make note of designs that strike your fancy. Keep in mind that selecting two or three different colors in varying shades will generate a better design.

3. Font and Text

There are so many exciting fonts out there, but don’t be tempted! You can use fancy fonts for your title, logo, and headings, but use a very simple, easy-to-read font for the bulk of your content, and remember that fonts are stored on visitors’ computers locally, so if you’re using a font that’s not web-friendly, turn it into an image. For your content, make sure that you use dark text on a light background for better readability. Too many people get overly excited about all the font and color choices, and go to great lengths to make their site look different, but if you make it difficult to read, visitors will click off to some other site that puts less stress on their eyesight. Lastly, make sure your font size is not too small… or too big.

4. Header

The header is located at the top of a web page, and it’s usually the area where you’ll find the title or site name. This should be prominent, clear, and very easy to read. The title can be text or an image but it should provide the name of your site, and give some clue as to what your site is all about. You can always use a tagline in the header to broadcast your site’s purpose. Also, if you do have a logo (and you should), it should be in the header.

5. Images

The more images you have on your page, the longer it takes to load. Generally, web surfers will wait just a few short seconds for a page to load before they go off in search of speedier delivery. Ensure that your images are optimized for the web, and that you don’t clutter your page with them. Keep in mind that videos and slideshows take even longer to load than regular images. However, you should have at least a few images on each page. Images break up long strings of text, and create spatial interest, which is attractive to the eye. Of course sites geared toward art, photography, film, etc. are exceptions to this rule!

6. Layout & Content Planning

Before you design a site, you should have a good idea of what its content will be. Determine all the components of your site, and then you, or your designer, can start to establish a formidable layout. Always develop a plan for content before you start working on design. There’s nothing worse than putting a site together only to discover there’s not enough room in your navigation menu for all the content you want to include.

7. Navigation

Your main menu or navigation bar will act as your site’s table of contents. It is here that you want to display simple links to key pages within your site. There are a few pillar pages that almost every website should have, which include: Home, About, and Contact. Take a look at other sites within your niche to establish other key pages that warrant a link on the navigation menu. These will likely include products and services pages.

Moving Forward

Designing a website can be stressful, but it can also be a lot of fun. It’s exciting to see the whole thing come together, especially for the first time. Even redesigns can help breathe new life into a business, and will often help to ramp up sales, even in a down economy.

A few final tips:

• Keep your design flexible enough so that you can add and change content later on.
• Include a plan for website maintenance and regular updates.
• Make sure the site is thoroughly tested on various operating systems and browsers to ensure full functionality.

And if you’re thinking about hiring an SEO professional, how do you begin to understand what you’re paying them to do?

If you want to learn about search engine optimization, you can spend weeks or even months perusing the Internet, gathering free information. Eventually, you’ll pick up enough knowledge to launch your own SEO campaign.

Or, you could just buy a copy of SEO School, spend a couple of hours reading, and then launch your SEO campaign. With the information in this ebook, you can optimize your website and see real results – in both your keyword ranking and your overall traffic.

In less than a month, I was able to apply the information I learned in SEO School and test it on one of my websites. And what I found out was that it works.

My SEO Experience

Over the last few years, I studied SEO at a distance. I paid attention to articles and blog posts that covered SEO, and I had a basic understanding of how SEO worked. From everything I gathered, it was a complex, convoluted field – one in which there were no guarantees and in which the rules were constantly changing.

Last summer when Naomi Dunford of Itty Biz fame launched her ebook SEO School, I was intrigued enough to buy it right away. The price was right (about half the cost of most other SEO books), and I knew Naomi’s writing style was witty and obscenely engaging, so it was sure to be an informative and entertaining read.

After breezing through the entire ebook in just a couple of hours, I knew one thing for certain: I was going to optimize my websites.

The thing about SEO is that it’s not that difficult. It’s just extremely time consuming – though even the amount of time you spend depends on the number of keywords you’re optimizing for and how competitive the keyword field is.

SEO School: Enroll Today

SEO School is a perfect introduction for people who want to learn SEO basics and who want the nitty gritty details on how to actually optimize a site. It’s ideal for website managers who want to start optimizing, and it’s a fantastic resource for business owners who are thinking about hiring an SEO professional but want to understand what’s involved in the process of search engine optimization before they shell out the cash.

The book kicks off with a basic introduction to SEO, and explains how search engines work and what their motives and goals are (remember, search engines are companies too!). Next, there is a discussion about selecting keywords based on a variety of factors, such as search frequency, competition, and how well a given keyword relates to your site.

About halfway into the book, you’ll start learning exactly how to tweak your site’s code and content to gain higher search engine rankings. You’ll also learn about off-site optimization. There’s even a section just for bloggers.

Naomi’s style matches her blog, so if you’re an Itty Biz reader, this book will delight you. And if you’re not an Itty Biz reader, then head over there and subscribe right now to get some of the best marketing tips around. However, if you are a puritan, beware – Naomi is liberal with language and her blog posts as well as her ebook are peppered with words that could get a child’s mouth washed out with soap, which is part of what makes it such a blast to read.

Case Study

I launched my own SEO campaign after reading SEO School, and the results were impressive. For the purpose of this case study, I will share my results for two keywords. Keep in mind that I was in the early, testing phase. My approach was to optimize a few pages and see what would happen. Once I could assess the test results, then I would be prepared to launch a full-scale campaign.

The main thing I wanted to know was: does SEO work? If I optimize, will I actually see an increase in my rankings and my traffic? The answer was yes, and my full-scale campaign is now underway.

The case study below outlines the steps I took to determine whether SEO School would pay off.

Case Study

The site I was working with was over a year old and had almost 200 pages of content when I started. I decided to optimize the archives rather than creating fresh content.

Keyword #1

I found that a keyword that generated almost 30,000 searches per month had sent 23 visitors to my site in 2008. I couldn’t even find my site in the first 200 search results on Google, so it was no wonder that I was getting such a small fraction of the search engine traffic.

After optimizing one page in December, my site leaped to position #130, and almost immediately, I noticed a spike in traffic. Over the next few weeks, I optimized four more pages on the site for the same keyword. Each time I optimized, I noted the current rank and followed up a few days later.

In less than a month, I had optimized five short pages and increased my rank from practically off the chart to page four. At the time this case study was written, my site was at position 32, so it’s still climbing – and I’m not done optimizing. I probably spent 15-20 minutes proofreading, editing, and optimizing each page.

Keyword #2

As it turns out, the second keyword occurred organically. In SEO, there is something called a long tail keyword. There are plenty of different definitions of long tail keywords. For the purpose of this study, the keyword that started generating traffic wasn’t one I optimized for at all. In fact, it was a combination of two other keywords I had optimized for.

For example, let’s say you optimized for the keywords “red” and “shirt,” and then found you were gaining traffic for the keyword phrase “red shirt.” Well, that’s what happened with my site.

The long tail keyword phrase that started drawing traffic gets between 3000 and 5000 searches per month. That’s not a lot, but if you ranked for several such keywords, you would see a nice spike in traffic. Also, keywords with lower search frequency are good for cutting your SEO teeth and learning the ropes.

In 2008, I received a grand total of 23 hits for this keyword phrase – that’s over the course of a whole year. After optimizing about five pages for portions of the keyword phrase, I received 182 hits from the keyword phrase in January alone. In a single month, I had increased my traffic for just one keyword phrase over 700% of what it had been during the course of an entire year.

I can’t wait to see what my stats show in February.

Summary

If you’re interested in learning search engine optimization on your own, Scribizzy recommends SEO School by Naomi Dunford of IttyBiz. This ebook is a quick and easy read, which will give you all the basics of SEO plus the actual steps you need to take to optimize your site.

Buyer beware: SEO School may contain language that is not suitable for children. But it’s really fun to read.

Regular website updates have numerous benefits. Most importantly, fresh content keeps visitors interested in what you have to offer. It also pleases search engines, increases your opportunities for SEO, and provides increased space for telling people about your business.

And it’s not just about your website. Your entire online presence hinges on staying up to date. From social media to newsletters, articles, and press releases, current content will help you attract and retain customers.

Scribizzy can help you put together a smart and effective content development plan so you can consistently grow and improve your online presence. Whether you want to update weekly, monthly, or yearly, we’re ready to put together a flexible, strategic plan that suits your business and your budget.

Visit our Web Content Development page to learn more or get a quote online.