DIY B2B Direct Marketing and SEO

Visit one of the the funniest, most innovative websites… ever!

Usually when a person breaks all the rules they make a right pig’s ear of things. But now and then someone delivers a stroke of pure genuis. 

A lot of very clever people have written reams of worthy blurb about how to craft the perfect website. A site that’ll suck in a massive response and convert every visitor into a lucrative customer. Formidable formatting, lovely layout and a seamless user experience.

This site throws most of that out the window  to deliver the most charming, funny, off the wall online experience I can recall since the birth of the interweb. Here’s a link. Enjoy Eugene’s Ridicuolus Home Page!

Your website needs a spring clean. So where do you start?

If the task seems daunting, not to worry. Here’s your top three key actions. 

1. Research and identify your business’s primary and secondary keywords and key phrases using free online resources like the Google Adwords tool. Why? Because there’s very little point writing new copy without taking keywords and phrases into account. You’ll only have to go back and crowbar them in later.  

2. Rewrite your website including the keywords and phrases you’ve identified. Why? It’s sensible to get your content into shape before you start attracting visitors and getting search engines all excited. 

3. Redesign your site with SEO in mind. Chances are if your site content’s out of date your design will be out of date too. A decent designer will take visitor needs into account. They’ll use their expertise to create a clear graphical user interface. They’ll write beautiful, SEO-friendly, standards compliant code in powerful source code order and much more.

Here’s a few common sense guidelines about using US English versus UK English

• it sounds glaringly obvious but if you have a dotcodotuk site use UK English. And if your site is mainly US-focused, use American English
• if it isn’t immediately obvious where your visitors and customers come from, find out from your webstats and write for the majority

What if you’re global?

If your customers live all over the world, you can’t really win. Luckily the biggest difference between UK and US English  is the spelling. While you’ll probably annoy a few people no matter which you use, the differences in spelling won’t mislead. 

Sometimes the same words mean completely different things. Americans might feel comfy wandering the streets in pants and vest, but in the UK we’d probably be arrested for it! Public school, brackets and first floor have different meanings too.

If you can, stick to words that mean the same thing in both countries and sidestep the contentious ones. There’s usually a perfectly good work-around if you think creatively about copywriting.  

Are you streets ahead of your competitors? Or have they stolen your SEO thunder?

If a competitor’s pages are beating yours hands down in Google’s search results, it’s a good idea to find out why. Then make amends. 

Here’s a nice little free online SEO tool that lets you compare various SEO aspects of two pages side by side. It analyses:

• key words
• links
• bold and italics
• page titles
• headers
• meta data
• the most frequently used two and three word phrases  

Then delivers a simple report showing you how the two pages relate to one another. And it gives you a rough idea of how much work’s needed to get your page working harder.

Here’s the link:   http://www.seomastering.com/site-comparison.php

You’ve written an ebook. You’ve poured your heart and soul into it. It’s almost ready. Now all you need is ebook editing.

Part one of this post concerns SEO…

I edit ebooks. I added a special ebook editing page to my book website, blancminge.com, in December 2009. As I write, on 19th January 2010, my ebook editing page’s positions in Google SERPs are:

key phrase: ebook editing:

• No 1 on page 1 of Google UK
• No 1 on page 2 of Google web

key phrase: ebook editing services:

• No 1 on page 1 of Google UK
• No 4 on page 1 of Google web

Take a look at the copy and source code on my ebook editing page and see how I’ve done it. I haven’t carried out any link building for the page’s key terms yet. I’ve achieved this level of visibility simply by optimising my page name, meta tags and copy.      

Part two of this post concerns ebook editing...

If your ebook needs editing, you know where to come!