Tue_Feb_12_06:00:07_PST_2019

66 Copywriting contains a ton of information packed into small convenient chapters, which works out well if you ever need to look at the information again. Copywriting Bible The above books are a great introduction to copywriting type books, but if you are looking for thorough copywriting and advertising advice, I could recommend no better book than Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples. It is like an encyclopedia of advertising knowledge from one of the world's best copywriters. It is a bit dated and speaks primarily of print ads, but if you are primarily writing sales copy, this is a great book to read. The above books will also enlighten you with coverage of subjects such as the sales process and different personality types. Horrible Copywriting We here at XYZ Corporation know what it means to be successful. In fact, sometimes we forget that at one point a long, long, long time ago we weren't the premiere information distribution technology enhancement resource agency facilitator. Times have changed though, and we have transfused our corporate mission to account for the discrepancies in the post-modern publishing phenomenon. We are…us…greatest…best…us, us, us…selfish, etc. Basics of Online Copywriting • Use varying style. Lose the corporate speak. • Be yourself. • Make it a conversation. • Make your point up front. • Don't use jargon. • Use shorter text, or, as E.B. White would say, "omit needless words." • Break up text using headers, sub headers, bulleted lists, and other text breaking devices. • Stress benefits before features (unless it is a tech-heavy product). An Audience of One It is a great idea to sell information. If your copy can connect with a person and get them to feel as though they are working with a person instead of a screen, the sale process is much easier. You do not know who is on the other end of the computer. People are generally distrusting toward the unknown. If site visitors sense a person is writing just for them, they will not want to click away.

Tue_Feb_12_05:00:08_PST_2019

65 $200 to design a logo for you. My original SEO Book site design was not overly simplistic because I am a minimalist; it was overly simplistic because I am a bad designer. For the first two years it was a default Movable Type template with a $99 logo at the top. I eventually paid a few thousand dollars to get a new, crisp, clean design. It is very easy to find shoddy logo design, but there are some good ones. Recently I purchased logos from The Logo Company for 50 each. A few times I have been disappointed, but some of their logos came out better than expected. My SEO Book logo was created by EZY Logo, a now defunct company that had great product but terrible customer support. If you need an exceptionally cheap logo you may want to run a contest at a forum or try to buy a logo from a site like Elance. I purchased AAA logo design software for $50. I think it is fun to play with, but if you are not graphically inclined, you probably will want to pay someone else to design your logo. Buying a good original logo is an exceptionally cheap one-time investment. Professional Looking Design (Part 2) Making a site accessible, usable, and professional looking might cost you 0,000 or more. If you are low on funds, it might make more sense to spend that money on brand building and marketing, but if you want designers and the like to link at your site it is much easier to get links if your site looks professional. Off the start I did not believe that coding errors or design mattered that much, but if you want technical sites to link to you, then your site has to pass the sniff test. That consideration is much more important if you write a tech blog than if you run a fairly static e-commerce site. Copywriting Humans do the Buying Inevitably, it will be human eyes that see your web page. For example, if my first six chapters had no good advice, you would not read chapter seven. I am unaware of any automated buying-bots that surf the web just to buy things. (There are, however, automated clicking agents that defraud people, and the people who create them should be shot.) Copywriting Books How do you write for human eyes? I recommend investing in a copywriting book. Some of the books I have read are Net Words by Nick Usborne, The Online Copywriter's Handbook by Bob Bly, and Persuasive Online Copywriting by Bryan Eisenberg. Of the three, I most highly recommend the third; Persuasive Online When you create your pages, make sure they read well to people. You aren't writing them for robots. You will need good copy to have a decent conversion rate and to encourage natural linking to your site.

Tue_Feb_12_04:00:07_PST_2019

64 You can learn more about SSI by viewing the Apache SSI Tutorial located at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/howto/ssi.html. SSI Without Breaking File Paths Webmasters often start out with a smaller site and later decide that they should start using SSI or a dynamic content management system. To use SSI, many people change their file paths from .html or .htm to .shtml or .shtm. The problem with doing this is that it can break inbound links. You can get around this by modifying your .htaccess file. To learn more about .htaccess files, view the Comprehensive Guide to .htaccess at: http://www.wsabstract.com/howto/htaccess.shtml. Content Management Systems (CMS) Another technique to control the look and design of a site is to use a content management system. There are many dynamic languages people use such as PHP, ASP, and ColdFusion. However, most people do not need an expensive content management system. Before you invest heavily in a content management system or design, you should know what the goals of the website are. Make sure any content management system you would consider using produces search-engine- friendly pages. (More about making a site search engine friendly later.) Blogs as Content Management Systems I organize many content sites with weblog programs such as WordPress and Movable Type. Movable Type costs 99 (as of writing this) for a commercial license and provides many of the features of expensive content management systems. Movable Type also offers a free one-month trial of their web-based software by the name of TypePad. If you like TypePad, you can host your blog there for a low monthly fee. Blogger, owned by Google, is a 100% free blogging software platform that is rather limited on the feature front. WordPress is free a downloadable software program that is easy to install. If you want to give blogging a try, I suggest going to Blogger.com and signing up for a free account. If your site is personal in nature or you like the blog content management system, you may not even need to pay for design beyond a site logo. If you are serious about using a blog as part of a business, I would recommend using WordPress or Movable Type. I wrote a couple articles on why I think using blog software is often an outstanding idea for both search engine placement and ease of site design. You can find them at http://www.search-marketing.info/newsletter/articles/articles.htm#blogs.. Professional Looking Design It is worth it to pay someone to make a professional looking design for your site. It is very affordable easy to use a default blog template and pay a logo designer $50- Writing an interesting blog ensures that you have fresh content available, which keeps traffic coming back to your site. In addition, blog software can be used as an exceptionally cheap content management system.

Tue_Feb_12_03:00:07_PST_2019

63 For an example of how powerful CSS is, take a look at the CSS house. A couple of the more popular resources on the web about cascading style sheets are the CSS Zen Garden and W3 school's CSS tutorial page. You may also want to view the official W3C CSS guidance page. Effects of Change on Branding On a daily, weekly, or monthly basis you can choose to change your font type, layout, colors…just about anything. You can do it in minutes and track the results. Some branding experts, however, such as Rob Frankel, believe that changing too frequently could hurt your brand. Make sure you have a distinct idea of why and how you want to change before you start altering things. If you realize many things are completely broken, then a complete makeover might be in order, but typically it is best to change and test only one thing at a time so you know the exact effects of any change. How CSS Saves Time You can link each page of your site to an external style sheet to control the display. Many of the repetitive changes that would be made on every page can be done simply by changing one file. This may not seem like a big deal while creating page five or six, but if your site has 200 pages you will be glad that you used CSS! CSS are not necessary for smaller sites, but are a great idea if you are building a large content-based site. They also can help to improve the content-to-code ratio. Server Side Includes (SSI) Server Side Includes is an Apache server technology that allows you to include pages or parts of a page within another page without the negative side effects of using a framed-based navigation system. To include another file inside of a page, include the following code where you want the included page to appear. The use of SSI for common elements, such as navigation or advertisements, work well to allow you to control your entire site by making simple changes to a single file. Between CSS and SSI, you can save literally hundreds or thousands of hours in your site design or re-design. SSI also lets you include the date last modified or current date in the page. This is often how many of those generic one page sites have the current date in their sales letters. On my Search Marketing Info site (Search-Marketing.info), I use SSI for the page footer, navigational tabs, local left column navigation, and right-side page ads. Using CSS and SSI or dynamic programming languages is not necessary if you aim to have a small Web site. If you are making a large site, these technologies can save you many hours in site maintenance.

Tue_Feb_12_02:00:07_PST_2019

62 Changing Your Site My Trial & Error I was a "hack-and-go" sort of person off the start. I have re-made thousands of web pages, most of them by inefficient means. Some of my worst mistakes are: using frames, trying to become an affiliate of over 1,000 websites, free money scams, and generally creating garbage without learning about the web. Business & Change The Internet is a highly responsive, trackable medium. You should WANT to change to evaluate consumer response. Successful businesses evolve. Successful entrepreneurs keep learning. Few sites stay on top forever by being stagnant. It's hard to think of change before you even start building your site, but right now I have thousands of pages that are reminding me of changes I still need to make. Creating a Site Design Seth Godin offered me some great advice for site design. He said, "The best way to make a web page is to steal an outlay idea from another website that is not directly competing with you." When you go to make your first web page, do so as a sketch. After you have a good idea (which is at least slightly different than the site you got your idea from), recreate your home page as a picture in an editor such as Adobe Photoshop. From there you can pay a design firm to create your page, or create it yourself using a program such as Macromedia Dreamweaver. Software such as Site Grinder and some companies like PSD2HTML and XHTMLized convert Photoshop images to websites for affordable rates. If you do not mind using an existing template, OSWD.org is a website that has a bunch of free web designs you can chose from. Many content management systems, such as blogs, also have free template galleries. You can start with one of the designs and modify it to make it look unique. Crafting Easy Site Wide Changes Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) How do you make it easy to change your site? One simple solution is to use cascading style sheets to control the display of your information. When the Web was created, the idea was to keep layout and information separate from one another. Using external style sheets allows you to change virtually every aspect of your site by making changes to one file. To do this, put the layout in a sheet called 'yourchosenfilename.css' and reference it in your other web pages. A code similar to the following would go in the head section of your pages.

Tue_Feb_12_01:00:08_PST_2019

61 I do not believe the tags are being heavily used to influence search relevancy algorithms, but eventually they may carry some weight. And many of the people who use tags also publish websites where they may link to some of the items they tagged. As the user search history builds and search engines can cross-compare search histories between users, the tag data may be used to help understand what concepts and other documents a particular document is related to. For example: • When people tag or link to documents on their own, they are likely to use a variety of terms to describe a document. This type of somewhat random and sloppy information organization is known as a folksonomy. • If searchers tag my site SEO or Internet marketing then search engines may believe my site is about those topics. • If the same users frequently tag SearchEngineWatch.com and SeoBook.com, then a search engine may think that the two websites are related. • Yahoo! My Web allows you to share what sites you are tagging with your friends. • Google created a program called Google Co-op that allows groups of people to create a topical search engine by tagging relevant sites. Google users can then subscribe to allow those results to appear in their Google search results. • Yahoo! and Google both have feed readers that they can use to see how popular your site is and how frequently readers visit it. • If my site ranks well in search results and many users never click on the listing, search engines may want to demote my site. If most people who click on my listing immediately click the back button, search engines may want to demote my site or flag it for human review. • Search engines will be able to cross-compare user acceptance data (as described in the point above), what sites are being tagged, how those sites are being tagged, and linkage data to determine if the popularity of a site is natural or if it is being manipulated by human intervention. • Google bought YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars, and also owns many other services (AdSense, Google Analytics, Google Toolbar, etc.) that allow them to collect web usage data. As Google hosts more of the web's content they will be able to refine their relevancy algorithms by incorporating more usage data into their algorithms. • If you can think of a way to create a site that people interested in your topic would want to tag, then you will be better off than 95% of your competition. • Tagging somewhat relates to link building. Much later on in the book I cover link building in depth.

Tue_Feb_12_00:00:10_PST_2019

60 than most people desire to do. This is part of the reason why people use and trust search engines so much. It also reinforces the value of the best channels in a marketplace. The solution to the information overload problem is to be so remarkable and interesting that you capture the attention of the audience. RSS and newsreaders (such as Bloglines, Google Reader, and FeedDemon) make it easy for people to subscribe to select news channels or websites while blocking out redundant or useless noise. If you cover a news topic that is saturated, you may want to use a news reader to help you organize your news and get the scoop on the latest news as it happens. The people who are subscribing to RSS feeds are also the most likely to be people who comment on the contents of those sites, and write other sites that can link at your site. If you can figure out a way to get those people to desire to give you their attention, you quickly and cheaply reach the most influential voices. If you did not own your site, is there any reason you would want to visit it multiple times each week? If you figure out how to make that answer "yes," then you are ahead of over 95% of competing webmasters. In most industries, many people will fail, or barely get by, while a few successful voices make themselves heard above the rest. Those people who gain many subscribers and have other people talking about them will be successful. Competitive markets are largely a game of mindshare. Ultimately, search engines follow people. Controlling Costs and Leveraging Exposure If you have a high attention portion of your site that is hard to monetize you can still leverage the value and trust associated with that section of your site without offending your regular readers. Some search algorithms heavily weigh domain related authority scores. If you find yourself in a position of great authority, but fear losing your market position by placing too many ads or too much lower quality content in your main channel, then you can create a static part of the site of lower quality that is more aggressively monetized while still keeping your high authority channel noise free. Some content management systems also allow you to change page layouts based on content age, such that you can monetize archive content more aggressively than new content. Tagging Search Results Both Yahoo! and Google allow users to sign into accounts and search. Searchers can also tag, or label, the results. Readers might tag my site using seo, search, or seo blog. Here are examples of tags people use to describe my site: