Are you looking for increased awareness? More sales? Downloads? Are you building a contact list? Maybe you’re sharing content in exchange for email address. Maybe you’re building a following so that when the time is right and you have a product ready for release you have your ‘sales funnel’ ready to go. Perhaps you are trying to drive customers to an offline retail location or promote an event. Whatever the real reason for you being online – recall it now.

Now ask yourself this: when your customers hit your site – maybe you’ve invested in PPC (pay per click) to assist your organic search rankings, maybe you spend time and energy on social media to let followers and fans know who you are and what you do. If so, when they arrive what are they confronted with? What do they see?

- Is your site a destination that talks in a language they understand?
- Does your language stimulate them into taking the sort of action that benefits you?
- Do you have clear compelling calls to action so visitors know exactly what’s expected of them?

No? Then you’re off message. You’re missing the bottom line reason to have a website and you may be missing out on profits.
One answer is to create landing pages.

Put your website to work by deploying landing pages. These are laser guided sales tools that get to the very heart of your proposition AND what your visitors want.
Landing pages are highly focused and can be highly effective when used alongside online marketing techniques such as PPC because you are targeting and qualifying your audience with clarity and precision. This quick response mechanism should enable you to reap sales and conversions with the minimum of fuss and the maximum effect.
How focused are your landing pages? Do you even apply strategies to drive your segmented audiences to specific landing pages? Talk to your SEO provider to discuss the sorts of strategies you might consider and the sorts of landing pages that you can use to help you build you business online.

But what if your site isn’t particularly copy based? Not all websites are bursting with copy. Many sites employ extensive graphics and images to represent their core messages and some website owners simply don’t want to compromise the aesthetic with acres of copy. It’s a fact of web life that some sites will produce better results by using more graphics than words, for example, sites for graphic designers or photographers, illustrators or companies that deal in stock images.

The problem for such sites is that it is text that the engines crave. It’s text that determines relevance and can deliver your competitive advantage through high rankings and better search positioning. It’s also text that will convert your visitors. What can you do if your site is heavily image based? How can you best SEO your site to give it a chance?

Here are some tips that might help you achieve healthy search engine positioning even if your site is graphic heavy.

• Always apply keyword descriptions to images. Informative AND optimised descriptions contribute very effectively to positioning.

• Use every opportunity to make your copy count. Side bars, about us pages, copy ‘below the fold’ (copy not instantly visible to human visitors) and contact pages all offer useful opportunities for you to deliver your strategic keywords.

Use as much off site SEO as possible through articles, social media and press releases to drive inbound links to your graphic-dominated pages.

Make sure you talk to your SEO or online marketing partner to achieve maximum web profile.

With global advertising expenditure expected to fall 9.8% this year, according to Media agency giant Carat (that’s up from earlier predictions of a 5.8% fall) you might even argue that a 5.3% drop represents a form of resilience. Figures for overall advertising declines in the UK and Western Europe are worse than the global drop with a projected decline of 16.3% and 11% respectively. On the bright side of their research, Carat believe that Internet advertising spends will rise 1% this year, globally although that’s compared to whopping 16.4% growth last year.

While we’re on the matter of online ad spends and trends comScore and Starcom USA claim in new research that only half the number of US internet users now click on display ads.

So what do all these statistics tell us? What are the conclusions to be drawn?

Well the figures tell us that companies are watching their media spends like hawks, reluctant to invest in anything that can’t offer top dollar returns, value for money and they are driving down prices accordingly to cut costs. Consequently, offline ad marketing is suffering major trauma. Terminal trauma for many printed and TV brands.

Online marketing though not doing as well as it was is bearing up relatively well – largely due to it’s core strengths of being highly targetable, flexible and measurable plus the fact that more and more people spend more and more time online as they turn away from traditional media.

That clickthroughs on display ads are falling reveals the importance of other digital marketing techniques, SEO (search engine optimisation) that offers organic profile, SMM (social media marketing) that builds online audiences and PPC (pay per click) as companies apply packages of online PR/SEO to fulfil their business objectives.

We’ve all winced at SEO article writing clearly produced by someone who didn’t have a clue what they were writing about. Articles that are clunky, keyword stuffed, tenuous or lacking cohesion.

Of course, not every company is fortunate enough to have an Ernest Hemingway or John Irving to hand – someone who can make copy sing, who can write articles to engage, enlighten and entertain, someone to inspire your customers. If you do have someone capable within grabbing distance, someone with a little experience and the willingness to study the skills further then great, grab ‘em. If you’re struggling, then take some professional guidance and input – hire a copywriter.

Do be careful in who you choose though. Much in the way that a lot of software and coding was outsourced a few years ago, there are now many opportunities to take your SEO article writing requirements offshore for spectacularly cheap (in every sense of the expression) results. There’s also the rise of the part-time, well-meaning home worker who will turn an article for the fraction of the cost charged by a pro. Tempting as these options might be – don’t do it.

Don’t risk your reputation with poor quality SEO article writing. You’ll look cheap, you’ll look tight and you will look off the pace. Bad SEO article writing, as opposed to benefiting your online presence has the potential to completely undermine it. Don’t let it. Use a recommend professional. As many of the companies now bringing their coding and other outsourced services back closer to home have discovered to their cost – you get what you pay for. Cheap copy is cheap copy.

Take a step back. Ask yourself why you are going to the time, trouble and expense of creating written content in the first place. More likely than not it is because you have a proposition you wish to share, or business information or products to promote. The last thing you want is for people to switch off, to bounce from your page and go somewhere else.

Keep it real, keep it authentic and honest

Good web copywriting is a vital component of content marketing and is a long tail game – the sideways sales letter as Jeff Walker calls it.

From an SEO (search engine optimisation) perspective you can go online and find all manner of spammy keyword density advice to inform your copywriting. Pay no attention. If your content is written naturally the search engines are savvy enough these days to identify natural, appropriate, topicality and themes. You not only run the risk of being punished by the search engines if they detect keyword spamming, your work will probably also come across as clunky.

Clumsily written copy designed for web crawlers is totally avoidable. By all means make sure that your keywords are in your headings and the page title and tags, but leave it at that. Let them occur naturally within the text.

The sideways sales letter

I referred earlier to the sideways sales letter. You may come across what are referred to as ‘long form sales letters’ or long form direct marketing copy – classic and effective copywriting that translates powerfully to the internet. This type of copy is often a final destination, the point at which your prospects are converted.

Great direct copywriters are few and far between but can make all the difference when it comes to monetizing your marketing efforts. Employing a copywriter who can nurture your sales funnel AND convert your self-qualified audience through well-written copy should be a priority. Use web copywriting as your 25-carat competitive advantage.

SEO Copy Articles are a great way to build links, traffic, web profile and to give your audience what they really want namely high quality content.

They work both on and off site contributing weight and authority to your web presence. Strong content will attract inbound links (link baiting), more so now than ever, as Social Media users seek to build their reputations by sharing innovative and interesting web content with their fans and followers.

In their efforts to be regarded as ‘thought leaders’ many SMM and Internet related marketers work extremely hard to source informed, well written pieces that show a fresh or innovative point of view. Take advantage of this hunger for original content by offering it. The high quality of your work will be rewarded over time.

Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit all act as potential sources of huge amounts of new visitors through articles that build enough popularity for them to hit their front pages. By building a range of strong articles on your site you will increase your readership and the chances of winning more article endorsements, Diggs etc. You can become a leader in your field, with a catalogue of high quality and highly useful work. It only takes a recommendation from a maven in your industry or field for you and your articles to start enjoying the acclaim and referrals that can lead to serious amounts of traffic. Specialise and aim high, seek to be a leader in your speciality too over time.

Another way of building your reputation is by submitting guest posts to popular sites, an industry leading blog for example. Be sure to offer them your very best work. After all if your article is going to be exhibited on a high traffic site you’ll want it to be as impressive as possible. Ask to include a link to your own site.

If you’ve got it flaunt it. If you haven’t got it, hire it in and then flaunt it. Use the services of a professional copywriter to crystallise your ideas or to help out by putting your words into an SEO article format to win you links, followers and ultimately new business.

For SEO copywriting, read good writing – strong, organised, intelligent and informed writing. There’s no magical SEO wand that can be waved to turn copy into spider friendly, reader friendly copy (despite what some SEO ‘experts’ might try and tell you). What reads as interesting and informative writing to a human visitor will be equally appreciated by a search engine bot. The rewards are many. Great copy builds authority, followings, credibility, generates kudos and inspires inbound links. High search engine positioning is an inevitable consequence of quality and relevance, positioning that is re-enforced in a virtuous circle built on strong content.

There simply is no substitute for good quality writing. Interesting writing can’t be faked, and this is something that the search engines are increasingly cottoning on to, with more semantic style indexing and algorithms that seek to determine themes, expertise and peer validation.

Forget keyword densities that render articles clunky, clunky and crass – leave that back in the 90′s. Forget other black hat techniques that try to trick the spiders. Don’t blank out text, or use lists of keywords in the same colour as your background. Google will only punish you with de-indexing. That’s as inevitable as it is avoidable.

Concentrate your energy and efforts on getting it right first time. Your internet investment deserves great copy. If you lack the resources, confidence or the know how to write killer copy in-house, then consider investing in a professional SEO copywriter for effective and long-term rewards.