Jeff Smith Consulting

1. Update the pages on your website frequently. Stagnant sites are dropped by some search engines. You can even put a date counter on the page to show when it was last updated.

2. Offer additional value on your website. For affiliates and partners you can place links to their sites and products and ask them to do the same for you. You can also advertise their books or videos, if these products relate to your industry and are not in competition with your own product.

3. You can allow customers to ‘opt in’ to get discounts and special offers. Place a link on your site to invite customers to ‘opt in’ to get a monthly newsletter or valuable coupons.

4. Add a link to your primary page with a script ‘Book Mark or Add this site to your Favorites’.

5. Add a link ‘Recommend this site to a Friend’ so that the visitor can email your website link, with a prewritten title, “Thought you might be interested in this”, just by clicking on it.

6. Brand your website so that visitors always know they are on your site. Use consistent colors, logos and slogans and always provide a ‘Contact Us’ link on each page.

7. Create a ‘Our Policies’ page that clearly defines your philosophy and principles in dealing with your customers. Also post your privacy policy as well so that clients know they are secure when they visit your site.

8. Create a FAQ page which addresses most of the doubts and clarifications about your product or your company that are likely to be asked. This helps to resolve most of the customers doubts in their first visit to your site.

8. Ensure that each page on your website has appropriate titles and keywords so that your customer can find their way back to your site if they lose the book mark.

9. Never spam a client, who has opted for newsletters, with unsolicited emails. Later if they decide they want to ‘opt out’ of the mailings, be sure you honor their request and take them off the mailing list. They may still come back if they like your products. But they will certainly not come back if you continue to flood their email box with mails they no longer wish to receive.

I wanted to post today about a percentage that I have been tracking on Twitter to finalize a 6 month test I have been running. I wanted to prove out the number of people on Twitter that will automatically link back to me or my test subjects the moment I link to them. This test has allowed me to go from 0 to almost 7000 followers in 5 months. I actively pursued my first 300 subjects for the test and I have since only posted 112 times to my test account and it's organically grown by thousands of users. So my findings are: no less the 30% of the people you follow on twitter will follow you back. This is extremely powerful in niches which I will be explaining in upcoming posts on this subject.

Within this article today on SEO copy writing, we will look at the specifics of a search engine optimization world and how copywriting pertains to that.

A brief introduction toward search engine optimization is that its goal is to position your website well within the search engine page ranks so that you can gain a great deal of natural traffic to your website. One important part of the high page rank work is developing good web content. The importance of copywriting within this field is that you must be creative in developing web content so that it can meet the demands of both the consumer looking for information on the Internet as well as the demands placed on your website by search engine bots.

There is a great deal of writing on the Internet today which is very boring and does not interest people. The key behind SEO copywriting is that you are looking to impress both the search bots as well as the people who are surfing the Internet and stumble upon your page. You do not get a great deal of time to impress your site upon these people so what you have to say and how you say it is going to be the difference between a sale and another lost lead.

If you are interested in SEO copywriting, look into some of the following sources for more information. Here is the website of one particular company where you can learn more about SEO copywriting in a tutorial forum: http://www.seo-gold.com/seo-tutorial/. To find many more resources, search the Internet using the following term: “SEO tutorials.” You will have great success in learning more about this particular field.

Good SEO copywriting focuses on many different factors such as the good web content as well as keyword optimization. Keyword optimization is making sure that your website has full use of a particular set of keywords so that when people search the Internet for these phrases, your site will be on the first page of results. This is how you generate good organic search engine traffic. This deal does go beyond just keyword optimization when looking into making a website work. Take your time to learn more from the resources that were listed above. This can give you a good idea of what you will need to become an SEO copywriter or give you some criteria on when to hire one.

Just as some general information, a good SEO copywriter should help you develop a high page rank within the different search engines as well as help build the sales at your website. It is important to get traffic to your website but is also important that you have a good lead conversion ratio. What this means is that you want more people to visit your sites and that gradually more of these visitors convert to quality sales for you. By providing good content that sells, you are setting yourself up as a person who excels at SEO copywriting. Hopefully this article on SEO copywriting has benefited you. This can be a very lucrative field if you learn to market on the Internet.

The name of the game with Internet Marketing is productivity. Productivity means reaching the greatest number of targeted prospects with the least effort and expense to generate the most sales.

The key to productivity is leverage: expanding your marketing activity with resources and systems that run without your direct effort or excessive involvement.

Developing a Link Partner strategy is one recommended way to leverage your efforts and increase your productivity, although there are numerous additional ways to apply leverage to your Internet business efforts. These may include:

- Advertising in ezines, online forums, websites and other sources

- Participation as a member in online business and marketing forums

- Participation in Social Networking sites

With each of these leveraging systems, it may take some effort and time to get them set up and to begin establishing your website presence.

The advantage to any or all of these systems is that once set up, they will produce results for you with minimal effort and will continue to do so for extended periods of time.

Link Partners are website owners or webmasters with whom you exchange your website link. You will place a link to their site somewhere on your website, and they will place your link somewhere on their site.

Links can be in text ad form or banner form. Links might be included in an article, a site review or a blog post. Or they might be listed in a business services directory. The style or nature of the link exchange should be agreed upon before the links are posted to prevent any misunderstandings or disappointments.

Link Partners may be easy to find, but the real essence of an effective Link Partner strategy is exchanging links with quality websites. That is, sites with a respectable PageRank and who are already attracting the same kind of visitors that you are targeting for your online business.

There are many good web tools available that can be used to check the PageRank of a website. You can do an Internet search for page rank tools.

To find quality sites and to encourage them to want to support your Link Partner strategy, here are some recommended steps:

1) When surfing the Internet, watch for and bookmark sites that you believe are suitable for your purpose. You could also do Internet searches for your keywords, then check out the sites that rate the highest in the search engine results.

2) Once you identify a suitable Link Partner candidate, write a complimentary review for the site and post the review on your website or blog page.

3) Contact the webmaster or owner of the reviewed site, advise them of the review and give them permission to publish the review on their site along with a link pointing back to your site as the review source. As an alternative to publishing the review on their site, they can simply include a link that points to the review on your site.

You can apply this Link Partner strategy to any number of partners you choose, keeping in mind that the more link partners you have, the more effectively you will be able to leverage your efforts and expand your reach.

Productivity is the name of the game. Increased sales are the goal. An effective Link Partner strategy can be the ideal means to achieve the desired end.

You should understand that many affiliates have been doing this for some time and they know exactly what they want or don’t want. The kind of plan you choose to use when paying your affiliates will decide, in many instances, who will join with you and who won’t. There are three main plan categories for you to choose between. Furthermore, there are tiers. We’ll begin with the plans, and then continue onto a talk about tiers.

Pay-per-click, or PPC, plans are the type of programs you may have heard mentioned most often. This kind of affiliate plan, as well as the other choices, is performance based. The way it works is easy. A visitor to a website notices a banner ad or another kind link to a site. He or she clicks on that link. Every click is worth a certain amount of money to the web master of that site. While this is a wonderful plan, there has been some worry recently about “click fraud”, which means clicks are being made with the only purpose being to generate more money for the host site.

Pay-per-sale, or PPS, plans enable greater discretion. With this type of plan the seller only pays the affiliate if a sale is made. Whatever the commission rate is, the seller pays according to the price of the item sold.

Pay-per-lead, or PPL, is the last kind of commission plan. With this arrangement the seller will pay the commission to the affiliate whenever a lead is created. This can result from either directed traffic that visits the seller’s site and registers for something, or is a lead based on a pre-determined criterion.

Now let’s discuss tiers. Tiers work in an easy to understand manner. It all boils down to referrals. Let’s pretend you set up 2 tiers. The first tier is affiliates who approached you directly. They will earn commission on both the traffic they generate and on the traffic generated by their referrals. The second tier consists of affiliates who were sent to you by another affiliate. These affiliates earn commission on their referred visitors, and the first tier affiliate also earns a lower commission, without having to do any work.

These are the main choices you have regarding setting up an affiliate plan. You can iron out the details whatever way suits you best. Keep in mind that the primary question is whether or not your plan will be competitive enough to make affiliates want to join.

Recently JSC made a lead investment into a company called GameChanger and the Iphone Application for scoring baseball. You can find more information about the company at http://www.gamechanger.io. The application is due out in late 2009.

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps to check the density:

• Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.
• Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.
• Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.
• When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.
• Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

There are three major ways in which you can create your landing page conversion rate. All landing pages created by professionals usually include these three elements at a few others.

The first way in which you can increase your conversion rate is through personalization. This is usually done in two ways: the first way is by providing a photo of yourself. The second way is by adding your signature to the bottom of your landing page. This radically increases visitors' trust. Most people who resist buying products online do so because they're weary of getting scammed by a faceless liar, who wont be around when they need help or when they need to return the product. By adding your picture and signature, you can gain visitors' trust.

Another way in which you can increase your landing page conversion rate is by using black text or a white layout. Regardless of what anyone tells you, this is one of the easiest ways in which to make your page look professional, rather than pathetic or desperate.

The third way in which you can gain trust is by offering something for free. This is generally what you will do if you're using a squeeze page to generate leads: you'll offer a free report or five-day course – and then use that to generate leads, which you will later upsell or generate revenue from via affiliate sales. Why is this technique so effective? Quite simply because it allows them to judge your work and ideas before they actually have to pay for them. Additionally, it builds trust.

In addition to these three general ways in which to increase your conversion rate, you should always guarantee a product. If you sell through Click Bank, you actually wont have a choice. But if you're using Paypal or some other check out program, you will want to make sure you clearly state that customers can return your product for any reason within a given period of time after the purchase.

Follow all of these steps and you will significantly increase your landing page conversion rate.