I cannot stress enough how important it is to include a marketing professional in your web design project. Moving graphics require coding that is not read by search engines.  Too much of it surrounding your HTML (the content that is understood by search engines) is likely to be missed or skipped over.  As a rule of thumb, keeping all moving graphics or text within the header of your site is the best policy for providing a “content rich” website that will have a much better chance at being found or ranking in the SERP’s 

This is just one of the very important reasons you should include a web marketing professional in your web design project, however there are thousands of others.  Often people lump web designers in with internet marketers and vice versa.  What is important to remember is that although their services may overlap in relation to that website, their purpose is very different.  A web designer is interested in two things 1. The way the site looks, and the client satisfaction in how it looks.  Internet Marketing professionals care much less about how a site looks and more about its functionality for users and marketability to search engines.   Asking or expecting your web designer to make your site “SEO Friendly” is like asking an electrician to build a house. 

The biggest downside of excluding a marketing professional in the web design process is that trying to make changes after the fact is sometimes more difficult even impossible without a complete redesign.  Internet marketing has a huge focus on code/content that is the framework of your website.  Just like a house,  if you take the frame away the entire house comes crashing down.

Whatever you do to sell your product off the internet, you must be twice as good at it online. For one, you are basically attempting the impossible, to convince people to buy your product without saying an audible word.  It’s like someone asking you to sell shoes for example without speaking a word and without letting the buyer try them on.  Every purchase made on the internet is viewed as a risk by a buyer for many reasons. To name one of the more obvious is, will I like it once I get it? Buyers also hesitate for safety reasons, cautious of paying for the item and never getting it. As an ecommerce marketer you are asking people to “take your word for it,” that the product is worth the cost and that you are a legitimate business selling a legitimate product.  This is in addition to the thousands of other objections that go along with buying something before getting to see it up close. Why would someone want to purchase something online versus in a retail store? Truthfully I cannot think of any.  As an online marketer,  you have to create that reason.  Probably the most common reason people would actually prefer to buy it in a retail store is the immediate satisfaction it brings.  Overcoming this objection is quite possibly the hardest one since most buyers would actually pay a higher premium to satisfy their need to have it now.  By giving your potential buyer a lower price and free shipping creates a reason to buy your product online versus in a store.  If your margins are already tight, you may want to rethink internet sales especially if your competitors are offering free shipping.  Believe it or not this is a big deal breaker no matter how little or how much the shipping costs actually are.  Assuming now that you have reduced your price for the product and offered free shipping, “what risk are you going to take to even the score for the risk they are taking by giving you their money, trusting that they will eventually get the product if all goes well. This includes the unforeseen shipping blunders that now add a third party to their risk of purchasing.  That’s a lot to ask of someone you don’t know, don’t you think?  What kind of guarantees do you offer?  What is your return policy? Can people ask questions with a quick reply when inquiring about your product?  Can people sample it before they buy it?  I urge every internet marketer to have a solid return policy that guarantees the buyers satisfaction in the purchase otherwise the most prevailing guarantee is – no sale.

Your lead capture must be polished and you have to be willing to give something away.  You take a risk and the buyer takes a risk. Whatever it is you use to persuade your audience to buy, it must be worthwhile, bordering on exciting! The idea on the internet is to sell your product in bulk to make up for how low you’ve had to reduce the price. Now with all of that said, before worrying about how to sell to your visiting traffic, you may want to first worry about getting them to your site.  That in itself is enough of a challenge to kill off the first round of the misled marketers before even making a single sale.  Do I think selling something on the internet is easy?  The answer is a resounding, “NO.” Contrary to the belief of a large majority, it is one of the hardest sales to make.

Adding to the blog with be posts from the experts themselves on their respective topic.  Our goal with this project is to initiate interaction and create an environment that opens up the communication lines.  Anybody intererested in getting information on any of the 5 mentioned  managed services, nows your chance to get it free from experts.  As some may know, since the conception of managed services they have found this service model to be a growing need for the small business owner as oppossed to the Enterprise business model that is started from.  The magazine is due to launch on September 9th.  Check it out if you’re interested at Managed Service Providers

  Content Writing:  Make it Simple

For those of you who find it difficult to put words on paper in any sort of logical order here are a few tips to help make it easy. 

Make an outline of what you want to say or the message you want to get across.  Content writing is much easier when you first organize your thoughts with an outline.  Start by putting the major points to discuss on paper but don’t worry about the order.  Later when you have jotted all of them down begin by putting them in an order that seems logical.  This will dramatically help your content writing to have flow, and to make sense. 

After putting your topics in order, make bullet points under each one of the key points.  Make this brief!  This should only be an outline or highlights of each section. One sentence per bullet point although you may have several bullet points if that subject contains many different things to talk about.  Here is an example:

 Subject:  How to Write Content

Style of Content Writing

• point of view (1st or third person)
• stick to one throughout

Planning your content writing

•  Jot down major points to discuss
•  Put in chronlogical order
•  Under each heading put bullet points of key information to discuss

Writing the Content

• Write the intro paragraph (brief summary of topics for discussion)
• Using outline as a guide write content that is rich with information

Summing up the written content

•  write a summary or conclusion paragraph
•  should relate to your intro paragraph by summing up the points discussed

Having a guide as you write your content, helps to organize your thoughts and ensures you stay on track with your ideas and information.  While it may seem like added work, it will actually save you time.  Once the outline is prepared, you are more than halfway done.  Try it the next time you are staring blankly at a white screen like a deer in headlights.

The general design of the site can be a critical feature on the readability of your site by the major search engines. Though sites programmed with flash animation tend to be eye catching they originally were unable to be indexed by Google.  So they were eye catching if you could actually find them.  A recent article put out by Google states of an improvement in their search engines ability to read flash animation but not something I would even risk if your goal is to be found in the search results.  Despite the good idea to leave flash animation out of the body of the site having your header with such programming adds a similar appeal yet remains SEO friendly. This is just one of the many things to keep in mind while building an optimized site.

Another factor of SEO that can be incorporated into web design is the ALT image Tag feature.  Here the web designer would enter a keyword within the programming of each graphic that appears on the page.  This lends additional opportunity for keyword instances that attract search engines for user search.  Because this is not easily done by an SEO Consultant after the site has been completed and most often requires the assistance of a web designer it helps to instill these features during the initial construction.

Keyworded urls are also an important feature for SEO.  Sometimes this offers an excellent opportunity to drop keywords/phrases in for added optimization assuming your domain name has the keyword in it and if it doesn’t this feature is especially important.  Let’s look at an example of a keyworded URL and how we can maximize keyword usage.  Remember any link that has our keyword in it is worth twice its weight a keyword.  So let’s say the keyword is “Button Jewelry”  the domain name is www.uniquebuttonjewelry.com/  and one of the pages on her site found by clicking on the navigation button that says “browse our shop” has a url that looks like this www.uniquebuttonjewelry.com/buybuttonjewelry.html   The keyword “button jewelry” has now appeared twice within the url  and although by itself may not lend much weight in terms of optimization, when used in conjunction with the many other urls for your website this can have a strong affect on a sites performance in the search results. 

While there are many more SEO tactics that one can incorporate into the initial design of their website these are some of the basics and ones that will lend assistance with a site’s performance in the search results.  Remember to talk with your web designer about building these features and more into your website.  This could save you a lot of work later.  http://www.contentwriterseo.com