Mark looks at some important aspects that will determine if you have any chance to make an impact on the web with your current or proposed web site. Key areas which Mark takes a look at are:

• Help People Find Your Web Site
• Make Sure Your Home Page Resolves Correctly
• Create Quality Content — and Lots of It

Of course, remember that every website is reletive to its competitors. If your competitors are ranking high in search engines and offer the same or similar website content, services, products or layout to yours, then there is probably no reason why you, too should not be able to rank high.

“[Visitors] will come only if you’ve structured your information in a way that’s easy for visitors to navigate, and for search engines to understand.”

Herndon gives you six steps to follow in order to structure your website in the most ideal way:

1. Start with an audit of your product offerings.
2. Take your list to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.
3. Compare your findings to your product list.
4. Classify your products.
5. Leverage your products.
6. Race to the bottom.

Read the full article on “SEO Friendly Site Structure – If You Build it, Will They Come?“.

1. Awareness
2. Interest
3. Desire
4. Action

To read more on this process read his article on “Landing Pages and the Decision Making Process“.

In “The Decision-Making Funnel, Stage 1: Awareness“, Tim addresses the issues concerning awareness and attention. Specifically, Tim looks at:

• Permission Marketing
• The Rules of Web Awareness
• Banner Ads
• Entry Pop-Ups
• Exit Pop-Ups
• Home Page Awareness

This article entitled “How To Optimize For Conversion In Organic Search Results” gives you a detailed overview of what are good measures of success for SEO efforts. In the past it was all about getting your keywords ranked high in search engines, however today we delve a lot deeper in order to maintain and target visitors precisely.

It may be very well and good to have plenty of informative content on your website but if your website pages do not include the correct keywords, that which potential visitors are typing into search engines, then what are the chances that search engines will rank you highly for keyword phrases that generate a load of traffic? The answer is zilch, zero, nichts. Visit our article “What are Keywords All About” to learn more about keyword selection.

To target the correct keyword phrases we need to collect an extensive amount of data to find out several things.

The most important is keywords or keyword phrases which generate a high amount of traffic. For these are the most valuable keywords to your website that will bring in the most traffic.

As well as this however, we need to be sure that of those keywords and keyword phrases with high traffic, that we select keywords which are more likely to convert into customers. It may be well and good to have thousands of visitors flowing through your site, but if they are not converting into paying customers, then there is little point.

The third step is to filter these keywords to select those which can be inserted into your website best in order to keep the content flowing and natural to read. The last thing we want is to create content that does not make sense to your visitors due to over-optimization of website content.

Since there are thousands (and sometimes tens of thousands) of keywords and keyword phrases that visitors are typing into search engines, this can often be a very tedious process which demands much concentration and effort.

After we have found the best keywords and keyword phrases for your site we need to look at keyword insertion and keyword density. Keyword density is an extremely important step, as the incorrect keyword density may result in a spam filter being flagged on your site from search engines, meaning that you may actually decrease your website ranking rather than increase it. Find out more about keyword density in our previous article “Is Keyword Density Important?“.

Another important step is to analyze your competitors. We will look at whether or not they have employed content optimization (or search engine optimization) and analyze which keywords they are targeting. We will compare their content amount to yours and see where you can improve over their shortcomings. After all they may be ranked above you in search engines – we want it the other way around.

Hopefully, from this article, you have learned the importance of content optimization and some of the steps which take place to get the best results. There is a great amount of work that needs to go into content optimization if you aim to do it correctly and find those keywords to target that less of your competitors are targeting and which result in just as much or higher visitor numbers and a higher conversion rate to give you a higher Return On Investment.