Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a hot topic today. The trouble is, as a term, it's a lot like "Artificial Intelligence" where it has been said that anything that doesn't fit into a clear-cut niche gets dumped into it.
It also fits into a very strange gap in the marketplace.
Businesses that want to get more attention to their web sites are told they need to pay attention to SEO. But who do they call?
If you call a typical marketing consulting firm and tell them you want to improve your traffic and conversions on your web site, they'll usually tell you to talk to a web development firm.
If you call some web outfit, they'll tell you it's a marketing function and refer you to the folks handling your marketing.
Web designers are trained primarily as graphic artists. They are experts in Adobe Creative Suite tools, and they also know a little about managing web servers. They don't really know much about online marketing other than how to send out email blasts.
Marketing firms don't know much about the internet, or how to market on the internet. If you do a search on Google for "San Francisco ad agency" for instance, and you look at the web sites that show up in the top page of results, you'll notice they all have one thing in common: they all make very heavy use of Flash, which is not only invisible to search engines, but it's "all show and no Go". They are missing virtually every aspect considered important and necessary to market anything online. Yet, these guys are supposed to be shining examples of "The Right Stuff"?
If you want to actually promote and sell anything online, whether it be software, info products, services, books, courses, whatever, you need to focus on "Internet Marketing" topics.
Stay away from using Flash and glitzy stuff on your web site.
Focus on building a simple site designed to attract visitors, suck them into whatever conversation you've got on your landing page, and get them to take some kind of action. Getting them to opt-in to your list is a great idea. Buying something is also good.
You need some kind of Call-To-Action if you want to profit from the traffic coming to the site.
One thing you can do is study how to get more organic traffic yourself using common SEO techniques. There are a number of them, as well as lots of tools to help make your job easier.
Here's another article I wrote that sheds some more light on the subject:
SEO Tools and Tips You Can Use Today
I hope this short article has been helpful.
-David
