If you want people to click your links and buy the stuff you’re selling, you want visiting your site to be a pleasant experience.  Think like a real estate agent and go for some curb appeal to get people in the buying mood.

Here are some tips in terms of design that can help you up your conversion rate.

White Space

Does your site have sufficient white space around it? By that, I mean that if it’s all crowded and everything is densely piled on the page, it can be a turn off. Break up your text into smaller paragraphs and add some subheadings so people can quickly scan the page and something interesting will actually pop out.

Too Much Advertising?

How much is too much in terms of ads? It’s a good idea to experiment and there probably isn’t a right or wrong answer but if people are inundated, they might not know where to click. The adage of “Less is More” can often be true in terms of advertising.

Photos

A picture can speak a thousand words. If you want people to think money, maybe you should have a picture of dollar signs. If you want them to think financial freedom, a nice yacht in the background might work well. Besides, plain text can be…boring.

Have a look at some sites in your niche that are doing really well and see what makes them look good. Study their copy, look at their design and dabble a little. If you have regular visitors, it wouldn’t even hurt to poll them on what they like and don’t like about your site design.

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

If you need to write content for your blog or a site that promotes your affiliate products, it can be frustrating when you are faced with writer’s block. Don’t despair, help is here! There are a lot of things you can do to free yourself of a block so you can keep fresh content on your sites and get people visiting as well as search engines too!

Stumble Around Cyberspace

Cyberspace has a lot to see and do and visiting websites can inspire you. Stumbleupon.com is not just a great tool for self-promotion but it can offer you great inspiration as well. It presents you with sites based on categories you’re interested in so be sure you’re signed up to stumble through sites in your own niche.

Visit Your Mentors

Hopefully you are inspired by a successful online entrepreneur (hint, hint) and if so, stop by their blogs and read their material. Chances are, you could feel inspired to write your own stuff.

Good Ole Google

Google News, Google Trends, Google Blogs, etc, etc, etc…Surf Google’s many areas until you feel inspired so you can write. If all else fails, watch TV or take a walk and clear your head and chances are that when you come back, you’ll have ideas.

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

If you’re not making it to top spot in Google for your desired keywords but you have a great meta description, you might get just as many visitors.

Most people who know anything about the internet are not confident enough to hit the “I feel lucky” button. Most people want choices so they’ll look at a few things when they do a search before they decide to click.

URL Name

If you’re in the top five spot they’ll probably check your URL name and see how relevant it sounds. This is a good reason to be choosy about your domain name.

Meta Description

The few sentences that describes what the page is about is something that’s going to make a bit difference. If you’re in spot three and your meta description is better than spot one or two, you’re going to be as likely as your competitors are to get a click. Look at your competitor descriptions and decide that yours has to be better. Beyond keyword and related keyword proximity, does it pique curiosity and tell the reader that your site has what they need? If not, you might want to play with it and see how some changes work out. A good meta description will help your SEO and will help you get more traffic even if you’re not at spot #1.

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

Internet marketing has some stiff competition and if you study your competition, you can get ahead. The great thing about online competition is that there are almost no secrets, really.

Sure, your competition might not be 100% transparent but there are a lot of things you can research and learn in order to improve your chances of increasing how much money you’re making on a constant basis. Here’s what you do:

Pick Your Top Three Competitors

Look at your targeted keywords and pick the top three competitors who seem to be getting the market you want. Study everything about them! Read all their website content, put Google Alerts out there about them and about your niche in general so you’ll learn about their businesses constantly (set a daily alert instead of on demand if you’re worried about inbox inundation), dissect their landing pages and sales letters to see what they’re doing and opt in to their mailing lists so you can see exactly what they’re up to!

Emulate But Don’t Copy

Emulating your mentors isn’t the same as copying them. You aren’t looking to plagiarize or rip off your competition; you’re gaining market intelligence and seeing what makes them so profitable.  Learning about the competition’s techniques and strategies will help you and if you gather information about more than one, you’ll be well on your way to evolving and learning on a constant basis!

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

We all know that Google is the big one (for today, anyway) to work your SEO magic for but should you take the time to optimize for more than one search engine online?

If you search key phrases on Google and on another search engine such as Yahoo you’ll often see rather different results.  Some people find that their efforts net great results on one and not such great results on the other.

Different Search Engine, Different Algorithm

Different search engines use different algorithms with their search engine spiders when determining which sites are relevant to various subjects.  One search engine might be more apt to look at your header and others might look at your keyword density for articles.Another might take a strong look at whether you have images and meta descriptions and how often your page is updated.

The key is to write good content so that when the visitors come, they’ll want to buy something!  If your content is relevant, the search engines will find you and it’s better to get targeted traffic that converts than to get empty volumes of traffic.

In terms of focusing, optimizing for Google is a wise move as it will probably give you the best bang for your time and money. You’ll find that if you optimize for Google and really concentrate on high quality content, you’ll naturally get good results with other top search engines.  It’s difficult to optimize for everyone and a tweak might move you higher on the results page on one search engine but could give you a consequence of losing placement on another and that loss could translate to big money for you.

The only way to really optimize for more than one is to design multiple websites and optimize each with seperate techniques specifically for a search engine.

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008