Online Marketing for Local Business
Posts tagged web copy
Keep it Fresh!
14 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
There are a number of important reasons why you should be keeping the content on your website fresh. The most simple, and critical, reason is to keep your current and future visitors engaged and interested in what you have to say. Stale content, such as promoting a sale or talking about an event that took place 6 months ago, has the potential to really “turn off” visitors to your website.
Another important reason for updated content that I reference a lot with clients is the SEO value that it can provide. Simply put, search engines really like to “see” fresh, new content (text, graphics, charts, video, downloads, etc.) on a website.
They figure that if someone is taking the time to continually add new stuff to the website, some of it is probably fairly relevant information or data, and probably deserves to be ranked higher than a site which is rarely or never updated.
Providing updated content can also support good customer service within your organization, be necessary for regulatory or legal reasons, or help you maintain company/brand reputation, among others. Bottom line, you need to keep your website fresh! And if you don’t have the time, energy or skill to maintain a regular blog or create updates for your webpages, find someone who can help. Even a relatively small investment can pay big dividends down the road.
(Need some ideas for what to write about? Here’s an older post on how to “re-purpose” old marketing materials…)
Don't Be Scrooge With Outbound Links on Your Website
15 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
So, you’ve worked hard to get visitors to your web site. I know. (I’ve worked rather hard to get YOU to read THIS.)
And now you’re asking if you should provide outbound links. Well, should you?
What if visitors leave via those links, and then never come back? It’s a concern that many business owners and newer website administrators or writers have.
But let me tell you a secret: Visitors leave when they’ve seen enough. Period.
When they have read (or glanced at) your article or articles; whether they have read an interesting tid bit or have read every last word, they leave. Nothing you can do will stop this. Trying to box them into your site won’t stop them from leaving.
Besides, the truth is that many visitors aren’t even relevant to your objectives – as some of you reading this are undoubtedly to mine – so you might as well provide them with helpful directions or a pathway to a more appropriate web site. Who knows, maybe they WILL be quite relevant to your business later on, and will remember your usefulness?
Does this mean you link to direct competitors, or have outbound links all over the page? Certainly not. But spreading a little love by placing some outbound links makes your own site that much more relevant. If you have a good business, and you provide value on your website, you will get your fair share of customers!
A good related article, and outbound link I might add! Don’t be a link miser.
How to Increase the Life Expectancy of Your Online Content
015 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
Go Green – Evergreen, that is! You can greatly increase the life expectancy of your online content by remembering to write in a “timeless” manner.
Writing a regular stream of fresh articles is critical to your article marketing (or blogging) success. However, it’s also important to make your articles as “evergreen” as possible, with content that stays fresh and useful long after you publish it. Being sensitive to how your articles could be read in the upcoming years will help keep them from eventually becoming stale, irrelevant pieces of text.
Most publishers that you are trying to attract with your articles prefer evergreen content as well, for a very clear reason. Evergreen content makes your articles (or postings) more useful to their readers for a longer period, and they can spend less of their own time pulling out stale content. So if done correctly, your articles might live on for years and years on a publisher’s website.
So How to Increase Your Evergreen Factor?
Remove the Time Element – Notice how the evergreen title below drops the year reference? Be sure to remove any time-specific references in the body copy, too.
Stale: “Hot Summer Fashion Trends in 2010”
Evergreen: “Hot Summer Footwear Trends: Flip-Flops vs. Sandals”
Find Long-Lasting Angles on Time-Sensitive Topics – This allows you to take even topical news items or recent events and make them virtually timeless.
Stale: Writing about this week’s top-ranked golfers in the world.
Evergreen: Writing about the characteristics and traits of top-ranked golfers, and how you can incorporate some of their success into your own game.
Use the One-Year Test – After you write your next article, read it again and imagine it’s one year later. Is your article still relevant? You should rewrite anything that would be outdated.
Stale: “10 Things You Need to Know Before Investing $499 on Apple’s Hot New iPad”
Evergreen: “10 Things You Should Know Before Purchasing an iPad”
The concept of evergreen content can of course be in mind when you begin writing any fresh, new article, and you can also apply the concept when you older content you have previously created and re-work it to become “evergreen”!