Hire Professional Copywriters

At FoundPages, we can tell right away if a website is professionally done - without even looking at it. You could read it to us and we would know. If we stay awake that is. And it won't even be the typos...

Persuasive copy writing is more important than it's given credit for. Sure, a killer website helps but beyond how it looks, it needs to read well and have calls to actions (CTA). And just as professional website designers can ensure your company is taken seriously, a professional copywriter can help convince your prospects and audience to start a conversation with your company.

This is not to say that you should abdicate all the content to some stranger. Using a copywriter can be like using a consultant. Someone to help you, because they do it everyday versus your 1-2 year update. It doesn't have to be for all your content, just the key pages. And you'll still have your say in the end, because someone still has to edit and proof all this.

They will understand concepts like personas because they will ask you who your customer looks like (figuratively speaking) and write specifically for each type. By not understanding your product and services totally, they can help you do a better job because they will be more likely to NOT understand what you do, and write accordingly to make it understandable.

Most copywriters will also know how to get the prospect to the next step or the CTA. Without this, all you have is an expensive electronic brochure. Most companies will try to 'dump' everything they have on a website, because they know so much about the products and services. On the other hand, a good copywriter will persuade them to fill out a form or call you. And they should be able to do this with copy that conveys your message, without being wordy.

A bonus is you'll save time, get around that writer's block and get that new website launched that much faster!

SEO Ranking Factors

As an online marketing firm with a history of expertise in search engine optimization, we've done many SEO projects. At last count, over 70 are done or in progress. We would do more except for the fact that so much confusion exists around them that it takes a long time to both sell and complete. There are a myriad of reasons, mostly to do with misconceptions of what works and what doesn't, by a company that thinks it has some in-house expertise, or worse yet 'a friend' who knows how to do SEO. We get more than a few of these later, after they have failed, or even get banned by the search engines.

With appropriate attribution to SEOmoz.org, I will list the top ten positive factors, as they have 'found' by getting feedback from some of the top SEO gurus. We've reviewed them and for the most part agree with them, although your mileage may vary, based on your OWN website. They are:

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Global Link Popularity of Site
3. Anchor Text of Inbound Links
4. Link Popularity within the Site
5. Age of Site
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
   
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
   
10. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site

This list wouldn't be complete without the top 10 controversial factors:

1. Manual Authority/Weight Given to Site by Google
   
2. Relevance of Site's Primary Subject
3. Participation in Link Schemes or Actively Selling Links
   
4. Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages
   
5. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
   
6. Quality of the Document Content
   
7. Domain Extension of Linking Site
8. Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
   
9. External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
   
10. TLD Extension of Site (edu, gov, org, etc)
    

It's worth noting that although these factors are weighted and appear to have been researched carefully, Google's algorithm in particular has hundreds if not thousands of factors that it takes into consideration, both on-page and off-page. As you can surmise, it's an ongoing process with a lot of variables.

So the next time somebody says they can do SEO, bring some of this up and see if they know what they're doing.... The entire article can be found at: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#f53