Do You Use These Calls to Action?

It’s my ongoing quest (that word always reminds me of Shrek) to find the best way to engage my targets.  I think MSFT gets a bum rap on adCenter and I’ve always found it to be much better than adwords, conversion-rate-wise, anyhow.  Point being that they have some very helpful tips, including a recent post on some of their better performing Call-to-Action phrases, which include:

1. Book Now
2. Reserve
3. Save Now
4. Discover your
5. Sign up Today
6. Buy Now
7. Pay Less
8. Order now
9. Research

Do you have any others to add?  Any conversion rates to share?

Speak with you soon.  DC

Real SEO - Tags, Text, Links

Yes, it can work. I reworked all page titles and added key anchor text, all grounded in a few core keywords. Results? From "SERP >40" to "<5" on core keywords in less than 2 weeks. Really. Is your inhouse Team doing the same? How about your consultant? Its not bragging but more of a statement on the importance of focusing on relevant changes. Oh yeah, it helps to have a LOT of inbound links, but hey, thats the truly important part of effective SEO anyways -- and you cant get a third party expert to do that for you, so watch out.
Speak with you soon. DC

Do You Understand Link Building, Keywords & Anchor Text?

We know the power (and importance) of link building. So while I was reading a few good SEO posts at seomoz, it reminded me that I promised a link building post of my own. Simply put, to build effective SEO, it’s important to be consistent when working on internal links, anchor text, and keywords. Perhaps an illustration will help convey my point.

Suppose you own a company that sells toys (with "toys" being the most generic word for the company’s products) and the company’s website is toysabc.com. Pick four keywords (KW) to drive your anchor text efforts.

The illustration below presents a suggested link structure, rich with anchor-text-laden keywords, that should help drive higher page rank scores and improve average times on your toysabc.com site.

Obviously, your architecture needs to support subpage folders and your Marketing Team still needs to complete the fundamental work in your keyword research efforts.

I hope this helps. Speak with you soon. DC

5 SEO Tips - you have your robots.txt so now what?

Now that the spiders can crawl your site (see my most recent post on creating a robots.txt file), where should you focus your SEO energy to get the most impact? My five suggested areas are:

• Title tags and urls
• Other tags and headings
• Keywords and content
• Site map
• Site registration

I will try to blog individually about each area in my next several posts, but for now, if you can focus on these five areas, you may reduce your dependency on your SEO consultant and actually improve your page ranks in a fairly short period of time! And remember, Google owns all this stuff so if anyone tells you they truly know how to crack the SEO code, use caution...unless their names are either Larry or Sergey.

Speak with you soon. DC