If you sell a product
online, there's a good chance that you have a sales letter for
it. Hopefully you've got a great headline that grabs people's
attention and then sales copy that states the benefits of your
product and is designed to convert visitors to customers. There
is a good chance that you have an affiliate program for your product
and you may even have organized some joint ventures to promote
it.
What about the search engines?
Optimizing sales letters is quite a difficult
process and it's something that many people ignore when they
set up a site to sell their product. The purpose of a sales
letter is to sell a product, not to get traffic. Therefore,
they should be written in a way that specifically targets sales.
This can often mean that the search engine friendly parts of
a page are not targeted. So, what should you do?
The simple answer is that you should not
change a sales letter to try to please the search engines. If
you were to do that, you may end up getting more traffic but
less sales. Getting phrases that people search for into a sales
letter may detract from it's overall message and this will often
prove to be the case if you
try to get keywords into the key parts of a page.
Popular marketing wisdom would suggest that
your headline is the single most important part of a sales letter.
Unfortunately, it's also quite an important factor for the search
engines. The first paragraph or two of a sales letter are also
very important because they can almost close the sale on their
own if you grab
people's interest. Again, unfortunately the first paragraph
or two of a page are quite important to the search engines.
If you were to write an article, you could
get keywords into the headline and first paragraph because they
relate to the article. With a sales letter, using keywords that
relate to the product may not be appropriate because you aren't
providing information as such - you are selling something.
Another issue with sales letters is that
they do tend to be quite long. Therefore, if you are worried
about keyword density, this can cause a problem. Not that you
should worry about keyword density too much but it is an issue.
If you were targeting a two word phrase, you may have to mention
it 100 times or more on your page to get the right density.
Let's face it, there is a good chance that your letter may look
a bit weird
if you did that.
Now, there are two methods that you could
consider using to get traffic from the search engines. The second
one that I discuss here is my personal favorite but using either
will have an effect.
Optimize Your Letter
There are areas of a page that are important
to the search engines but will not change the overall effectiveness
of your sales letter. Therefore, these parts need to be highly
optimized to give you the best chance of success - considering
other important factors will largely be ignored.
Page Title: It is very important that you
have a concise and targeted page title. When people visit your
sales letter they may well look at the page title in their browser
but it is your headline that will catch their attention. They
won't look at the title and say "Nope, not for me".
They'll be happy if the title is a short phrase that matches
up with what they were looking for and so will the search engines.
Keyword Density & Positioning: You can
improve the keyword density of a page by including it in bulleted
lists, quotes and highlighted areas. Often, people will put
a key part of their sales letter in a box or highlight it to
reinforce the point. This is where you can get a few keywords
in. After an important paragraph in your letter, you can either
re-state the information or re-word it. Make sure you get keywords
in here. It's very important that this is obviously an important
point for your reader's benefit. Just re-stating something in
another normal paragraph will look strange.
As I mentioned, bulleted lists are useful
because they are short and to the point - they don't have to
read like a normal sentence or paragraph. So, make sure your
main keyword is included in any bulleted lists - this could
be a list of chapters that your book contains (if you are selling
a book) or a list of the benefits that your product will bring
the purchaser.
If you have testimonials for your product,
include the ones that contain your keywords near the top of
your page. Obviously you shouldn't re-write a testimonial but
if you have a couple that do actually contain your keywords,
make them prominent. Prominent, from a search engine perspective,
is as high up your page as possible.
Bold Text: Things such as bold text and the
use of italics can have some effect on how well the search engines
rank your page. It won't have a huge effect but in this situation
we are trying to optimize everything that we can. Sales letters
are often filled with bold text, italics, different colors and
so on. It's important that you make important points stand out
on your page.
Now, you can make important points stand
out for the search engines also. Try to be sparing with your
use of bold text and try, where possible, to only use it to
highlight points that include your keywords. As I said, only
do this where possible - don't go through changing your whole
sales letter.
These are just a few little things that you
can do to optimize your sales letter. Don't forget to also get
links pointing to your sales letter and, where possible, use
keywords in the anchor text. For example, my book is called
Rankings Revealed but I try to get links to my sales page to
say "Search Engine Rankings Revealed".
Don't Optimize Your Letter
As I said earlier, this is the approach that
I prefer. I don't optimize sales letters at all. I use other
pages to try to draw traffic from the search engines. These
pages establish my credentials and I then forward them to the
sales letter.
You should compile a list of relevant keywords
and phrases and then write some informative articles that focus
on each of these. Now, articles offer a much easier way to get
your keywords into the important places - headline, first few
paragraphs and so on. Optimize these articles as much as possible
using Title tags, Headings, Bold text and so on.
Add these to your site and link to them from
wherever you can. Make sure that the link text uses keywords.
Each article should have a few prominent
links to the sales letter for your product. These could be in
the actual text of the article or you could just provide a link
from the end of the article.
You can also add these articles to all of
the article directories online. The benefits of this are twofold.
The
article itself can draw search engine traffic - even if it is
on another site. Then, people follow the link to your sales
letter. Also, this link to the sales letter will increase it's
link popularity.
Please Note: If you are going to submit the
article to other sites, you shouldn't really have links to your
sales letter in the body of the article. Just link to it from
your bio box at the bottom.
You should never compromise the quality of
your sales letter in order to get traffic from the search engines.
Obviously traffic from the search engines is very important
- largely because you don't need to pay anyone a commission
to get a sale. However, if you look for other ways to get good
rankings you'll find the options are there. This may not be
a direct approach but it will work.
There you have a couple of ways to get traffic
from the search engines to your sales page. Again, the second
option works much better for me because it allows a much greater
degree of flexibility and allows me to target a much wider range
of keywords. This approach may not work for you and you may
find that you can optimize your sales letter page without harming
your conversion rate.
Do some testing and you'll soon find which
is more suitable for your situation.
About the author:
Sean Burns has over six years experience in setting up, maintaining
and profiting from websites from the comfort of his home. Sean
is also the author of Rankings Revealed which shows you how
easy it is to achieve top 10 rankings on the major search engines
-
http://www.webmastersreference.com/
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