Social media along with Internet have made life much easier for online entrepreneurs as well as offline businesses. People who are making the most of this time are building media asset on their own too. There are people who are going unarmed into the battle. They do not possess any critical tools or knowledge for succeeding online. There are three things that you need to take care of while building online home base.

Design optimization

A user friendly and professional looking Web site is a must for achieving your ultimate goals and this has got more affordable too. You will have to make sure that the underlying code of the site design is clean and compliant with the standards for ensuring maximum search engine friendliness. Most prefer WordPress for managing and publish content online but not all WordPress themes are optimized for business goals, search engines and usability. You must look for good WordPress theme frameworks around for providing solid foundation for your sites.

Content optimization

It is really important that you create compelling content which people will love. I have put in a lot of strategies, tips and tricks on my blog. You can go through them for getting better results. You need to work properly in order to make sure that search engines like Google get you the right traffic. There are three finer points that I wish to share for SEO.

SEO is now down to 3 basic things -

• Languages that searchers use.
• The way which search engines see your content.
• The trust which search engines have in your site.

Conversion optimization

It is really important that your ultimate goals are met. Nothing else matters more than that and these goals always involve people who take some form of action. Your landing page must be good and it should get more people to buy, sell and call you up. You should make sure that you have the right page design.

Ok I will come straight to the point instead of beating around the bush. Use the cliffhanger. It is a striking event which takes place at the end of a story and leaves doubts in the minds of readers. It usually makes them think about the fate of the protagonist and thus it forces them to come

back to see what happens next. In the world of online content, you should create each ‘scene’ in such a way that your readers go deeper and deeper in to the story. This is a media cluttered world and your blog, social media outposts, emails and your offline activities need to be good but that is not enough.

You might use a terrific headline to make your readers read the entire post but it is also essential to end the story in such a way that they’d want to come back and read the next post. You can wrap up the story with any fascinating teasers saying that the next post is going to contain a lot of beneficial content.

Or you could build some sort of mystery, fever, and anticipation around the release of the next product. This will surely make your readers come back to read the following post. Remember the famous TV series ‘Lost’? The fans got so impatient that they started posting their scripts online just to satisfy thirst. Internet is a big stage and content creators are just players. The best story will win no matter what kinda business you are in. It is essential that you leave your readers hanging.

This formula has been widely used in a lot of places and you probably know about it too. But then a lot of people often skip out on basic rules and spend hours on the Internet looking for more convoluted mantras. Hence I decided to blog about it here.

This is the age of traveling content and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are at the peak of their powers. The way search engines work have also changed recently with Google declaring war on content farms and Facebook partnering with Bing. To make your content famous, there are two things that you need to know. First, the content must be of good quality and second, the content should travel well. Here are my few bits to maximize the reach of your content.

1. The content should be of good quality –
   

   There are 2 ways for doing this. Either create content that people will be able to use or create content that will entertain them. It can be hard to create good quality content but it will certainly pay rich dividends.The content should be an ambassador of the brand. For instance, in a natural foods cereal company, it was seen that topics related to health were outperforming the articles that were related to the product or brand message.

2. The message should be well organized -
   Organizations should not be restricted to silos as it can get in the way of spreading the content around well. For instance, there can be a bunch of old-school editors who do not want to work with social media team because they are in the marketing department. There should be a small reorganization which would put social team in editorial. Social should integrated and not separated.
3. You should be operating like a publisher –
   Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter can turn brands in to publishers. You should publish regularly and also provide useful or entertaining content for increasing chances of staying on top of the mind of your desired audiences. The blog should be updated regularly and should contain shareable posts. Presentation too is important. Present the content in a format in such a way that it should appeal to the eyes. Long boring paragraphs will put your audiences to sleep.
4. Your content should be portable –
   Make sure there is a ‘Bookmark & Share’ widget for your content so that people can share it easily. There are tools of social sharing which give you one click option for sending all the content in a social network and you never know who you’d meet. You should meet the targeted audience where they are, instead of forcing them to meet you.
5. Your content should be findable –
   When you are investing in content, you should make sure that it travels far. It should be optimized for the road. You can put videos and games in standard sizes or ratios so that they are pretty easy to embed. The recipes or reviews should contain microformat data so that they can be found easily by the search crawlers. It is also recommended to create a mobile version of the sites. An RDF or Resource Description Framework should be used for tagging the content and for using standard based, good codes. There are other tools like Embedly which will maximize sharablility.

I have some very basic problems with SEO copywriting. Many times it is seen that the focus is altogether on the keyword itself, but there isn’t nearly enough emphasis put on the content itself. This is why I am not in favor of SEO copywriting; not enough people care enough about to do it well. Conversely, I feel that is anything is worth doing, it is worth doing well. It reminds me in many ways of 1999. Everyone just wanted to get their website out, but no one cared about the quality of their website; they just wanted one. It resulted in so many cringe-inducing website designs that are laughable in retrospect. It is the same with SEO copywriting today. Not everyone is focusing on quality at all.

Just how do you optimize something that looks to be dead on arrival? Look at the keyword for sure, but at the very least you can try to enjoy yourself while writing it and make the content the best it can be. It doesn’t have to seem like you’re flogging a dead horse. Get the content right and you’ll be able to attract links and attention quite easily. Quality always shines through in the end, after all. And you can only optimize something that is functional in the first place. Where is the sense in optimizing something that is fundamentally broken to begin with?

Now though, things seem to be coming a full circle. Experts are now saying that SEO doesn’t matter any more and that you don’t need to game the system since traffic just comes. But I don’t agree with this. It is the online equivalent of a business saying that we don’t need to do marketing since the business will just happen and customers will come. You wouldn’t follow this tack for a real-time business. What makes an online business that different? Again, traffic just happens to come your way if your content is unique and of a certain quality. And you shouldn’t make it hard to find. But this might not be the right kind of traffic for you unless you’re lucky.

And if you just “got lucky”, chances are that you don’t know what to do with SEO copywriting. In the next article, I will talk about some simple SEO copywriting tips for you to improve yourself. But again, the onus to dish out quality content is entirely upon you. If something is worth doing, do it well. The same is true of SEO copywriting.