Search Engine Optimization - SEO - Why Should a Salesman Care

Fifty hours a week, sometimes more, you make the calls, fight the traffic, call back for an answer the 14th time and get voice mail. But once in a while, the phone rings and its a free lead. They saw your ad. They looked up promotional products in the yellow pages. More likely today, they Googled something like Custom Imprinted Products - Austin, TX. Or they went to Ask Jeeves an typed: where can I find the best printed water bottles in the world?

When that happens, you want to be found among the responses. Back in January, we decided to type in Custom bicycle bottles. To our great dismay, we didn't show up on any list for 25 pages or more. Being competitive in nature and knowing this wasn't helping our sales, we put in hours and hours of research. Now we are on the first page or two on all of our "Key words" and "Key phrases." How did we do that?

I'm going to break this post up into several days, because there is much to much to tell in one article.

TEXT IS EVERYTHING

Since we are in a product driven business, and our roots are in advertising, we are inclined to want to say it with pictures. White space is our friend. Too much copy kills the ad. Not true on the web. Not if you want to be found by the major search engines.

The Spiders (computerized agents that go out to find relevant information) are sent out every day to update what the SE (search engine) will list when you type in key words. They do not look for and cannot read pictures!! With regard to web site content, they typically look for:

The first 250 words
Headlines
Words in Bold or Caps
Word density

Therefore, the first thing you want to do is to make sure that the first 250 word shown on your site are filled with key words, and that those key words are capitalized, made bold, and appear in headlines.

For instance, today your site might have a beautiful picture on the front page with words like "Make Your event special. We are ready to help you with your planning. Our marketing professionals are trained to evaluate your unique needs, and help you to accomplish your sales goals. Call us for a free consultation."

The search engine would maybe use event planning professional. So if anyone ever typed that in, you would be on the list somewhere. However, if your first 250 words started out:

CUSTOM IMPRINTED PRODUCTS are the core business at Smith's Advertising Specialty Company. Our promotional products specialists are ready to help you with any custom imprinted product requirements you might have. We carry 70,000 unique promotional products that can be custom imprinted, many in 4 color process.

This opening will be scanned by the spider and it will see that you really care about custom imprinted and promotional products. You will move up the list on both of those subjects or any variation. So the bold items above are the key words you are trying to get noticed on.

You might have other key words that are more important to you. Like the example above, your city might be important if your business is mostly local. So, make sure your city name is in the first 150 words at least once. This will also help to differentiate you from others who are trying for a high position on the other key words.

Maybe you are interested in a special niche, like schools. Write your copy to include the words you want to have the Spider find. The spiders are trying to be logical. They really want the person doing the search to find relevant pages. Your job is to help the search engine find the relevant things on your pages.

That way, you can get those calls from out of the blue for 100,000 California Springs Water Bottles. Right?!?