Knowledge base: Search Engine Optimisation
How to turn website visitors into paying customers
The most important part of your website is the text. The purpose of your website is to turn visitors into customers. Having a website that your visitors can relate to and which communicates the message of who you are and what sets you apart is best achieved by a well-planned and relevant web content development.
The purpose of your text is for people to read it and get the message
When trying to persuade potential customers to go with your company, you must give them something. People find is easier to trust and relate to website text that is informational, to-the-point and easy to read. When web-publishing text created for print, optimizing the text for web readability can make it many times more effective.
How new customers can find you on their own.
A great way to save money on offline marketing of your website, is to optimize your content to contain the keywords that your potential customers are searching for. This way interested visitors will arrive organically at your website.
Making sure that people can find your website where they search for it (Google, Yahoo, MSN and such) requires web content which has been optimized for findability. Findability optimization is an important part of search engine optimization (SEO).
Our services include:
- Web content development
- Web readability optimization
- Findability optimization
Contact us to know more about how a thoughtful and well-planned web project can benefit your business, or learn about how good web design delivers your message more effectively in ‘Show what you want to say: Visual communication‘.
Market your website through search engines
People who are interested in what your company has to offer should be able to easily find your website on the web.
- The more websites that link to your website the more people will be able to find you,
- the quality of those websites linking to you and their relevancy to your company determines your position in the most important search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN,
- your presence on the web must be designed to match the content of your website in order to be most effective.
Targeted search engine marketing (SEM) is a very effective way to get the relevant traffic to your website that can result in new customers. Our experience in search engine marketing can save you a lot of time and effort in promoting your website on the web.
Contact us to find out more about the benefits of good Search engine marketing.
Web content: Acronyms are bad for your website
Acronyms on websites are bad for human visitors as well as robot visitors.
The use of acronyms (such as “CAD” instead of “Computer Aided Design”) on a website is a problem for the usability of the website, specifically because it lowers the readability of the webpage. Acronyms make web text less understandable, lowers the reading speed, and lowers the user-experience in general. Keeping in mind that web users are usually very impatient it is not a good idea to slow them down. They will loose their patience. And then you will loose the sale.
When reading web text, visitors often scan the text rather than reading it (word for word). This means they might miss the definition of an acronym or they might be too distracted to learn a new term.
Your visitors are looking for information - not puzzles
Good web content writing is about telling stories. There is a story in the phrase “Web design & development”. Even if you have never heard this phrase it still gives you an idea of the meaning of the term. There is no story in “WD&D”. These are just letters, and they could mean any number of things. Web content should be specific and informational.
Bad communication is bad for business
While acronyms themselves do not tell a story, using them unfortunately tells a story of laziness, arrogance and snobbish exclusiveness. It is very rarely the aim to communicate these values to the reader.
By using acronyms you are asking people to pay very close attention and that is a big thing to ask from users on the web. You risk chasing away visitors.
Also a problem for search engine optimization.
In regards to search engine optimization, “business services” is a good key-phrase that your potential customers might be searching for, so it is important to get that indexed by search engines like Google and Yahoo. “BS” on the other hand is not a very good key-phrase. Using this acronym you are actually removing this key-phrase from your content, thus lowering the relevancy of your website in the search engines for people searching for that particular key-phrase. And that is of course a very bad idea.
To optimize your web content for usability, readability, findability, try replacing acronyms with their long form - your text will be easier to read and easier to understand.
You should only use acronyms on web pages in situations where the acronym has universal consensus and is so commonly known that the acronym has replaced its long form in everyday use. Situations like this might be CD, DVD, MP3, etc.
In cases where it is necessary to use an acronym it is a good idea to still define the long form of the acronym. On web pages this is done using the acronym-tags, which adds the long form definition to the acronym as a hover-effect, like this example: SEO (try to move the cursor over the acronym “SEO”).
Contact us to know more about how Search Engine Optimization can benefit your business.
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