Guest post by Nichola Stott, the media flow

In this fourth part of a series guide to search engine optimisation, we’re going to look at SEO considerations for content. It is extremely important that you are familiar with keyword research, and I would recommend reading part 3 of this series (Keyword Research) to help provide a solid foundation.

Once you have identified your keywords you then need to implement them in the correct manner on your site, including in the user-facing content, and also the source code, or CMS for your site, (in the meta- data, header and other appropriate tags). Today we’re going to focus on content…

It is important to ensure that the keywords you have identified feature in your content. I mean… why wouldn’t they? Having your keywords in your content is the most natural thing to do, providing you got the keyword research stage correct. Although this will contribute towards ranking your pages for the terms you have identified; most importantly this provides a consistent user journey and helps to assure visitors that your page is indeed relevant for the query they have initiated.

Some SEO practitioners may advise you to consider and optimise your keyword density, (which is the number of times a keyword may be used in any given piece of content, expressed as a percentage of total content). Whilst having your keywords in your content is important, I would advise against this approach. Come on now – if all we had to do was drop your keywords a magic number of times then the web would be full of dull pages of auto-written crap. It’s not the 90’s anymore!

I strongly urge you not to obsess about an optimum density, and instead focus on writing relevant and attractive content for your users.

• Keep content relevant and snappy as the web is not the best medium for reading long pieces of wordy content
• Do consider your keywords and make sure your main keywords are contained a handful of times in a relevant and meaningful way
• Do not obsess about keyword density or you risk your content reading badly to humans (who are your customers after all.)

More on debunking the keyword density myth (amongst others)!

Also check out this excellent piece on “promotional vs informative” copywriting, from web copywriting expert Angie Nikoleychuk.

About the author: Nichola Stott is a highly regarded search and social media professional with over a decade of experience in online communications. Nichola is director and co-founder of theMediaFlow, a search and social media agency; and is a regular conference speaker and contributor to online industry media including Econsultancy, SEO Chicks and State of Search. You can contact Nichola on linkedin  or twitter.

If you decided to start selling informaiton products from your website you need to decide on how you are going to automate the delivery of purchases to your customers. Information products offer a good way of converting your knowledge and expertise into products that can be sold online and offline regardless of the amount of hours you work every day. If you are trying to implement the 4-hours-working-week concept – you know that’s something that you need to do as soon as possible. You can then use social media marketing to promote your products.

One option would be to integrate PayPal into your HTML/CSS website. It’s easy and cheap to do. Your payments will be securely processed by PayPal so you don’t need to worry about handling someone else’s card details. However the downside is that every time someone places an order for an ebook or a mp3 recording – you have to go online and send the customer the file or a link to download it. This will take time. And by no means the income, generated from such sales, can be called “passive”.

The other option is to use a shopping cart. Whichever system you are using at the moment to manage your website – WordPress, Joomla, HTML – there is a way to integrate a shopping cart solution. Some are free (like ZenCart), for some you need to pay a regular monthly free (like 1shoppingcart). However the system will handle the whole purchasing process on your behalf – from listing the products to sending a Thank You message.

The main benefits of a shopping cart over basic PayPal:

• Easier to update – you can add products & categories via an online control panel, image resizing is done for you, download links are automatically created for each product;
• Access it from anywhere – all you need is a web browser;
• Multiple payment methods already integrated – you may be able to use PayPal, Worldpay etc.;
• Automatic email notifications – you get notified of all new orders, your customers receive an automatic thank you message;
• Statistics available online, all in one place;
• You don’t need to have any technical knowledge of how to build a website;
• You can create discounts, multiple purchase offers, use affiliate schemes, send promotional emails to get customers to return and buy again;
• The purchase will get delivered automatically;
• You can create content pages to fully integrate the shopping cart into your site (or make your site as a shopping cart);
• The system will collate customers’ emails, so you can keep in touch and follow up;
• In most systems you can send a newsletter to your customers or integrate it with e-newsletter systems like Aweber, MailChimp or Constant Contact.

So very quickly you will be able to set up and manage your online store. All you need now is to finish off that e-book you were working on for a while.

1. Apply commitment
If you decide to set up your profile on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn you will need to regularly post new content and keep it up to date. This is a commitment that’s required from you the moment you press the Submit button to save your profile If you can’t do this – don’t bother starting as it will send a wrong message and will not attract any new customers.

2. Manage friends
All messages and friends’ requests received on social networking sites must be handled in a timely manner. You need to treat them in the same way as if they were your usual business emails received in the Outlook or Lotus Notes. However don’t just automatically accept all requests. When it comes to social networking, it’s about quality not quantity. You must make the time to vet followers using tools like SocialOomph.com.

3. Keep with the image
Don’t accept irrelevant requests. Set your preferences to pre-screen all new comments or content. Decline anything not keeping with the business image you want to present. Don’t allow sexual photos or links to website, foul language, random advertising or spam. Otherwise your profile will quickly become irrelevant, boring and non-professional.

4. Take fun seriously
Your social media profile is just another form of your business Web site. It’s part of your business PR strategy. Before adding anything – consider the impression it will have on those viewing it. However have fun when writing or adding content, make sure your personality shines through. People will want to read about you, not a glossy sales pitch or dry stats you found on the Internet.

For more tips check out my other posts: Using a VA for Social Media Marketing and Researching Google keywords.

Good luck with blogging!

Make the Internet work for you. An Internet presence is a must, so explore the advantages of ‘search optimisation’ and ‘PPC’ programmes. It is unfortunate but obvious that a lot of money can be spent needlessly bidding on highly competitive words or by bidding on others that receive clicks but fail to convert into sales.

Within Google AdWords there are tools that will allow you to find keywords that you might not have considered that not only receive a decent search rate, but have little competition and will therefore cost less. There are many free and paid keyword research tools available but using Google’s Keyword Research Tool is the best to make decisions based on Google-only data.

• This tool is free
• Google has more search data than many other services
• It shows bid prices and search volume estimates next to keywords
• It shows your current page titles and keywords
• It shows the % of organic and paid traffic going to a URL

For any keyword, the Google Search-based Keyword Tool will show up to 800 related keywords with cost and search volume estimates. The tool also works to show you 100 keywords related to a site that they think you could bid on which are not already in your account. The data is easy to export using a handy export button.

For further reading go to Get Elastic The Ecommerce Blog .