Is Your Website?s Copy Up to the Mark?

The Internet is a relatively new medium. What works for you in your printed offline brochures and advertising materials may or may not work on your web page. If you have already invested either time or money or both in your website you should carefully scrutinize the written words on your pages to see if they can really deliver a return on your investment. Here are five important questions to ask to when making a review of your website?s copy.

1. Can a web visitor quickly grasp what your page is all about?

You only have a short time to let your web visitors know the purpose of your website. If it is not crystal clear, they will have already surfed on to another website. Headlines and sub headings that convey your most important pieces of information are a must, especially for the main page of your site.

Writing good headlines is a science in itself. Look at a newspaper, almost every headline has a verb. Headlines must be active, and they must be convincing. Marketeers and linguists alike have identified what they call ?power words?, words that are emotive and draw attention like ?breakthrough?, ?new? , ?discover.? Use these words to grip the attention of your web visitor.(An excellent introduction to the science of headline writing is Shelley Lowery?s article located at http://www.web-source.net/secret_formulas.htm)

2. Is your ?Unique Selling Proposition? highlighted?

There may be hundreds of websites offering the same thing that you are offering. What sets you apart? What is the distinguishing feature or benefit of your product that makes your product or service different and, most importantly, desireable? It may be one particular item, a combination of items or it may be the sum total of all that you have to offer. If you were a web hosting firm it might be ?Worry Free Service at a Price You Can Afford.? This particular particular item is known as your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). It is your biggest ?cannon?, and you have to ?shoot it? right at the top of your home page.

3. Have you clearly emphasized the benefits that a consumer will get from your products or services?

It is important for you to first distinguish the features and the benefits of your product or service. Using the example of the web hosting firm, some features might be user-friendly control panels, pre-installed cgi scripts, back up power supply, etc. Benefits are not the same as features, benefits deriving from these features would be: ?Easy for you to maintain? and ?you don?t have to worry about down-time.?

Remember, it is the benefits that sells your product or service, not necessarily the features. You must convincingly show that your product can answer the needs and desires of the person who has just visited your web page.

4. Is the copy optimized so that your pages will do well in search engine queries?

Optimization for search engines is something that traditional advertising copy writers never had to deal with. No matter how convincing your copy is, if no one can find your page then it is useless. Be careful not to hide your keywords with synonyms. If you want to be found for a particular word or phrase, then make sure that this word or phrase is in your headlines, in the body text and in clickable text (?anchor text?) of links on your page. For example, if you have the sentence: Click Here to Learn more about our Web Hosting Services. The clickable or active portion of the link should not be the words ?click here? but rather your keywords, ?Web Hosting Services?. If your copy doesn?t contain and emphasize your keywords, your page will not fare well in Internet queries, even if your meta tags include these words and phrases.

5. Is there a call to action?

What is your ?most wanted response?? What do you want the surfer to do after she or he has seen your pages? Maybe you would like her to order your product, download an introductory ebook, to join your mailing list, to fill out a form, or to call you up for an appointment? You can?t expect her to do this, unless you ask her to do it and show her how to do it. You may need a nice button that says ?Order Now?, or a sub headline that says ?Download your Free ebook.? The ?call to action? is very important and that?s why you should make it prominent, and repeat it more than once.

So, take a look at your website, and make sure that your copy is really doing the job of capturing the attention of your web visitors, convincing them about the merits of your offering, and showing them how to take the next step.

About The Author

Donald Nelson is an editor, web developer and social worker. He has been working on the Internet since 1995 and is currently the director of A1-Optimization (http://www.a1-optimization.com) a firm providing affordable search engine optimization and web promotion services. You can sign up for his monthly newsletter ?Web Promotion Tips? by sending an email with ?subscribe? in the subject heading to subscribe@a1-optimization.com

support@a1-optimization.com

More Web Design Articles

6 Tips To Improve Your Business Website
There are six important characteristics that can play a major role on the impact your website has on prospects. Outlined below is the importance of each characteristic and tips on how to maximize your potential.

Web Site Professionalism? What Is It?
Your web site should be-visitor friendly to navigatesearch engine friendly for the crawlersAutomated with ecommerce and subscription forms..

Design vs Content: Who is KING?
Well it is not Elvis, that's for sure.I am a firm advocate of good design but most of the time people tend to interpret design as amazing graphics and astounding visuals they tend to forget that design is the culmination of every aspect of good and effective presentation into one.

Top 10 Web Design Mistakes
As a webmaster, you want to keep your visitors content so they?ll come back again. Below you will find ten common mistakes made by webmasters that may deter people from returning.

What to Avoid to Make Your Website Design Effective
The effective design is this one, which is maximum simplified, conformable to your users because they are your main purpose. This one, simply and clearly announcing what is your website about.

10 Things All Webmasters Should Know
Geared Up with a website and lots of energy to make a mark online? Spare some time and go through this. You'll be glad you did.

Why Should You Care About Your Web Site Colors?
**How Colors are Used in web design:**Demarcates screen elements into groups- You can pu a blue background for your navagational bar and white for rest of your page. This tells the visitor that the blue area has different elements and grabs his attention.

Are You A Bill Clinton Webmaster?
One of the most frequent questions I get asked about my ebook, Don't Get Banned BY The Search Engines, is whether I amended it to include post-Florida Google. "Florida" is the code name that search engine optimizer wizards gave to a November, 2003, shakeup at Google that left many webmasters covering themselves up with makeshift fig leaves while dangling upside down above the proverbial crocodile moat.

Simplify Your Web Site for Clarity and Ease of Use
There are plenty of web sites out there in which basic elements of design are ignored. The viewer may experience overkill and frustration, instead of gently receiving the message or information.

Explode Your Homepage And Replace It With Something Dynamite!
You know that I'm always extolling the virtues of an all-round website marketing approach that doesn't just focus on search engines? Well, you'll be suprised to hear there's a big problem with this.The big problem with this is that it assumes your website is ready to start receiving lots of visitors in the first place! Before you start marketing your site you need to know.