You have a well designed website with perfect usage of flash banners and graphic designs, with proper site navigation and easy accessibility. Still do you feel that you are not getting the desired visitors and sales to your site? I suggest you probably need to work on the content in the site. I believe it is essential to have effective web content in a website, to attract the search engines.

Search Engine Optimization
Search engines ranking or position websites based on two factors:

1. Is your site relevant to the search words? (Optimized)
2. Is your site important? (Many links back to your website from other websites)

Only when you address both of these are you guaranteed of making an impact. Your degree of success depends on how hard you try and how many other people you’re competing against and how hard they’re trying. This is the process that we follow at Doug Williams and Associates.

So how can one write effective content for their websites? Read it as “effective writing” and not “lengthy writing”. Out of my experience as an SEO consultant and professional content writer, the more crisp and easy to understand the content is, the greater are the chances for it to become a hit among the readers. Also I am of the opinion that regularly updating your website with data that is useful for the visitors would divert more traffic to your site. When do you think one needs to consider re-writing their website content? I have come across the following observations that I have mentioned below:

* Traffic inflow is good, but the conversion is not as expected, because the visitors are probably not getting what they expected out of the contents.
* When the content is very less and the site is filled with only graphics and Flash designs
* The content in the website is not explaining more about your business and gives irrelevant information to your visitors.

I have found the following tips highly helpful in maintaining effective SEO web copy for websites:

* Know your audience: Understand who are your audience and write keeping them in mind. Also write stuff that they can relate themselves to and what is realistic.
* Give a clear picture of your business: The content in your website should give exact details of your business. This helps in your audience getting a better idea of your business, thereby encouraging an inflow of website-relevant traffic.
* Make the content heading more appealing: Now that you know your audience well, next try writing stuff that will appeal to them. For example, if your visitors are going to be more of careful and budget-conscious family ladies, then you could write articles like “Top 8 ways to organize your household budget effectively”(Gosh! Am sure I myself would be interested to read it as well, and am not even married!) The heading has a striking impact to attract readers and wins a main part of the battle of bringing in traffic.
* Give them some useful information: Well you have clearly understood who your visitors are going to be and you have catchy headings as well. But what if the content inside is of no use to the audience. Write stuff that contains utilitarian information to your clients.
* Choose apt keywords: You have got to think from a normal layman’s point of view, who is searching for products. Choose probable keywords that your audience would search in the search engines.
* Use Keyword phrases: Bank on phrases and not single words as keywords, because the probability of searchers using phrases of words is more.
* Keyword phrases in Meta tags, links and headings: Now that you have frozen on the keyword phrases, use them in Meta tags, link them with text links, so that the pages get related to one another. This increases the probability of search engines spotting them out. Also use these phrases in headings as well
* Check and re-check! And more importantly, check and recheck whatever you have written, to overrule any spelling or grammatical errors.

According to me, these are certain ideal steps that you can follow from the SEO point of view, to optimize your site. I am sure, if written smartly and relevantly, web contents would help give a boost to your website, thereby increasing relevant traffic and sales conversion.

Search engine optimization process:
* Understanding your marketing plan, products / services, competition, etc. prior to the start of any work.
* Choosing the right keywords or phrases that describe your product or service.
* Using these keywords and phrases with the right prominence and frequency throughout the text. Having the right amount of text to satisfy the search engines.
* Placing these keywords in meta tags, and alt tags with the right prominence and frequency in the HTML code.
* The analysis of the HTML code and the debugging for errors that many sites have.
* Creating links from other relevant websites to yours to improve your link popularity and therefore improving of your ranking with many of the search engines

Estimates are that only 2-5% of the websites today have been optimized. With the growing number of websites being added by businesses and individuals, the only way to stay visible in the World Wide Web is SEO. Optimization helps your site to obtain top rankings.

Website optimization is not cheap, it requires many hours of analysis and investigation by experts. But the results can be astounding. Your website visibility can increase dramatically, saving you a lot of money that you would constantly need to spend on advertising otherwise.

Remember SEO is not using trickery to fool the search engines. It is not using spamming techniques that will only improve your chances of being dropped from search results altogether. It does not involve the use of “throwaway” domains or “shadow” domains. Such tricks will cause you to be dropped completely and at best only work for a short time.