In his book Confessions of an Advertising Man, advertising legend David Ogilvy reveals the secret to making sales--
"...What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form. Your most important job is to decide what you are going to say about your product, what benefit you are going to promise."
Ogilvy wrote this in 1963, when creating persuasive ads for print and television was no walk in the park. Yet today, thanks to the World Wide Web, developing effective content has become even harder. Not only must you find the right words, you must optimize your words for the all-powerful search engines. When it comes to your Web site, your sales message is useless, no matter how well written, if customers never see it.
For searchers to find you, your Web content must incorporate the right keyword phrases. Keyword phrases are the words people use when using search engines to find your products or services.
Selecting the right keywords is an art and a science. Some phrases are used by searchers more than others. Some phrases are used by certain types of searchers but not others. The placement of keywords and the frequency of their appearance are also factors that affect the search engine ranking of a particular Web page.
Many analytical tools are available to help you select and position keywords, as PJ Fusco explains in this ClickZ post. As she points out, keyword optimization is not a one-time shot, it's an ongoing process of review and refinement. The more you learn about customer behavior (i.e., the keyword phrases they actually use to find your page) and page performance (e.g., conversions, unique visitors), the better you can craft your sales, marketing, or branding message.
And yet, content development cannot be reduced completely to science. A Web page can include all the right keywords in all the right places and still be unreadable.
In Ogilvy's day, the challenge was to craft a persuasive message. Today, the challenge is to craft a persuasive message while confining yourself to a specific number of specific phrases. That is why optimized content is more expensive--and worth every penny.
