As a marketer I do NOT mean to undermine the importance of good copy on your site. It’s true, good copy can sell, but so can images. Pictures spark an emotional response in people, and since most purchases are emotional, this is a good thing! If you look at all of the major retailers online you will find good, clean, professional photography.

I have worked with several clients who had a tough time with pictures for their site. In some cases the vendor that sold them their products did not have good images in the first place, and since most of my client’s businesses use drop shippers as their primary supplier, this was a big problem. I encouraged many of them to talk with their suppliers and try to get them to take better pictures. Also, some were able to purchase the products as demo models, and take their own quality images.

One of my clients was selling real estate in Costa Rica. He had spent two weeks on the construction site of this new development project and had shot hundreds of pictures. When he sent me the disks of images I was surprised to find very little I could use. I was in a jam because the client wasn’t going back to Costa Rica for months, and the site needed to be done! Furthermore, he was going to be unwilling to spend hundreds of dollars on stock photography when he had just sent me hundreds of pictures he took (that he thought were good). The solution: I turned to IStockPhoto, which provides tons of stock photography for $1 each! It turned out this was the perfect solution. I found tons of images of Costa Rica, and was able to make the site look much nicer. Above is one of the images from the site.

Every month or so (no one really knows for sure) all of the major search engines re-index the cyber world. They send out “spiders” to scan all of the websites in their index and hunt for new content. This is your opportunity as a website publisher to feed the spiders something new. It’s very important for search engine rankings that the spiders find updated pages when they get to your site. That doesn’t mean you have to go nuts redesigning the site every month, but you should be in the habit of changing a bit of copy on your various pages. An easy way to do this is to have content that would normally change frequently, such as news items, or a “feature of the week” sort of thing.

Stale content on your site will eventually bring the whole thing down. The search engines will give your site less and less relevance because it doesn’t see the site being updated or maintained. Don’t let this happen to you! Of, course when refreshing your content every so often, don’t forget those all important keywords!

Many folks believe that adding your website to major search engines is a time consuming process. It’s not! In fact, many entrepreneurs play off this assumption and offer services to submit your site to thousands of search engines for a low fee. First of all, there is no need to submit your site to thousands of search engines. The overwhelming majority of searches done online are on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. It’s that simple. Why pay to submit your site to thousands of other sites no one else is using? Secondly, there is no need to pay at all. It’s easy enough that a well trained monkey could do it. In fact, I just took five minutes to submit my site to all the major engines.

Here’s what you want to do. Go to your favorite search engine and type in “Google Suggest A Site”, then do the same for Yahoo and MSN. You’ll get a very simple form that will allow you to submit your URL. It’s also a good idea to go to DMOZ.org and submit your site there.

Furthermore, against popular belief, there is no benefit to submitting your site every month to the search engines, in fact, it may hurt you. They may interpret the act as spam. Once your site is listed, be happy, and spend your time working on improving your rankings. More articles on how to do that can be found on this site.

When browsing the various sources of online help for search engine optimization, you will find many people that devalue the use of meta data in your header. Of course, the title tag is important because that’s what appears in most browsers. However, you should always treat meta tags as an important part of your SEO strategy. Here are some tips for using meta tags well.

- Make sure the title and description tags are unique and well written for each page
- Try to include a few important keywords for the page, but do NOT stuff them in
- Your title tag and description should speak specifically to what is on the page
- When possible, make sure each page has unique meta tags

The last bit of advice about meta tags is to be sure NOT to make your website name the first part of each page’s tags. Many, many sites use their site name and then the rest of the title tag. This can be viewed as duplicate content. Pick one page (probably your index) and have the website name in the title tag, then be sure all other pages are unique.