It can be a balancing act between keeping it short and including enough information to cover all the points.

Download the Web Content Guide as a PDF

The guide includes:

1. What to do before you start writing
2. General tips on the important things to remember about paragraph structure and layout
3. A five step process for creating content
4. A template to help you step through the process

This is a FREE resource to help you with the content creation process. If you would like to read about the importance of adding fresh content to your website – No Traffic To Your Website? You Must Add Content! This was posted a few days ago to help people understand how search engines determine whether to put you on the first page or bury it.

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• New & Recurring Customers
• Search Engine Visibility

This is an IMPORTANT CONCEPT! Too often companies spend a significant amount of money on having a website built only to have it gather dust and disappear into the abyss.

There are two main reasons this occurs:

1. New competitors entering the internet. Dilution
2. The search engine (SE) placement of your website is based on the frequency of visits, among other factors. If your website doesn’t have a continual stream of new content, the search engines have no reason to visit.

A blog (a contraction of the term “web log“)[1] is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order.

A blog is a container for all types of different content separated into categories and tags. It allows a single piece of content to appear to a search engine multiple times. Hence, multiple instances indexed by the search engines.

Simply put, an article about a special for a new product sold in your local store can appear as:

• product + location (i.e., widgets roseville)
• product + special (discount widgets)
• product + manufacturer (manufacturer widget)
• product (widget)
• etc.

The point here is, one article (post) turns into 4 different search results.

This concept is the reason websites built like company brochures are DEAD. Blogging is a very powerful method to insure your website remains current and on top of the search engine results.

Some ideas for content for your website are:

• New products
• Safety tips
• Industry news
• Partner news
• Community events
• Completed projects
• Case studies
• Before and after’s
• Client testimonials
• Top 10 Questions (FAQ’s)
• A detailed explanation of a question
• How To Guides
• Helpful advice
• Daily Specials
• Customer of the Month
• Safety recalls
• etc.

The rest of this article will explain adding content to your WordPress enabled website. If you don’t have a WordPress or similar website, you might want to read my article “The WordPress Revolution for Small Business Owners.” Another great resource – How To Create Content For Your Website is FREE to download and provides 4 things you should know.

Static versus Dynamic Content

Most websites are a combination of static and dynamic information. Static information rarely changes. Examples of static content are: About Us, Contact Info, Services, and more. Dynamic information is constantly changing: specials, events, testimonials, projects, etc.

WordPress Pages & Posts

In WordPress, static content is handled in the Pages component. Pages are typically used in your website’s main navigation or tabs.

Dynamic information in WordPress is administered vial the Post interface. This is the blogging component of WordPress. Unlike pages, posts are displayed in the main navigation as a single tab. To navigate the blog, an additional navigation structure of categories is used.

Depending on your website’s setup, your blog tab can be named as Blog, Articles, News for a few. The navigation of your blog will typically be shown in the sidebar of your website and not in the main navigation.

“To add content to your website via the blog you will use Posts”

Key Elements of a Post

To be effective, a post must contain:

• your primary keywords (search term)
• location
• 2 – 3 paragraphs
• a picture
• multiple categories
• and, a Call To Action

Steps To Writing a Post

1. Create the Headline – The headline must include your keywords! It must be interesting. Must draw attention from your audience.Some examples…
   10 Things You Should Know About _________
   New __________ installed in __________ Home
   Incredible Savings On _____________
   _____________ Supports Our _____________ Community
   While Supplies Last __________, On Sale Now
2. Write a couple of paragraphs about your main topic, headline. Remember, short and sweet, 3-5 sentences per paragraph.
3. Finish the post with another paragraph summarizing the topic and include a CALL TO ACTION.

Pretty simple stuff!

I can’t emphasize enough, the most important part of anything you put on your website…

A CALL TO ACTION!

A call to action is what you would like your visitors to do next. This could be a:

• Call for an appointment
• Schedule an estimate
• Sign up for a newsletter
• Print a coupon
• refer your company, etc.

We have discussed the importance of having fresh content for your website, and the differences between static and dynamic content. In WordPress, Pages are static and Posts are the dynamic component to your website. Creating content to post should take no more than 15 minutes of your time. The rewards for your efforts will be increased search engine visibility and new traffic to your website.

How to post to your website is revealed in a quick video HomeBuildR.Net/Videos If you like what you have read, leave a comment below or share with your friends. Please don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter. It’s free and a great resource.

Just added: Free Downloadable Guide – How To Create Content For Your Website

Here’s a great tip from the guys at Brownbook on how to effectively use video to drive traffic.

Video has opened up a whole new way to present your business to prospective customers.  But many business owners don’t know how to get it working for them.  The biggest question is one of quality, and how good is ‘good’.  Big businesses want to make an epic, and small businesses just think they do.  They’re both wrong.  Savvy consumers today see through glossy marketing videos.  Here’s what you do: Whether you’re big or small, get a handcam, point it at the CEO or business owner, and get them to TALK about their business.  Keep it short – less than 2 minutes – and avoid multiple takes.  In most cases us consumers want to see you in the raw, without all that high production; we want to see you, hear you, KNOW you.  Then we’ll trust you – and if we trust you we’ll buy.

FYI: Brownbook is a great resource that’s free and gets results from the search engines. You can add photos, videos and more on your company’s listing. And if you don’t have a website, you can use your Brownbook profile as your home on the web.

The combination of various factors attribute to your website’s decreased visibility.

• Fresh content
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Saturation

While these terms may seem “Greek” to most small business owners, once explained they are really quite simple to comprehend.

To understand, you must first have an idea of the basic concept of how customers find your company on the internet. One of these methods is called Direct Traffic. This is where one of your customers enters your website into the address bar of their browser.

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content. Hyperlinks present in resources enable users to easily navigate their browsers to related resources. Wikipedia
Common Browsers – Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, Blackberry

A second method of web site traffic is Referring Sites. A good example, is any internet Yellow Page site. A customer will search for your company and will be directed back to your website via a link.
And the third most common way is via the search engines, Organic. This method by far has the greatest potential for new clients. The 5 biggest search engines are (listed by percentage of users): Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, & AOL.

To rank highly on these sites, a website must be optimized. Optimization in a nutshell, is the process of catering your web pages’s information for it to be found vial the search terms commonly used by your audience (clients).
Books are written on just this topic alone. Let me give you a quick example. If you were selling “spark plugs”, a web page devoted to spark plugs would have to compete with all the major brands – Bosch, Champion, AC Delco, etc. That is only the beginning! Add to that, all of the major auto parts stores – Napa, Kraegen, Pep Boys, etc. The likelihood that your website will be on page one of the search engines is ZERO!
On the other hand, if you had a page that discussed the benefits of “Bosch BMW Spark Plugs” your chances of ranking increase. Taken one step further, what if you had a page listing all of your brands and wrote specifically about “Spark Plugs in Reno Nevada”? A number one page ranking for consumers looking to purchase a spark plug in Reno, NV would now be within reach. (This practice of targeting longer phrases to drive traffic is commonly referred to Longtail Marketing)

Search Engine Optimization allows your potential clients to find you.

Another factor that has been responsible for decreased traffic to your website is saturation. The percentage of your competitors with websites has been exponentially increasing. Added to this is the number of competitors who were once called associates. Many companies struggling to survive have added services and products that were once outsourced to companies like your own.

Critical Things You Must Do To Generate Traffic To Your Website

1. Provide Fresh Content - Every time you update your website, the search engines have a reason to come back and visit. With increased visits, you will have more pages from your website listed on the search engines. Quick question, how likely will your website be found if you are only listed once for a given search term? Versus, having 10 or more pages for an equivalent search?
   Contractors and other small businesses that work with a consistent flow of new clients have an easy means of adding multiple pages for a given search. This is accomplished by blogging or discussing a completed job in one or two paragraphs. You can read more about this tactic in the article WordPress Revolution for Small Business Owners.
   To emphasize my point, let’s just say you bought a brand new home. You move in and do nothing! The landscape quickly overgrows, the dirt and debris accumulate and very quickly your new home looks like manure.
   Are you expecting different results with your website?
2. Authority - To gain the status of an authority in any market, there must be others willing to recommend and promote your products and services. Newspaper articles, television appearances, referrals and the likes, help establish you and/or your company as an authority.
In today’s market we can not overlook the authority given by user review (Yelp, Angies List, Google reviews, etc.) and social media site (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) Take a moment to look at any local search business listing on Google. Those companies with the most user reviews, consistently rank the highest (are displayed at the top of the list.)
3. Get your site listed!

When working with clients, I have found many to have a pretty website that is showing up on one of the major search engines, but not the others. What about all of those other potential clients that aren’t using the search engine that your website is listed?

And that is just a start! You need to have your company listed in not just the search engines, but social media sites, internet yellow directories, business directories, and with mobile search GPS and local directories.

Why is this important? Imagine for a moment, you have a stunning billboard offering a $100 dollars to anyone that calls. You’d be overwhelmed with phone calls! But is that really true? What if your billboard was on some dusty one lane road in the middle of the Arizona desert?

Same scenario, you now have 50 of the same billboards in all 50 of the top cities in the US (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, …) What do you think your phone traffic will be like now?

Listing your company and website in multiple locations in the internet is like having those 50 billboards!
The downside, is this can be time consuming and expensive to accomplish. I know too well the time it takes to just list in one directory. For me, it takes about 5 minutes per site. And I have all the tools to get it done quickly via copy and paste, etc.

Good news, you can accomplish this yourself with patience and time. Or you can have our construction marketing agency do the work for you for an incredibly low price.
Enough of the self promotion…

Let’s recap: Your website’s traffic is constantly being eroded by increased number of competitors (Saturation)
More importantly, smarter competitors who understand the value and necessity of a holistic approach to on and off line marketing.

3 of the most important things you can do to ensure your website is being found by your potential clients

• Update your site often
• Capture reviews from your clients
• List your website in as many quality locations as possible
  WARNING: If you are selling water heaters, listing your site on a kitchen gadget sales page, won’t get you noticed BUT it will hurt you.

Be sure to visit us often for great free tips and advice on marketing your company on and offline. Sign up for FREE for our newsletter with other great tips and advice.
We are always welcome to your comments, questions and feedback. You may comment by clicking the link below.

A simple, yet very effective way to increase traffic to you website is to have a sitemap. So what is a sitemap and how do you submit it to the search engines?

A site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on aweb site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site. – Wikipedia

Site maps can improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found. This is an important point. 70% of all contractor websites do not utilize this simple strategy! I say this from experience working with a large number of contractors who have either built their own websites or who have had companies build them in the past.

So how can you take advantage of having a sitemap on your website?

5 Simple Steps to Submitting a Sitemap

1. Get a Google username. If you aren’t already signed up for Gmail, I would strongly suggest you do so now. Having a Gmail account allows access not only to their email program, but a whole plethora of web services such as, Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, AdSence, Google Local, etc. You can sign up for your Gmail account here.
2. Create a sitemap. This is as easy as going to XML-Sitemaps.com Entering your website address in the form, downloading the generated sitemap and uploading it to your web server or website hosting account.
3. Submit your sitemap to Google. With your Google username and password, log on to Google’s Webmaster Tools and add your site. During the process, you will be asked to enter the location of your sitemap usually it will be something like “http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml” (replace yoursite.com with your website’s address)
4. Submit to Yahoo - Yahoo Site Explorer works on the similar lines as that of Google Webmasters Tool. Sign up, add a site, verify your website & add your sitemap as a feed.  Hereby, Yahoo’s searchbot can have access to your sitemap.xml file.
   Visit Yahoo Site Explorer at http://www.siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
5. Ping the Search Engines – Copy and paste the following URL’s and remember to change the YourSite.com to your website’s address.
   • Ping Google – http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.YourSite.com/sitemap.xml
   • Ping Yahoo – http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification appid=YahooDemo&url=http://www.YourSite.com/sitemap.xml
   • Ping Bing – http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=www.YourSite.com/sitemap.xml
   • Ping Ask – http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.YourSite.com/sitemap.xml
   • Ping Moreover – http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://www.YourSite.com/feed.xml

Take these simple steps to increase traffic to your website!

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Here’s to your success!