One of the biggest mistakes first-time online business owners make is to overlook the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

The truth is, no matter what kind of business you’re in, optimizing your website for search engine robots is not only important, it’s even more important than meta tags, page titles, or even your site’s content!

SEO is an intensive process, is critical for websites that are just starting out, and takes careful attention to detail. You have to make sure that your site’s HTML and CSS are valid. Without having these worked out, it’s likely that your titles, meta tags, and even loading your site with keyword-rich content is going to have little or no impact on your search engine ranking.

Think about it like this…

Imagine you own a brick and mortar store in the downtown district of a busy city. Your shop is surrounded by all kinds of other businesses — including your competitors — with their slick advertising, flashing signs, and all kinds of gimmicks to grab the attention of potential customers. Now imagine that you also have some advertising on display, but all the letters are jumbled together, images out of place, and it’s all piled up right in front of your front door in a heap!

If your website isn’t optimized for the search engines, it could be that the search engines see you just like this — no order, no positioning, no sense!

Valid HTML & CSS

Valid HTML & CSS is the first step toward good SEO, and should be one of your top priorities! They aren’t just something you use to create your webpage! They are standards — the same standards robot programmers use in order for their robots to understand what’s out there on the web! If your website isn’t up to those standards, those poor robots are probably reaching your site, scratching their digital heads, saying, “WTF?” and moving on to the next site! Yikes!

Yikes is right, but there is hope! There are two great, FREE sites that will look at your website and tell you if your site is up to spec!

The XHTML Validator and the CSS Validator.

If you understand how to write your own HTML and CSS, these two sites are invaluable! Hello! Bookmark??? If you don’t know the first thing about HTML or CSS, you would do well to hire someone who does, to clean up your site!

Guess what! Finally Creative LLC offers XHTML and CSS services! Don’t believe us? Just try going to those sites and plugging in http://finallycreative.com — we dare you.

Contact us for a quote.

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One of the clever tricks web designers can use to make a subtle, psychological connection with viewers is a form of “hypnotic” marketing: customizing the text or images of a webpage to correspond with the time of day.

To illustrate, we have a client who is selling an e-Book. He wanted to adjust some of the key phrases in his sales letter landing page so that readers felt as though the message was directed uniquely at them, no matter what time of day they might be viewing.

As an example, he wanted to change the line, “If you purchase right now,” to a more timely message. Now, in the morning, his webpage displays the line, “If you purchase this morning.” During the day, his message displays as, “If you purchase today.” At night, it shows, “If you purchase tonight.”

He reports that this subtle change, used strategically throughout his sales copy, has increased his conversions.

We did this with a simple PHP script, added to the functions file of his WordPress theme.

<?php
function timeofday($morning, $day, $night) {
$hour = date('G');
if (($hour > 0) && ($hour < 10)) { echo $morning; }
elseif (($hour > 9) && ($hour < 17)) { echo $day; }
else echo $night;
}
?>

This simple and elegant script checks to see what hour of the day it is. If the hour is between 1am and 10am, the morning message is displayed. If the hour is between 10am and 5pm, the daytime message is displayed. Otherwise, the nighttime message.

The usage is just as simple. Wherever he wants to customize the text in his sales letter, he just adds this function anywhere in his source file, with the appropriate text as the options:

<?php timeofday('morning text here', 'daytime text here', 'night text here'); ?>

Voila! Hypnotic marketing, with a simple PHP script.

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