If you sell a product online, there's a good chance that you have a sales letter for it. Hopefully you've got a great headline that grabs people's attention and then sales copy that states
benefits of your product and is designed to convert visitors to customers. There is a good chance that you have an affiliate program for your product and you may even have organized some joint ventures to promote it.What about search engines?
Optimizing sales letters is quite a difficult process and it's something that many people ignore when they set up a site to sell their product. The purpose of a sales letter is to sell a product, not to get traffic. Therefore, they should be written in a way that specifically targets sales. This can often mean that search engine friendly parts of a page are not targeted. So, what should you do?
The simple answer is that you should not change a sales letter to try to please search engines. If you were to do that, you may end up getting more traffic but less sales. Getting phrases that people search for into a sales letter may detract from it's overall message and this will often prove to be case if you try to get keywords into key parts of a page.
Popular marketing wisdom would suggest that your headline is single most important part of a sales letter. Unfortunately, it's also quite an important factor for search engines. The first paragraph or two of a sales letter are also very important because they can almost close sale on their own if you grab people's interest. Again, unfortunately first paragraph or two of a page are quite important to search engines.
If you were to write an article, you could get keywords into headline and first paragraph because they relate to article. With a sales letter, using keywords that relate to product may not be appropriate because you aren't providing information as such - you are selling something.
Another issue with sales letters is that they do tend to be quite long. Therefore, if you are worried about keyword density, this can cause a problem. Not that you should worry about keyword density too much but it is an issue. If you were targeting a two word phrase, you may have to mention it 100 times or more on your page to get right density. Let's face it, there is a good chance that your letter may look a bit weird if you did that.
Now, there are two methods that you could consider using to get traffic from search engines. The second one that I discuss here is my personal favorite but using either will have an effect.
Optimize Your Letter
There are areas of a page that are important to search engines but will not change overall effectiveness of your sales letter. Therefore, these parts need to be highly optimized to give you best chance of success - considering other important factors will largely be ignored.
Page Title: It is very important that you have a concise and targeted page title. When people visit your sales letter they may well look at page title in their browser but it is your headline that will catch their attention. They won't look at title and say "Nope, not for me". They'll be happy if title is a short phrase that matches up with what they were looking for and so will search engines.
Keyword Density & Positioning: You can improve keyword density of a page by including it in bulleted lists, quotes and highlighted areas. Often, people will put a key part of their sales letter in a box or highlight it to reinforce point. This is where you can get a few keywords in. After an important paragraph in your letter, you can either re-state information or re-word it. Make sure you get keywords in here. It's very important that this is obviously an important point for your reader's benefit. Just re-stating something in another normal paragraph will look strange.
As I mentioned, bulleted lists are useful because they are short and to point - they don't have to read like a normal sentence or paragraph. So, make sure your main keyword is included in any bulleted lists - this could be a list of chapters that your book contains (if you are selling a book) or a list of benefits that your product will bring purchaser.
