All sales begin with some form of advertising. To build sales, this advertising must be seen or heard by potential buyers, and cause them to react to advertising in some way. The credit for success, or blame for failure of almost all ads, reverts back to ad itself.

Generally, "ad writer" wants prospect to do one of following:

a) Visit store or website to see and judge product for himself, or immediately write a check or use a credit card and send for merchandise being advertised.

b) Phone for an appointment to hear full sales presentation, or write for further information which amounts to same thing.

It only makes sense. You have an e-commerce catalog site. You want lots of visitors to come to your site and buy. The best (and most cost-effective) way to do that is with great search engine placement. However, search engines are text machines, and most catalogs don’t have a lot of text, so herein lies problem.

The obvious answer is that you need more copy on each page. However, pictures of your products are just as important as copy, so they can’t be removed to make more space. That doesn’t leave a lot of room in product description area, does it? Maybe not, but who said all copy had to go in description area? Who said you have to create a site same way a paper catalog is created?

Sometimes we view our site’s pages with a very narrow vision. This causes us to have an “it’s always been done that way” mentality. While direct mail catalogs may be sorely limited on space and require short sections of copywriting, Web pages have infinite room for copy.

Your Home Page

Most often, online catalogs have a home page that is almost exclusively graphic. There may be short blips of copywriting here and there, but not much. Since your home page is most important page to have optimized for engines, you’ll want to include a minimum of 200 words of SEO copywriting there. Don’t panic… it doesn’t have to all be in one place.

You can create a short section of keyword-rich body copy as an introduction to site. Then, under a graphic of your new spring additions, include some SEO copy explaining why your visitors will just *have* to have these products. You can then add a sentence or two of copy under graphics in your sidebar. Lastly, give highlights of your customer-service program or money-back guarantee and an invitation to click further into site to shop around, and you’re all done.

Obviously, where copy goes is dependent on your site’s layout, but you get idea. Spread copywriting around. You don’t have to put it all in one lump in middle of page.

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