When it comes to making sales on the Internet, it seems that copywriters and search engine optimization experts are always at odds with each other.



You see, one group wants the salesletter to be absolutely perfect to make maximum sales, and the other group wants the page to be optimized perfectly for the search engines to send free traffic their way.

I remember my first experience with a search engine optimization firm. I had a site that was designed to sell sunglasses, and I'd just finished writing all the salesletter for the different types of sunglasses available. At the time pay per click advertising was a brand new concept, so I wasn't using it. I wanted to get the free search engine traffic available from sites like Yahoo and Google, so I hired some SEO experts to make my site perform better in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). I gave them access to all my pages so they could optimize everything as necessary.

When they got done my website was properly optimized, but my well crafted salesletters were a complete mess. My writing no longer flowed nicely, my headlines now sucked, and there were a lot of erroneous words all over the place on my pages. However, the pages did perform better in the search engines.

However, I was not satisfied with better performing pages if it meant I couldn't sell my visitors anything due to the fact that my salesletters weren't very good. It was at this point that I fired the firm that I hired and vowed to learn how to do the search engine optimization myself, and I was going to make the search engines like my pages while still preserving the integrity of the salesletter.

The first thing I did was go back and redo the salesletters again. I looked at what the firm I hired tried to leave in certain keywords or phrases, but I made them seamlessly blend into the salesletter.

Then as I started to learn more about search engine optimization myself, I started to learn about the importance of having links pointing to my website. So I went out and started to find people who would link to my site.

I frequently tweaked my sales pages, but I always made sure that they made perfect sense to my visitors.

Good copywriting and well optimized pages do exist, especially these days. Here is my checklist for making both work together:

• Write your salesletter as you normally would.

• Get links to your salesletter with the links containing the anchor text you want your site to rank well for

• Make sure the key phrase is mentioned somewhere in the salesletter, but ignore ideas like keyword density.

• Make sure your title tag contains the keyword you want to rank well for.

• Update your salesletter frequently (you should always be testing your salesletter anyway)

• If your entire website is just the salesletter, add a blog to the site to give you site more content, as all the search engines like to see a website add new content over time.

The most important item on the list is the links. So if you're not going to spend time getting quality links pointing to your website, then don't waste your time optimizing your salesletter for the search engines.