It’s actually fairly likely that you’ve never heard of a web presenter, but if you have, it’s actually fairly likely that you’ve only heard glowing things said about them by people who want to sell them to you. Web presenters are still fairly new in the world of online marketing; they don’t have the credibility that tools like custom blog creation or targeted Email marketing have. Like Email marketing, Web Presenters aren’t a part of your SEO strategy — they’re the second stage, a tool used to increase conversions.

The basic law of making money online is mathematical: the number of visitors you get times your conversion rate times the sale price of the product minus your costs equals your profits. Increase the visitors (with SEO), and you make more money — but increase the conversion rate (with a Web Presenter), and you make more money as well. At some point, improving your conversion rate becomes more profitable than pushing more traffic onto a low-conversion page, and that’s when tools like Web Presenters come in handy.

A Web Presenter, for the record, is a full-body or head-and-shoulders image of a person who pops up on your screen and talks to you about the content of the page. The benefits of a Web Presenter are intuitively obvious: they talk to you, they have posture and gesticulations and all of those secondary elements of communication that text lacks, and they’re hard to stop watching once they get started, so they increase stickiness as well.

But there are pitfalls to be found when hiring a Web Presenter. You should be careful to choose a Web Presenter whose image matches that of your company. Hiring a conservative-looking older gentleman for an agile young SEO company might not be the right fit, for example. You should also make sure that your Web Presenter is comfortable with your content. Having a Web Presenter that pronounces ‘SEO’ as a one-syllable word that rhymes with “Rio” will immediately throw suspicion on that company’s site, for example. Make sure that the image and the content come across clearly, however, and you should find that a Web Presenter has very positive effects on your bottom line.

When you’re a novice webmaster, sitting in your living room in your PJs and looking over the (probably nonexistent) traffic flow to your website, it’s hard to consider dropping a few hundred dollars on SEO services provided by an established SEO company. After all, you’ve done some research — you know how easy it is to write a backlink. You’ve seen the forums where they tell you a dozen easy ways to write a backlink to your site. You’re even on a mailing list where a charming lady from Western Washington State tells you a bunch of high-Page-Rank sites you can get backlinks from all by yourself and very easily.

Why do you need to spend that kind of money? After all, if you can understand how to get a backlink written, you can surely find some experienced Indian or Filipino gentleman to do it for you for a couple of bucks an hour. That’s real value, isn’t it?

Not really.

You see, there are several things that an SEO company will do for you that a freelancer cannot. It’s true that if what you want is backlinks written, a freelancer can do it cheaply — but if what you want is an organized backlinking campaign planned and executed, you’ll be hard pressed to find someone on ELance or Craiglist who can do that for any less than a real SEO company would charge.

Backlinking campaigns require several elements that simple backlink writing doesn’t. You need to have a long list of fully-researched keywords. You need some short, high-traffic, high-competition keywords that you’re willing to commit large amounts of effort to dominating, knowing that they’ll be the core of your traffic. You need dozens and dozens and dozens of low-traffic, low-competition, long-tail keywords that you can rank for easily and take advantage of the numbers game on, knowing that no one is terribly meaningful but the synergy they generate will be.

You need tracking — you need to know which backlinks are driving traffic that actually buys, so you can make more of those. You need to know which backlinks are driving tire-kicker traffic so that you can make less of those. Without that kind of value, your SEO money is just being tossed down a hole — and what kind of freelancer is going to be able to do all of that for you?

Whether it comes in the form of article marketing, custom blog creation, or social bookmarking, there’s a lot to be said about the power of organic SEO to drive traffic. But some webmasters don’t seem to get the fact that traffic doesn’t equal profitability. Ask anyone who’s gotten fifteen million hits on YouTube for a video that didn’t link anywhere or ask anyone for anything — you can get all of the hits you want, but without a solid endgame, all of your SEO efforts don’t mean a thing.

There are a lot of powerful SEO endgame strategies out there, but only one of them is so powerful that it’s been adopted almost universally by everyone from internet marketers to small businesses to major corporations: the power of targeted Email marketing.

Targeted Email marketing basically amounts to three things: you get someone to give you their Email address (and agree to let you send them Emails), you send them an Email with a strong call-to-action, and they click the link and (hopefully) buy stuff. It sounds so simple, but as with any aspect of trying to get someone to give you money, there are a lot of pitfalls.

The first pitfall is that word ‘targeted’. That means that you have to collect the emails of people who will be interested in your final offer. Anything else and you’ll get a 90% unsubscribe rate the first time you send out an email with an offer in it. Generally, you can successfully target by offering a free information packet about the same subject as your product in exchange for their Email address.

The second pitfall is that word ‘marketing’. People don’t like to be sold on stuff, and unless you’re Ron Popeil, you shouldn’t try to sell people something when you first ‘meet’ them. Arrange an autoresponder to send them information-filled emails for a few to several weeks, without asking anything of them. Only once they’re sure that what you’re sending them is worth reading should you pop the sales link.

Done right, targeted Email marketing not only builds sales, but it builds a solid list of satisfied customers that will look forward to your new offers — and who doesn’t want a crowd of people just waiting for another chance to give them money?

Forum posting. Custom blog creation. Article writing and distribution. Press release services. Let’s face it — there are a LOT of SEO services out there, so many that most webmasters couldn’t afford them all even if they wanted to. SEO companies will tell you — quite rightly — that it’s important to spread out your backlinks so that they come from a wide variety of sources, but it’s silly to try to get every single possible backlink variant going to your homepage.

In fact, there are a few simple ways to trim down the list to a dozen or so techniques that will fit your website best. It boils down to two questions: are you making money already, and what is your growth strategy?

Are You Making Money Already?
If you’re already seeing money coming in, then you have something of an idea about the conversion rate of your traffic. This is important, because different traffic sources have different conversion rates, and you need to know how to maximize the traffic that converts best for your site. Unfortunately, this is a process that requires testing and is unique to each site, so you’ll have to do the work on your own to figure out which link types to cut out — or have a talented SEO company do it for you.

What is your Growth Strategy?
Backlinks generally come in one of two broad types: links that drive traffic, and links that drive rankings. Some, like a well-written article submitted to a popular article directory, can do both. By and large, however, you have a choice between immediate traffic at the expense of long-term ranking power, or surviving on minimal traffic for quite some time until the rankings kick in and the organic traffic starts to flood. The design of your business should dictate which you shoot for, and you should communicate your choice with your SEO service.

In either case, if you’re not already seeing good business, it’s probably a good idea to pair your SEO efforts with a talented PPC management outfit, just to get the traffic flowing up front. The PPC costs might cut into your profits, but without them, you wouldn’t have any profits to cut into, so it’s a win/win.

Most of the world has heard it by now, but just in case you haven’t, Google has changed the rules once again. The infamous Google algorithm that determines page rank and position for searches has been changed, dramatically. This time the search giant knocked out link farms completely, invalidating any link that comes from a site with either no content or duplicate content, including, it appears, RSS summaries on news sites. Those links can still give you traffic, but they won’t count towards your positioning when potential customers are searching for your products or services.

On the flip side, Google has obviously decided that on-site content development is what they want to see for sites to be awarded those top spots on Page One. Blog posting, once considered a casual pastime, has now become an essential element of any internet marketing campaign. If you plan on getting any kind of significant organic traffic from search you will need to start writing or hire someone to do it for you. In the three months since the Google Panda announcement websites have been literally disappearing from the top twenty pages of Google’s search results.

For the time being, other search giants like Yahoo and Bing are playing by the old rules and you can see the disparity in the rankings. Seeing a top ten in two columns and a Page 30 in another might seem hopeful to some, but not when the Page 30 is the search engine that controls a 90% global market share. When it comes to search engine marketing, what Google does is what the industry standard is. The smaller players may win back some ground over this, but not enough to be significant.

Organic SEO companies have always used link building as one of their staple elements in any campaign, but they don’t all do it the same way. Here at Webwise Media, we’ve always focused on content rich links, site development, and article writing and distribution to high-PR directories. The exact details of the Google algorithm remain secret, but we know from tracking our analytics that none of our sites have lost any ground. That tells us and our clients that we’re doing something right. What would we recommend for you? Let’s start with some blog posting.

Open another window and go to your home page or landing page. What do you see? Is it enough to capture your attention if you’re visiting for the first time? Put yourself in the place of a person who has never been to your site before and has no idea how to navigate to the sign-up or purchase page. Would they find it naturally or simply click off after a few minutes? If your average time on site for a new visitor is less than one minute, you are a good candidate for a web presenter.

A web presenter is an animate image in the form of a man or woman who tells you what the site is all about and directs you to where you need to go. The average script for a web presenter is longer than one minute, so most of your new visitors will stay at least long enough to listen to what you have to say. Some business owners use an image of themselves; others choose an attractive female or male avatar. The choice is yours, but we generally recommend the fictional character and a professional voice. A lot of research goes into creating these things and we have statistics to back up what works.

Is a web presenter an organic SEO tool? In some ways it is. As far as we know, time on site isn’t a variable in Google’s search algorithm, but an interesting presentation could cause a potential customer to bookmark your page, and bookmarks are in the algorithm. They are quality links that were created voluntarily by a party not looking for a return link posting. If the person who creates them is on a social network, those bookmarks become even more powerful, garnering additional links and direct traffic for the originators “friends” or “followers”. This process is called social bookmarking and it is most definitely an organic SEO tool.

Obviously, the more time someone spends on your website, the more likely they are to make a purchase, unless of course your products or services are sub-par or over-priced. The web presenter will keep them onsite; the quality and affordability of your offering will do the rest. It helps if you also have the web presenter explain to the visitor what they need to do to make a purchase. That’s how you increase your conversion rate.