The topic of SEO vs. Sales is a rather fascinating one. This topic is really the battle of what is good for SEO in terms of content and website structure versus what is good concerning the direct marketing appeal.

SEO is about having good content, page authority and plenty of pages. From the sales perspective you want people to fill out a form, give you a call and purchase your products. It can be quite challenging to find that middle ground consisting of the power of SEO without having to sacrifice the direct response effectiveness on the sales side. A good looking web page filled with great content is ideal as far as SEO goes but it is not very conducive to prompting a visitor to take an action such as filling out a form or buying a product. And, having a webpage with a very clear call-to-action is great for getting people to take action but it is not so great in terms of SEO due to the fact that there is not a lot of text on the page.

One of the easiest ways to bridge the gap between SEO and sales is to implement a blog on your website. A blog can add a great deal of content and authority to your site. You should keep your blog fresh by creating a new blog post each day and be sure to include relevant keywords in the title of your blog posts. Each post should ideally consist of at least 300 words. Another tool you can use is what is called an expandable text box. When you click on an expandable text box, it opens into a page containing a lot of content. Google loves expandable text boxes because they are relevant, they contain a lot of information and they tell the search engines what your page is all about.

You also can make your site much more SEO friendly by adding three elements: Resources, FAQs and a Glossary section. With the FAQs, divide them across many pages with one FAQ listed per page. You also should consider making use of user-generated content on your site. This could be a forum or a set of photos that people can post comments on. This way your site visitors will be creating fresh content for you and they will even do some linking back to their sites which is all good in the eyes of the search engines.

Another thing to do is to create autonomous landing pages for paid advertising. These pages will still be a part of your site but they will be to some degree, mirror images of pages within your main site that will prevent your visitors from becoming distracted. These landing pages will encourage the average visitor to take a desired action such as buy a product or service from you. The key here is to keep the autonomous pages consistent with the design of your website and to think of these pages as microsites as opposed to single pages.

If you are able to find the balance between good SEO and sales, you will be killing two birds with one stone. The search engines will like your site and your visitors will be more likely to do what you want them to do, which is to buy something from you.