When helping a Singapore florist to optimize his site. I asked if we should target online florist Singapore or online flower delivery in Singapore. And he said flowers.

But, that’s wrong and I’ll tell you why.

One-word terms such as “flowers” or “florists” are too generic.

Understanding the Buying Cycle

People who use these one-word terms are researching on the topic flower. Even for people looking to buy flowers, in sales speak, they will fall in the very early stage of the buying cycle – they are not ready to buy yet.

Whereas someone who enters “online flower delivery in singapore” knows what he is looking for and is likely to be a customer.

You can read more about keyword selection and the buying cycle at Yahoo Search Marketing Tutorial on Generating Sales: Selecting Keywords.

How Keyword Length Affects Conversion Rate

There are many keyphrases that online florists can target beside the ultra competitive one-word terms and two-word phrases. Study on How Keyword Length Affects Conversion Rate by OneUpWeb.com indicated that 3-word and 4-word phrases returned the best conversion rates.

So the phrases online florist singapore and online flower delivery singapore will give you higher chances to attract paying customers to your web pages than say the generic flowers which attract casual surfers who simply burn up your bandwidth or (unlikely but possible) choke up your Web server to prevent other visitors who are ready to buy from accessing your site.

Keywords List for Online Florist

So what phrases should you target to attract visitors who are ready to buy flowers and related gifts such as hampers, bears and chocolate. Here’s a Singapore SEO company who are too willing to show off their client’s keywords list. Go study the list below.

Read about the Free SEO Starter Guide at the Blogopreneur this morning via Google Alert. It was a short post by Kian Ann. Since he highly recommend it and it’s by Google, I have to go download and print a copy of this free SEO ebook.

This is a basic SEO guide and I think it’s a must-read for everyone, not just webmasters and web designers.

Because it is such a short guide, only 22 page, there is no table of contents or organized in chapters.

So I have taken to time to list out the main points of this very useful and important SEO Guide by Google.

1. Create unique, accurate page titles
2. Make use of the “description” meta tag
3. Improve the structure of your URLs
4. Make your site easier to navigate
5. Offer quality content and services
6. Write better anchor text
7. Use heading tags appropriately
8. Optimize your use of images
9. Make effective use of robots.txt
10. Be aware of rel=”nofollow” for links
11. Promote your website in the right ways
12. Make use of free webmaster tools**
13. Take advantage of web analytics services**
14. Helpful resources for webmasters**

Click here to download the SEO Guide in PDF.

Google Using Viral Marketing to Promote its Services

Did you read the last 3 heading in the above list?

They are promoting Google services!

What a smart way to promote your services by giving away a small little SEO guide book.

Isn’t that viral marketing in action?

Search Marketing Expo or SMX Singapore was held on 13 & 14 Oct 2008 at the Suntec Singapore. I was invited to speak on search engine optimized copywriting. Honestly, it wasn’t a difficult topic – just that I’m not used to speaking for only 25 minutes.

What is SMX Singapore?

If you are interested to find out what I thought of the inaugural SMX Singapore, go read it at my SEO Blog – SMX Singapore 2008. You will find pictures of the other speakers and delegates.

SMX Singapore is the conference for search marketing professionals and that will include both SEO and PPC. Search Marketing Expo or SMX was founded by Danny Sullivan of Third Door Media and organized in this part of the world by Search Engine Bootcamp based in Sydney, Australia.

SMX Singapore 2009

Despite the small turnout at this year SMX Singapore, I thought it was good start and set the stage for bigger and better conference next year. Barry indicated that the next SMX Singapore may be held in June 2009 and already major publishers have pledged their support.