I’ve just been invited to serve as a keynote speaker at the Charlton College of Business, University of Massachusetts Graduate School, and the subject is e-commerce and survival tactics in a recession economy. The conference I will be speaking at will include corporate executives from Massachusetts businesses, as well as faculty and grad students.

I’m thrilled to be invited, and the subject matter I have been asked to speak on is right in my comfort zone, my wheel house power zone, to use baseball hitter terminology now that the season is upon us. You see, not only do we spend a great deal of our business time offering advice to our clients on the subject – - we, ourselves, are an Internet e-commerce business, and we practice what we preach.

What do we preach?

*  A well researched list of keywords for which we want our site to be ranked well by the major search engines;

*  Well crafted copy wrapped around those keywords in the appropriate word count and keyword density, structured well for a strong indexing by search engine robots;

*  Regular content growth on our web site, along with regular copy refreshing on our home page; and

*  Promoting yourself on social networking sites,

just to name a few practices.  In fact, this blog, integrated into our website and with an excerpt fed to the home page of our site, represents our effort at regular content growth and home page copy refreshing.

So, assembling my remarks for the conference next month will be a pretty easy task.  I’ll just mention what we do for our own sites.  Let’s be a little more specific, though.

A lot of the work we do for clients is web copy writing and SEO.  Our free resource booklet, available for download in our Marketing Services section of this site, is devoted to those very subjects.  Our actual conversion history tells us that we have landed more projects for clients who found us by searching on Google and Yahoo for those very terms, “web copy writing and seo,” than for any other related search strings.

So, we optimized our site for those keywords, integrating them into the copy throughout, and making sure we wrote about them to our blog on a regular basis.  The results are telling . . . multiple top 10 and top 15 ranks on both of those search engines for our sites (we have three e-commerce sites devoted to those services).

When geographical references to our office locations are added to the keyword (Cape Cod and Dublin, Ireland), we rank in the top 10 multiple times, also.

My remarks at UMass next month will include our own case study, no “cobbler’s kids going barefoot” excuse for us.  But we’ll also be able to offer the case studies of our clients, like Golf Glider, Unitel, Nauset Lantern Shop, and Life Ireland, too.

The point is, virtually everyone with a computer uses the Internet to conduct virtually all of their pre-purchase research online, no matter the product or service. Standing out in the crowd is even more essential now.  Everyone is comparing prices, shopping for bargains, and getting their attention and business means survival.

If you aren’t touching your site every other week now, you’re falling behind.  Falling behind today could mean going out of business.  I’ll publish my speech here after the conference.  Be sure to check back then to learn more.