Alphabet soup is on the menu today, except I’m going to ask you to search among the floating pasta for these letters: S, E, A, O and M. Grab three Ss and three Es while you’re at it. The rest you can eat … and while you are slurping away, I’ll talk about some search engine stuff that is terribly important to how you manage your online marketing efforts.

Eating alongside me is Catherine Seda, president of Seda Communication. The author of Search Engine Advertising: Buying Your Way to the Top to Increase Sales1 (which has the enviable distinction of going into a second printing within weeks of its release!!), Catherine will share with us some valuable suggestions for paid listings.

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We’ve talked often enough about the importance of communicating your value proposition, not only on your home page, but on all your landing pages. You want to give folks an up-front, concise idea why they absolutely need to be doing business with you.

And we’ve talked about the importance of the message being meat, whether you are penning the words to that value proposition or any other piece of copy on your site.

Sometimes it helps to look at an example in the negative and evaluate it by identifying what you should not do! Just like those fashion DOs and DON’Ts columns. Most people who read that stuff tell me they get a healthy idea of what they should do based on an explicit presentation of what they should not do.

Read on for the full flavor of this great big DON’T. The copy is word for word … only the name of the company has been changed to protect its questionable innocence.

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