The missing link in internet marketing is not Piltdown Man – that held our attention span for more than 40 years before being exposed as a hoax.

And it’s not that last elusive backlink that will propel you to the top of page one forever if only you spend an inordinate amount of money with the backlink company that’s selling you the latest snake oil.

The missing link in internet marketing will always be there. It will be some piece of mystery information that isn’t quite in your grasp. Probably with a sales pitch attached that promises to take you to riches beyond your wildest dreams if only you knew the secret.

There’s one problem with all that…

The elephant in the room is that we can never know the complete picture.

Apart from anything else, the internet is forever shifting.

What worked yesterday may or may not work today or tomorrow.

It’s also complicated.

And if someone is trying to sell you something expensive, it gets even more complicated because they have to justify the cost.

On top of that, we tend not to believe that simple things work. That applies to all areas of life: we need a sports drink to rehydrate us because that’s bound to be so much better than drinking a simple glass of water. That one is possibly true. But so often the claims are couched in terms that would occupy a team of lawyers to do the equivalent of the room full of monkeys who would eventually type all of Shakespeare’s plays.

Basics work best

We hate to hear that.

Partly because the basics take time.

But the basics are essential because if you don’t get them right, nothing else will work properly.

On your website, this means getting the page title right and the description that appears below it in the search results looking nice and enticing.

If you’re using something like the Yoast plugin for WordPress then you can see this on screen and check how it’s likely to look.

Make sure you do that for every single page you create as it’s the first impression that potential visitors will have of your site. If they don’t like it, they won’t click.

And if they don’t click, two things happen:

• You get less visitors (that should be obvious)
• Google track the lack of clicks and decide that your page isn’t relevant to that search, so you slip down the results. Pushing your visitor numbers into a downward spiral

Assuming that you’ve got those two basic elements right, you’ve cracked a very high chunk of on-site SEO,

Sure, there are lots of other things you can do.

But until people arrive on your site, those are the only two things that count: page title and page description.

So if your site isn’t getting the traffic you want, do a search on Google for your site (it’s as simple as putting site: directly in front of your url and performing a search). Then check and adjust any page that doesn’t look nice enough to click.

Next, it’s on-page content

You need content on every page that people click onto.

Ideally, lots of content.

That can be a mix of written words and videos but the aim is to give visitors everything they need to know. Probably with some extra effort needed but that’s where your solution or product or service comes in, so there will probably be a gentle sales pitch once you’ve told them what to do.

It’s at this stage that you can play the “it’s complicated” card to your advantage.

I often go on about something I read years ago where it said that McDonalds have something like 27 steps for cooking French Fries.

Most of us would think along the lines of pour them into the fryer, press the “go” button, take them out when they’re cooked.

But to ensure consistency when the job is being done by low wage staff, they have a lot more steps.

The closer you can get your products and services to needing lots and lots and lots of steps, the more people will throw their arms up in the air and decide it’s simpler to pay you to do it for them.

Written on-page content is one of those areas. You need lots of it – nowadays “lots” means upwards of 1,000 words. Ideally over 2,000 words but that can be a struggle for many people and there arem’t always enough hours in the day to do that. But you can always split your writing over two or three days to get it to that level.

Written content is definitely an exception to the “less is more” rule so often quoted for things.

In direct mail and magazine adverts, everyone instinctively thinks that less words are better. But that’s not the case. Long sales copy beats short copy every time.

When he was alive, Gary Halbert took this to the extreme: his sales page led to the offer of a book which was essentially 100 pages or so of sales pitch,

Dan Kennedy does the same – he’s a prolific writer and his books are essentially a pre-sell for his higher priced services.

So don’t let anyone try to convince you that less words are better. They’re wrong!

If you can’t write or don’t want to write, employ a writer. They’re relatively cheap and they’ll get reasonable quality content written for you. It won’t be as good as if you wrote it yourself but it’s a lot better than having nothing.

Then there’s traffic

This is usually shrouded in mystery.

But actually if you do the steps above, traffic will follow.

You may have to promote yourself slightly to kick start it – Tweet, add something in Facebook. that kind of thing.

But, over time, traffic will follow good page titles, nice page descriptions and copious amounts of content.

It may not be earth shattering amounts of traffic. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s laser targeted so you get high conversions from it.

And that follows (much like night follows day) from getting the basics right.

That’s the missing link!

I told you it was simple.

Get the basics right.

And get them right lots of times on lots of pages.

Aim to regularly add content to your website – whether that’s daily, several times a week, several times a month. Don’t make it much less frequent than that otherwise Google will probably think you’ve got bored with your site and will gradually demote you in the search results.

And if you still need more of a plan, feel free to contact me for some personalised help.