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Hmmm so the guy who brought us WordPress now suggests that about 30 percent of all blogs are spam and I guess he would know. It seems that WordPress now powers well over 2.5 million blogs and since going into the blog hosting business his team has deleted over 800,000 spam blogs.

I guess those figures could be worse, they could be similar to the amount of spam that's appearing in inboxes these days. One company that specializes in anti-spam software suggests that 96% of all emails are spam. I'm sure that's something we all knew and think about often as we clean all that spam out of our inbox every day.

Steve's heading out today to visit an older couple who are trying to establish their business on the Net. Even though they're a typical Mom and Pop operation they've managed to produce a really professional looking site and have even been able to get some good back links from other sites that are sending them traffic but they're having trouble turning those visitors into sales.

They're also not doing so well for search engine traffic and when you look at the site it's easy to see what the problems are. From a search engine point of view the site lacks any focus on keywords or keyword phrases that might be important. In fact when Steve and I had a quick look at the site we couldn't identify any terms that the site was aiming for.

So one of the things Steve will be talking to them about is rewriting the text on the pages to include keywords and keyword phrases. He'll also be talking to them about the importance of various parts of the pages. This couple probably hasn't been told how important the page title is or how important the meta description can be because it looks as though they've merely repeated the keywords in the meta description and the page titles don't seem to have any keywords in them at all.

But that's not the main problem with this site. All those things can be fixed quite easily and the site should then begin to appear on the first page of Google's search engine results pages for terms that are important for this couple's business. The biggest problem with this site is that it doesn't seem to have a sales focus.

Now I said that the site looks quite professional and it does. The colors are good, the navigation is ok, the font and font sizes are good and that all gives it a very professional look at first glance.

That's important because various surveys have found that more people are prepared to buy from a site online that looks professional. It seems that to many surfers a professional looking site is a site that they can trust and when they feel they can trust a site then they're prepared to spend money there.

However this site doesn't convert visitors into buyers because it doesn't focus visitors on buying their products. It's obviously trying to sell the items that this couple produces but it doesn't take the potential buyer along through the product research and buying process in a very focused step-by-step manner.

It doesn't say to people who visit the site 'here is our product', 'these are the benefits for you if you purchase the product', 'here are some testimonials from satisfied customers' and 'here is how you actually make the purchase'. Instead the site talks about the product and then throws in some sales pitches for other items and other sites where this couple are affiliates. It even tries to encourage people who visit the site to become affiliate marketers for these other products themselves and only then goes back to trying to sell the items this couple produces.

With such a lack of focus it's no wonder that this site isn't making sales.

So how focused are your sites when it comes to marketing? Do your sites take the surfer by the hand and lead them through the marketing process in a clear and logical progression from start to finish or do your sites resemble the site we've been looking at? Are you're marketing sites just a jumble of pages with no logical progression?

Even if you're only building free sites there should always be some form of progression through the site. Obviously there's the standard layout for a free site but that's not what I'm talking about here.

What I'm talking about involves your marketing on those free sites. Do the ads you have on your free sites become more and more focused the deeper a surfer goes into your site or do you just throw up a few banners and a bit of text and hope for the best?

Perhaps sharpening the focus of your advertising is something you should think about and perhaps even test on a few sites just to see if it doesn't increase your sales.