How to Get Top SEO and Placement Results with Google Caffeine

Since its debut in 1996, Google's search engine has experienced countless updates and revisions. But none of those revisions have fundamentally changed the architecture of the Google search algorithm as much as Google's latest update, codenamed Caffeine.

While recent reports put Google's market share at around 65 percent, a massive update to its search engine technology makes sense at this point. Microsoft's new Bing search engine showed some resiliency in late 2009, while Web 2.0 services like Facebook and Twitter have done a lot to change the way people search for content on the Internet.

10 Business Blogging Tips to Improve Your Blog Performance

Business blogging is a different kettle of fish to blogging for money and that, in turn, is entirely different to blogging socially. The type of blog you manage will determine the voice, design, and style of your blog as well as the efforts you're likely to put into promoting it.

A business blog needs to be professional as well as appear it. Regular posting on topics that your readers will genuinely find interesting can promote you as an expert in your field. A blog can keep the line of communication between you and potential customers open. It enables you to post relevant, keyword rich postings that encourage new traffic and help build your client base.

It's far from an exhaustive list but below are ten tips to remember when blogging for business:

1 - Set Your Goals Early

In just about every guide you ever read it says "set your goals"; it might be a cliché but it's true. With a business blog your most likely goal is to incréase sales but other worthy goals can include:

• Communicating with your existing or potential clients
• Relaying company news
• Answering queries and questions
• Providing guides for current customers
• Providing a portal to everything useful related to your industry

The design of your site, type of content to include, whether or not to include ads, and numerous other decisions will be governed by the reason that you start blogging. The sooner you realize what it is that you want to achieve, the sooner you'll achieve it.

2 - Use SEO Friendly URLs and SEO Plugins

WordPress is an invaluable SEO tool. It is a dedicated Content Management System but, more than that, it has a team of frighteningly dedicated users that create themes, plugins, widgets, and more and then provide them free of charge to other users. Among these tools are a great number of SEO related tools that can be used to determine your meta description and title tags.

A simple but potentially effective SEO fix is to change the format of permalinks or URLs so that they dispense with the default page id to be replaced with an easier to read and keyword optimized page URL. You can do this through the Wordpress dashboard.

3 - Consider Your Media Placement

Adding photos and illustrations, logos, videos, and other forms of media are great for reader engagement, but you should consider each of your blog assets and place the most valuable and useful in the most prominent position. The quicker you can grab a reader's attention, the more likely you will be to keep it for longer.

Certain themes allow you to easily embed video and slideshows into the sidebar of your blog and this can be a very useful tool to make your pages appear more attractive while relaying genuinely useful information.

4 - Consider Your Ad Placement

The primary target of a business blog is not usually to make money directly through the blog itself. Therefore, the placing of third party ads is not necessarily a good choice. However, you can add ads for your company or service as well as associate websites. You can even add banners to specific categories, tags, or pages in your blog. Don't overdo the number of banner ads and other distracting advertisements though and try to keep the interface clean and professional.

5 - Offer Your Readers the Chance to Pass You Around

Add me, share this, retweet, and email this functions should be provided to your users. When you post something useful and one of your readers shares it, it has the potential to go viral and create a lot of exposure for your blog and therefore your website and your business. This works especially well with highly unique content and can be text, audio, video...

Some themes have these functionalities built into them, but do ensure that they're enabled. Alternatively find a sidebar widget or a social bookmarking plug-in that offers the same features and install this. Many blog readers read a number of blogs regularly and by enabling them to add you to social bookmarking and social networking sites you may well develop a long term relationship with them while also letting them inform others of what you provide.

6 - Keep Quality Content Coming

Try to set yourself a regular schedule but remember that it can be broken and it can be added to when necessary. If news breaks, then post your commentary on it. If you intersperse product reviews and articles that relate to your business then try to schedule these. Make sure you post regularly, at the very least once a week, and spend some time getting involved in the community that builds up around your blog.

7 - Not Every Post Need Be an Advert

As long as you fill your blog with relevant, interesting, and well written posts then visitors will take the time to look around, read a few posts, and even clíck the ads to your site in order to see exactly what you have to offér. Not every single post needs to include multiple links to your website pages.

You can download plugins that further the likelihood of users reading more posts. Some add a list of related posts to the bottom of each entry while many themes provide the chance to show "most popular" and "most commented" posts to further direct the flow of traffic around your blog.

8 - Respond Where Responses are Expected or Deserved

Managing a blog is more than posting a missive of the week's news every Friday. No matter how often you post you should spend some time interacting with the community that develops around your blog. Answer questions and queries, provide insight, and give a response where one is requested.

A business blog should always be professional, which means keeping posts and messages that are too personal away. Similarly, spam comments can prove extremely damaging for your SEO as well as the trust your readers place in your business. There's decent spam settings in Wordpress and you can further extend these.

9 - Stuck for Inspiration? Immerse Yourself in Web 2.0

More specifically read forums and blogs, wikis and news sites related to your industry. Look for those news stories, articles, and videos that you like the most and are relevant to your blog and write about them. Read the comments in your blog and look through your analytics to determine the pages that are most popular with readers.

Look at emerging keywords and news topics and try to act quickly. Slant the resulting article in favor of your business, if possible, and then post this to your blog too. There's plenty of online portals and sites for news in your industry and you can use email updates, RSS readers, and browser or home page plugins to display them regularly and in an orderly and comprehensible way.

10 - Blogging is Great for Business But Business is Also Great for Business

Getting stuck into a blog and truly developing your blog community can be a great way to build traffic to your website and develop clients for your business. Reading related blogs and becoming an active member in social networks can help you find out what your readers want and deliver it frequently.

Blogging and Web 2.0 in general can quickly become addictive. It should be treated as a tool to assist in managing your online business, which means that you need to concentrate on the other aspects of your business. Outsource your blog development and content creation if necessary and enjoy the results.

Your Meta Descriptions Now Affect Your Google Rankings Again

Meta descriptions (the text snippets of the web page you see in search results) used to be an important ranking factor. Until not too long ago both Google and Yahoo! officially announced they no longer used Meta-descriptions in their search algorithms. But recent developments in Google's search also bring Meta description back to life as a ranking factor.

No, Google did not back out of their decision to discount Meta descriptions as a ranking factor. However your site's search snippet can now significantly affect your rankings. Here's the deal.

Google and Personalized Search

Early this month Google announced that they would be tailoring everyone's search results based on their search history even when users are not signed into Google. Personalized results are nothing new on Google. The search giant has been customizing peoples SERPs (search engine results pages) for quite a while already, but until now it only happened when you searched while signed into your Google account. Today, signed in or not everybody gets personal results.

Here's How It Works

Whether you're signed in or not, all the searches you run on Google are stored in your browser cookies. This data is referred to as your 'Web History' and Google uses it to customize your search results. If you're not signed in, your Web History is stored for 180 days, then old data is replaced with new searches. If you're signed in, there's no time limit and you can manage you Web History. Either way the searches you run and sites you visit will affect your future search experience.

The sites you visit more often will be pushed higher in the search results on related queries. For example if you search for 'cat food' and visit www.petfood.com, next time when you search for 'dog food' you may see www.petfood.com in top 10 results even if it doesn't rank there in the general impersonalized search. You can tell that your search results have been personalized by the 'View customization' link in the upper right hand corner.

The personalized search results can differ significantly from the general SERPs. I ran a couple of tests searching for related keywords and clicking the same site each time. I also checked this site's rankings with a rank checker to get a list of impersonalized rankings. In one of the tests a few click-throughs to a site pushed it 26 positions up on a highly competitive keyword. That is from the 31 position on page 4 straight to the 5th spot on the first page in personalized search results (I was signed out).

How Meta Descriptions Can Affect Your Google Rankings

Although Meta descriptions are no longer part of the ranking algorithm they can affect your site's positions in the personalized search results. Your Meta description is a crucial factor that determines the CTR (click-through-rate) of your site in search results. The more compelling your description is, the more searchers will click it. When they click through to your site from search results this is recorded in their Web History. Next time they search for a product or service related to your site, it may appear high up in their personalized search results.

Since everybody now gets personalized results, the scope of the effect your Meta descriptions have on your rankings can get really huge. That's another reason why you should invest some time into testing and optimizing your Meta descriptions.

Meta Description Optimization

There's plenty of advice out there on writing compelling titles and descriptions, so I won't go there. Just keep in mind one thing. Google doesn't always show the Meta description you provide. Sometimes it just compiles a random text snippet from your page that contains the keywords used in the query. But you can easily locate the keywords where your Meta description shows up by searching for them on Google.

In Conclusion

There's been a lot of criticism coming down on Google for introducing personal search to everybody. Some people are worried about privacy issues. Others don't like it because the whole concept will help the rich get richer and keep the small guy out of the game. And some SEOs are just whining that this makes SEO success harder to measure.

Although I don't think it is the best idea Google had either, I prefer to embrace it and run with it. And I suggest that you take this news as a call to action. A strong motivation to actually do something that's going to help your SEO, your sales and your business. And that is to take a look at your Meta descriptions. Go and see how your website appears in the search results and find ways to improve it. With personalized search or without it, having a catchy compelling text in your search results snippet will get you more clicks, more traffíc and more customers.

By Richard Gilmore

How Much SEO Do You Need To Get Top Rankings?

Perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions, perpetuated by industry SEO experts, is that a website must follow perfect SEO strategies to get top rankings. While adhering to simple common SEO standards does help the search engines both find and index your site more quickly, it doesn't guarantee by any stretch of the imagination that following those SEO guidelines will propel your site to the top of the rankings.

If only search engine optimization was that easy!

No doubt, there are some SEO faux pas that will do harm to your site's rankings, especially in Google, the ultimate hall-monitor all puffed up and ready to pounce on any misbehaving webmaster. Things such as keyword stuffing, keyword spamming or linking out to bad neighborhoods such as link farms, pharmaceutical or gambling sites may get you blacklisted.

But how much SEO do you need? How much search engine optimization do you need to get top rankings? Do you need a whole lot or do you need very little SEO?

Actually, after 10 years of marketing online, the answer to that question varies depending upon what you're trying to accomplish with your SEO efforts? If you're operating an online business in a very competitive (read lucrative) market, SEO will be high on your agenda as you go about annihilating your competition.

Even if you're an ordinary webmaster or website owner you're probably fussing over your rankings in the search engines. The higher the rankings you achieve for your chosen keywords; the more traffíc you will get. Good quality traffic that converts well into loyal subscribers and fans of your site.

Many webmasters and companies spend thousands of dollars each month in order to get their keywords and sites up to the top of the líst. If you're into affiliate marketing, your daily income will rise and fall almost parallel to your rankings. Now, if my earnings go up, I know automatically my rankings have gone up, usually in Google. If my earnings go down, I know my rankings have gone south. Some times even a drop or rise of one place on the first page SERPs will affect how much you earn.

Obviously, because of this fact, SEO or how well I am optimized for the search engines is extremely important to me. I am constantly building quality links and quality content for my sites. Some keyword battles you win, some battles you lose. I have been fighting some keyword battles for over 3 or 4 years now!

But how much SEO is enough? How much SEO should you do with your sites? Many webmasters make sure all their on page set-up or lay-out is done exactly to what the SEO experts say you should do. This is not a bad idea. Make sure your Title, URL, Headlines, Keyword Density... are all laid out right. These are things we can control and adjust to meet the SEO standards.

Other SEO or ranking factors are much harder to predict, many of them are simply out of our control. How other sites link to us, what they put in the anchor text, what they say about us... simply things we can't control.

I believe the over-riding reason why your site is listed at the top of any rankings has to do with the number, the quality and the quantity of sites linking back to your page. The higher the number of related quality one-way links you have flowing back to your site, the higher it will perform in the rankings. Your anchor text is very important (underlined part of a link); it must contain your keywords or variations of it. The content on the linking page should also be related to your chosen keywords.

Get this part right and you will get high rankings.

Or at least this has been my experience - all the other ranking factors do count but this is the over-riding factor in my opinion.

Another major ranking factor lately, has been the importance Google is placing on social media links. Get your content to the first page of Digg with lots of diggs and it will rank high in Google. This is not surprising when you consider the nature of these social bookmarking sites... it really is an actual "vote" for the quality of your content. Getting Delicious bookmarks has a similar positive effect.

Another prominent factor, from my observations, is having your major keyword in your Domain Name. Use hyphens if you want but having those keywords in there, does help rather than hinder your rankings.

Now if you're wondering about how Google ranks pages or your keywords.... Google has around 200 ranking factors (with filters and penalties thrown in to make all our lives interesting) which it uses to rank your keywords/pages. This is still the best online resource that lists all of Google's ranking factors: www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-factors.htm

Now the question still remains, how much SEO do you need? How much time should you spend at optimizing, building links, worrying your head off over the latest Google Itch?

The answer always comes back to quality content. Create a site that has quality content and the SEO will take care of itself. People will link to your site, you will get bookmarks in all the social media sites, Google will find your content and rank it. Your SEO will grow naturally as your site grows. Keep building more pages, keep targeting more and more related keywords in your niche or subject area and you will get higher rankings.

Now, of course, some webmasters are a little more aggressive in how quickly they want their rankings to rise to the top of the search engines. Here's something you can do if you want to go into the SEO battle full-force.

1. Download SEOquake and place this free SEO toolbar plug-in on your Firefox (or I.E.) browser.


2. Go to Google and type in the keyword or keyword phrase you're targeting with your site or content.


3. Select the number one ranking and observe how many pages it has indexed, PageRank, how many backlinks it has, age of the site... and so on.


4. Then use the page info button and study all the on-page factors this site has and notice what it's doing with its page and keyword density lay-out.


5. Check all the backlinks this site has in the different search engines. Copy or try to get the same backlinks for your site that your competitor has acquired. Then get more backlinks and/or higher quality backlinks than your competitor.


6. Watch your rankings rise...

Just a few more words of wisdom and we're done. Some battles will be too tough to fight, the competition will be so stiff you just can't compete. Other battles will take a long time; months, even years before you rise to the top. Your best bet is to choose long-tail (multi-worded) keywords that have little or no competition. You can rise to the top within days, even hours. The sweet thing is this: long-tail keywords are often the most lucrative and bring in the most sales. For in the final analysis, you just don't want SEO, you want smart SEO. And you will quickly learn, most times you can often out-smart your competition, even if you can't out-rank them.

By Titus Hoskins

Small Business SEO Checklist: The Do’s

1. Commit yourself to the process. SEO isn't a one-time event. Search engine algorithms change regularly, so the tactics that worked last year may not work this year. SEO requires a long-term outlook and commitment.

2. Be patient. SEO isn't about instant gratification. Results often take months to see, and this is especially true the smaller you are, and the newer you are to doing business online.

3. Ask a lot of questions when hiring an SEO company. It's your job to know what kind of tactics the company uses. Ask for specifics. Ask if there are any risks involved. Then get online yourself and do your own research—about the company, about the tactics they discussed, and so forth.

4. Become a student of SEO. If you're taking the do-it-yourself route, you'll have to become a student of SEO and learn as much as you can. Luckily for you, there are plenty of great Web resources (like Search Engine Land) and several terrific books you can read. Aaron Wall's SEO Book, Jennifer Laycock's Small Business Guide to Search Engine Marketing, and Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin are three I've read and recommend.

5. Have web analytics in place at the start. You should have clearly defined goals for your SEO efforts, and you'll need web analytics software in place so you can track what's working and what's not.

6. Build a great web site. I'm sure you want to show up on the first page of results. Ask yourself, "Is my site really one of the 10 best sites in the world on this topic?" Be honest. If it's not, make it better.

7. Include a site map page. Spiders can't index pages that can't be crawled. A site map will help spiders find all the important pages on your site, and help the spider understand your site's hierarchy. This is especially helpful if your site has a hard-to-crawl navigation menu. If your site is large, make several site map pages. Keep each one to less than 100 links. I tell clients 75 is the max to be safe.

8. Make SEO-friendly URLs. Use keywords in your URLs and file names, such as yourdomain.com/red-widgets.html. Don't overdo it, though. A file with 3+ hyphens tends to look spammy and users may be hesitant to click on it. Related bonus tip: Use hyphens in URLs and file names, not underscores. Hyphens are treated as a "space", while underscores are not.

9. Do keyword research at the start of the project. If you're on a tight budget, use the free versions of Keyword Discovery or WordTracker, both of which also have more powerful paid versions. Ignore the numbers these tools show; what's important is the relative volume of one keyword to another. Another good free tool is Google's AdWords Keyword Tool, which doesn't show exact numbers.

10. Open up a PPC account. Whether it's Google's AdWords or Yahoo's Search Marketing or something else, this is a great way to get actual search volume for your keywords. Yes, it costs money, but if you have the budget it's worth the investment. It's also the solution if you didn't like the "Be patient suggestion above and are looking for instant visibility.

11. Use a unique and relevant title and meta description on every page. The page title is the single most important on-page SEO factor. It's rare to rank highly for a primary term (2-3 words) without that term being part of the page title. The meta description tag won't help you rank, but it will often appear as the text snippet below your listing, so it should include the relevant keyword(s) and be written so as to encourage searchers to click on your listing. Related bonus tip: You can ignore the Keywords meta altogether if you'd like; it's close to inconsequential. If you use it, put misspellings in there, and any related keywords that don't appear on the page.

12. Write for users first. Google, Yahoo, etc., have pretty powerful bots crawling the web, but to my knowledge these bots have never bought anything online, signed up for a newsletter, or picked up the phone to call about your services. Humans do those things, so write your page copy with humans in mind. Yes, you need keywords in the text, but don't stuff each page like a Thanksgiving turkey. Keep it readable.

13. Create great, unique content. This is important for everyone, but it's a particular challenge for online retailers. If you're selling the same widget that 50 other retailers are selling, and everyone is using the boilerplate descriptions from the manufacturer, this is a great opportunity. Write your own product descriptions, using the keyword research you did earlier (see #9 above) to target actual words searchers use, and make product pages that blow the competition away. Plus, retailer or not, great content is a great way to get inbound links.

14. Use your keywords as anchor text when linking internally. Anchor text helps tells spiders what the linked-to page is about. Links that say "click here" do nothing for your search engine visibility.

15. Build links intelligently. Submit your site to quality, trusted directories such as Yahoo, DMOZ, Business.com, Aviva, and Best of the web. Seek links from authority sites in your industry. If local search matters to you (more on that coming up), seek links from trusted sites in your geographic area—the Chamber of Commerce, etc. Analyze the inbound links to your competitors to find links you can acquire, too.

16. Use press releases wisely. Developing a relationship with media covering your industry or your local region can be a great source of exposure, including getting links from trusted media web sites. Distributing releases online can be an effective link building tactic, and opens the door for exposure in news search sites. Related bonus tip: Only issue a release when you have something newsworthy to report. Don't waste journalists time.

17. Start a blog and participate with other related blogs. Search engines, Google especially, love blogs for the fresh content and highly-structured data. Beyond that, there's no better way to join the conversations that are already taking place about your industry and/or company. Reading and commenting on other blogs can also increase your exposure and help you acquire new links. Related bonus tip: Put your blog at yourdomain.com/blog so your main domain gets the benefit of any links to your blog posts. If that's not possible, use blog.yourdomain.com.

18. Use social media marketing wisely. If your small business has a visual element, join the appropriate communities on Flickr and post high-quality photos there. If you're a service-oriented business, use Yahoo Answers to position yourself as an expert in your industry. With any social media site you use, the first rule is don't spam! Be an active, contributing member of the site. The idea is to interact with potential customers, not annoy them.

19. Take advantage of local search opportunities. Online research for offline buying is a growing trend. Optimize your site to catch local traffic by showing your address and local phone number prominently. Write a detailed Directions/Location page using neighborhoods and landmarks in the page text. Submit your site to the free local listings services that the major search engines offer. Make sure your site is listed in local/social directories such as CitySearch, Yelp, Local.com, etc., and encourage customers to leave reviews of your business on these sites, too.

20. Take advantage of the tools the search engines give you. Sign up for Google's webmaster Central and Yahoo's Site Explorer to learn more about how the search engines see your site, including how many inbound links they're aware of.

21. Diversify your traffic sources. Google may bring you 70% of your traffic today, but what if the next big algorithm update hits you hard? What if your Google visibility goes away tomorrow? Newsletters and other subscriber-based content can help you hold on to traffic/customers no matter what the search engines do. In fact, many of the DOs on this list—creating great content, starting a blog, using social media and local search, etc.—will help you grow an audience of loyal prospects and customers that may help you survive the whims of search engines.

Your additions are welcome in the comments.

5 Google Tools For Researching Your Market

Internet marketers and webmasters have always had a love/ hate relationship with Google. Whatever you think of them they do provide website owners with some great market research tools.

No matter what market you are in or plan to be in, you will find these free tools provided by Google very useful when researching your market. You should be researching your market constantly, NOT just when setting up your site. The internet is ever changing and, if you're not keeping up with those changes, you will be left behind.

Market Research Tool 1 - Related Searches And Wonder Wheel

When you start typing in the main Google search box you should see a drop down box appear giving you some alternative search terms related to the word you typed. Note these phrases down in a notepad file or write them on a piece of paper. They will be useful as part of your keyword list used in the next tool. You will also see more related search phrases after you click search. Scroll to the bottom of the results page and you will see "searches related to:" Note down any new phrases shown there.

Recently Google has released Wonder Wheel which is also a related keywords tool but is shown in a mind map format. You can also click on the related phrases to find more useful search terms. To access wonder wheel: enter your keyword in the standard search screen, then at the top of the results on the left you should see a show options link. Select that and it will reveal a menu. Near the bottom of the menu you should see wonder wheel.

Market Research Tool 2 - Adwords Keyword Tool

We all know how important keywords and search phrases are. Let's face it, it's what drives the internet. Google has provided us with a tool that tells you what keywords and phrases people are using to find what they are looking for. You are able to search an individual country, more than one if you hold down the ctrl key on your keyboard as you select, or all countries.

The adwords tool is now more valuable due to the fact it shows actual search numbers. Previously you only had a green bar to indicate how much traffic the search term receíved. You can also see how competitive each keyword is amongst adword advertisers, showing us which keywords are commercially viable.

Market Research Tool 3 - Google Trends

Now that you have an idea what keywords your market is using you can use the trends tool to check the history of that keyword / phrase. Google Trends supplies data for the last 5 years, giving you an idea if the search term is consistent. You can also see if the search term is popular at certain times of the year, also known as a seasonal keywords.

Another important function of Trends is the section that tells you the popularity of a keyword by country, city and language - very useful if you are targeting particular countries or even cities.

Market Research Tool 4 - Google Alerts

Alerts is underused by webmasters. If you want to stay in touch with what's hot in your market, you can by using Google Alerts. All you have to do is enter the most popular phrases in your market. Google will then send you links via email depending on what type you select.

The types are news, web, blogs, video and groups. If you would like a mix of all, you can select comprehensive. You can decide how often you want to be updated by selecting either: as it happens, once a day or once a week. I hope you can see how powerful this is if you want to be seen as an authority in your market.

Market Research Tool 5 - Google Web Search

Finally, we have Google's standard web search which is not standard in my eyes. It provides a lot of information if you know what to look for. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important part of running a website. By performing a search of your market keywords, Google will tell you what type of content it sees as important.

If you see videos, blogs or images this gives you another way to reach the top 10 of Google. If you see Web 2.0 style sites such as Digg, that could be another avenue. If there are adword ads on the right side of the screen, that tells you the market is commercially viable and more importantly that the keyword you entered is good enough to pay for, especially if there are 10 ads or more.

As you can see, even if you don't have money to buy the latest tools, I have shown you there is a way to get some very important information using free tools from Google. Are you starting to love them now?

By Pete Moore

The SEO's Toolkit Part Three: Resources

Welcome to part three of this three part series on SEO tools and resources. In the last two articles we discussed the variety of Firefox extensions used for SEO as well as an assortment of other free or affordable SEO tools. In this article we'll discuss some of the resources you'll want to access on a regular basis to keep up to date and informed on the goings-on in the search engine and SEO realm.

We're going to cover a few different types of resources below and I'm going to try to keep this article to a reasonable length so let's begin ...

Media

When there's a breaking story or you want an expert opinion on a subject, a good first place to hit are the media sources in that industry. The SEO industry is no different and there are some impressive albeit often unconventional media sources. Some of my favorites are:

Webmaster Radio

Webmaster Radio is an Internet-based radio station with some great programing ranging from affiliate marketing to PPC to organic optimization and much more. With shows hosted by experts in their fields from Danny Sullivan (Search News) to Dave Szetela (PPC) you'll find solid information that is well-rounded. I'd list my favorite shows but what I like may be different than you and what I need to know may be different than what you need to know, so look through their programming and either listen through your work day as I often do or download the podcasts for later listening.

WebProNews

WebProNews offers up-to-the-minute information on virtually every event. They have reporters writing constantly and have other scoring SEO blogs and other news sources, compiling the information in one place for easy access. They also have great articles by third-party writers and a very active readership that is proactive in their commenting. Definitely near the top of my go-to list when I'm looking for news and current feedback.

Addme

This site is difficult to classify as it fits into a couple categories but I decided to include it under media as that's my primary use. They include tools, resources, a directory and much more on their site. My primary use of this site is for the articles and newsletter.

Search Engine Watch

No list of SEO resources would be complete without including Search Engine Watch. This site is the one that started it all. Search Engine Watch provides everything from fantastic articles and breaking news to search engine stats and an awesome forum. A definite bookmark.

Blogs

As with many industries - blogs are a great way to keep informed on the latest goings-on in the SEO realm. The trick, however, is figuring out which blogs are worth reading and which authors are truly knowledgeable. Over the years I've read many blogs and to be honest - I still do. Below are some of the key blogs I reference on a regular basis.

SEO Book Blog

Aaron Wall over at SEO Book has an excellent blog worth reading on a regular basis. I have yet to visit his blog and not find some tid-bit of information that was worth reading either because of the information itself or because often he's just entertaining. Another to add to your weekly reading list.

Matt Cutts Blog

It's nice to get it from the horse's mouth. For those who don't know - Matt Cutts is the head of Google's Webspam team. He blogs about Google, technology and occasionally his cat. One has to read what he writes knowing that he's a Google employee and as such can't really give away the farm, BUT he gives tons of great advice, insight and tips. The perk being that you don't have to ask if following his advice will get you banned. :)

SEO By The Sea

Bill Slawski (the author) focuses his attention on the more technical side of things with tales of patents, algorithmic possibilities, statistics and functionalities. For many, his would be one of the more dry blogs if not for his gift with words and ability to make even the most bland of subjects palatable. You don't need to visit his blog daily but adding it to your weekly journey through the web is recommended.

SEOmoz Blog

What blog list would be complete without the inclusion of the SEOmoz blog. Rand Fishkin and crew keep their visitors up-to-date on some great research, news and SEO tips. From opinion pieces to months-long whitepapers, you'll find useful information. Again - not necessary to visit every day but a weekly pass is always worthwhile.

Forums

Forums are a great place to gather information, especially on current events such as ranking updates. That said, reading forums can be a risky thing. Almost anyone can join a forum and post their thoughts. While this format allows us to capture a wide range of information and knowledge - it also results in less qualified people giving advice as well. So while I recommend reading forums, I also recommend taking things with a grain of salt - at least until you figure out who's who.

SEO Chat Forums

The SEO chat forums are easily one of the largest and most popular of the SEO forums. They cover a HUGE array of issues from Google and social media to Alexa rankings and (hold your hats) Ask Jeeves (that's right - the forum's been around for THAT long). Users worth noting are rustybrick, fathom, and randfish.

DigitalPoint Forums

DigitalPoint is also an ancient forum (2000 - ancient by web standards at least). It covers a wide range of topics from SEO to PPC and affiliate programs. Some users worth noting there are shoemoney, daven, and, of course, digitalpoint. A great place to ask your questions. Heavily visited and they have a ranking system for their users so you can get a decent feel as to whether they're reliable.

SitePoint Forums

There are a variety of reasons I like SitePoint and I own a number of their books. Their forums focus on design and development (not SEO), but every SEO needs resources on the design and development side.

Newsletters & Other Resources

Of course there are other resources that every SEO or webmaster needs to be able to get their hands on. Here they are:

Google Webmaster Guidelines

These are the guidelines set out by Google telling you what you can and can't do and what tactics to look out for. Worth a look over periodically as they do change from time-to-time. If you're heading into the forums for advice, you'll definitely want to take a gander at the guidelines first to make sure that if you get led astray - at least you'll know what can get you banned or penalized.

By Dave Davies

The SEO's Toolkit Part Two of Three: Tools

Welcome to part two of this three part series on SEO tools and resources. In the last article we discussed the variety of Firefox extensions used for SEO. In this article we'll discuss some of the free and affordable tools you can use to better your organic optimization efforts. By affordable I mean for virtually everybody so I'm going to set the bar at $100/yr or ownership. Admittedly, we use tools that cost more than this but many of those tools will be out of some people's price range.

Here are some of the key tools you need to use to help insure the successful optimization of your website.

Google Keyword Tool

Many of you are likely familiar with Google's keyword tool, but it needs to be noted. This is a great resource for researching keywords. As with all keyword tools, it has its limitations and most would agree that it seems to overestimate search volume but nonetheless it is probably the best of the keyword tools out there, especially at the price.

Keyword Discovery

No individual set of data is perfect and no stage of the SEO process is more important than keyword research and selection. Keyword Discovery is a great tool to compare with the Google keyword data. Where you find commonalities you know that 2 independent sets of data agree. With a free tríal that may itself work for many - it's certainly worth looking into.

Keyword Spy

While the paid version of this tool is more than the $100/yr. max I noted previously - the free version provides some great data. Simply enter a competitor URL and you'll find out some valuable data about the keywords they rank for both organically and in AdWords. This is great for competitor analysis as well as for finding keywords you might not have thought of.

Xenu Link Sleuth

A fantastic free tool that crawls websites, reporting back all the broken links. Over time, almost all sites get broken links. Running this tool periodically will help you find them so you can fix them.

Google Webmaster Tools

Arguably one of the most important of the SEO tools. Google Webmaster Tools allows webmasters (and SEO's of course) to see their website the way Google does. With this tool you'll get to see what your site is appearing for in the results, what pages on your site are linked to but don't exist, and a wide array of errors and statistics.

With this information you can repair a number of issues. If your site is appearing for phrases that you're not getting traffic from, you can review your titles and descriptions to see if you can improve your clickthrough rate. Xenu won't show you the links from other sites that are pointing to pages that don't exist - Google Webmaster Tools will. You'll also find good backlink information for your site as well as a lot more.

Page Prowler

Page Prowler is a backlink research tool that allows the user to collect large amounts of potential backlink information, sort that data by site strength, and then proceed to pursue those backlinks. The value of this tool is primarily in the time it saves. It has no function that could not be done manually, but it can compile data that would otherwise take a person hours or days to collect quickly and easily.

Full disclosure – Shawn (the developer) asked me to advise on the development of this link building tool and I'm also assisting in it's marketing. I was extremely impressed with Shawn's first version of PR Prowler which includes some great functions and information. I felt the need to note this, but I'll also note that we at Beanstalk use this tool regularly. I would not include it here if it didn't deserve to be and I'd include it here if I had nothing to do with it other than my using it.

Advanced Web Ranking

Advanced Web Ranking is probably the most affordable of the better rank checking software programs. It has a ton of great features including scheduling and auto-report generation. You can set the searches to take place slowly to reduce the impact on the search engines. I still recommend to run it in the evening to further minimize your impact during high-volume search periods.

Multiple Keyword Rack-Checking Tool

This is probably one of the most popular tools on the Beanstalk site. One of the pet peeves I always had with online rank checking tools was checking rankings one-at-a-time. This tool allows you to check your rankings on Google ten at a time. Apparently others agree as it's the most used tool of our set.

136 SEO Tools

While we've tried to include a solid set of very affordable tools in this article, you might find value in tools we don't use. The "136 SEO Tools" page is regularly updated and includes some very interesting (though not part of my daily arsenal) tools. Highly recommended to visit at least once. I have it in my bookmarks and check back every couple months to see what new tools have been added.

Written by Dave Davies

The SEO's Toolkit Part One of Three: Firefox

Every SEO uses different tools and resources. Some tools are paid, some are free and some are internally developed tools that we use for ourselves and our clients - but we all use them. Very often I get asked what tools people should use if they're looking to optimize their own sites and what resources they should use to keep up with the latest going's on. While telling people how to optimize their own sites and what the tools we use isn't generally the best of business practices - I just can't help myself. If your budget doesn't allow for the hiring of a professional SEO company - trying it yourself may be the only option. I also try to remember that once-upon-a-time I was optimizing my own sites and was new to SEO and without the open advice of others already involved in the community - I wouldn't be running a successful SEO company today. To this end, it only seems right to provide a list of some of the main tools we use on virtually every site.

When I initially started writing this article I was going to cram a slew of various tools and resources into one article, but the article was going to end up running WAY too long to hold your attention (or mine) so I've cut it into three EZ parts (as opposed to three EZ payments which you'll be familiar with if you too watch late night TV with a laptop in front of you writing things like SEO articles). But let's get to the meat of this article shall we? The series will be divided into three parts:

• Firefox


• Free & Affordable Tools


• Resources

So let's begin with Firefox. Let me first say, I don't know if Firefox is officially the browser of SEO's, but if not - it should be. You can download it at Mozilla.com. And now the extensions that make this browser invaluable to SEO's...

SEO Quake

If I had to lose all but one of my SEO tools - this would be the one I'd keep which is why it gets listed first. This little tool allows me to quickly look at the top 10 results in the SERPs and within seconds see all the PageRank, indexed page numbers, backlinks to that page, domain backlinks, the age of the site and much, much more.

This tool doesn't provide any revolutionary information in that it's all data that can be accessed directly. However, it reduces the time taken for tasks that would take minutes to seconds. It then provides easy links to more detailed information. A fantastic tool.

Oh, and it also adds a line through all nofollowed links. Very handy when link building.

SEO for Firefox

Aaron Wall over at SEO Book has added a great tool to the mix that duplicates a lot of functions of SEO Quake but which has enough additional features to be very useful. Basically - neither is a replacement for the other.

Like most tools - it provides information that can be accessed in other ways, BUT with this Tool Aaron allows users to find tons of relevant site and keyword information quickly and painlessly. From keyword traffic to keyword trends, from backlink counts to social media mentions - this tools gives quick access to tons of information.

Admittedly, I prefer the layout of SEO Quake and some of the easier functionality.

SEO Link Analysis

A HUGE thumbs way up (two of them in fact) to Joost de Valk who made all our lives simpler when this tool launched. What this tool does is display the PageRank and anchor text of every link when you perform a backlink check on one of the major engines. I suppose you could visit every single site and get this information yourself and there's value in that to be sure, but when you need a quick analysis of a site's backlinks - this tool is invaluable.

As a sidenote – it works VERY well with SEO Quake.

Web Developer

With this tool we're getting a bit more advanced. For those of you who understand coding or are learning (and you should be), this tool is incredible. It allows for quick testing and viewing of a site's structure including, image info, table and cell information, W3C compliance, CSS details and MUCH, MUCH more.

I can't possibly list off all the functions this tool offers and admittedly I don't use them all but I use enough of them regularly for this tool to make my top 10 list.

IE Tab

This is an odd tool to add and it's purely a convenience tool but like adding a second monitor to your system - once you have it and realize that it saves you just a few seconds dozens of times per day you quickly realize that your productivity relies on it.

With a simple click of a button, this tool loads Internet Explorer into your Firefox tab so you don't have to go back-and-forth between browsers when testing. I could survive without it, but since you have Firefox anyways...

Search Status

This is another tool with many uses. On the surface it simply displays PageRank, Alexa and Compete rank and mozRank data but with a right-click of the icon you get access to a whole slew of additional information, including fast links to whois, the robots and sitemap files, keyword density information, Archive.org info, and it will even highlight nofollow links.

A lot of these features overlap other tools noted above, but I will say - I have it installed and so should you.

These are the main extensions I have installed for Firefox (read: the ones I use virtually every day). This isn't to say that's all there are, and I can't stress enough the benefits of visiting addons.mozilla.org and looking for more useful extensions specific to your needs (RSS, Twitter, coding, etc.) I have about a dozen more installed than are listed here, but those above are the main Firefox SEO tools I use daily.

In the next article, we'll be taking a look at free and affordable tools that you can use to help improve your website rankings. Be sure to keep your eyes open as there will be many invaluable tools listed there too.

Can SEO Exist Beyond Google Personalization?

Speculation in the search industry is rife this week with claims that Google Search Personalization has changed the SEO playing field. But has it really? Or are people freaking out for no good reason? To find out, we’ll look at how it impacts SEO in the negative and positive. But first, let’s have a quick refresher on how Personalized Search works.

What is Personalized Search?

For the past few years, Google has been monitoring what you search for when logged into your Google account and in particular, what sites you click on in the SERPs. If you favor particular sites, Google takes note and customizes future searches to show you more results featuring your favorite sites, more often and in higher positions.

For example, if you like t-shirt shopping online and are a regular visitor to Threadless as a result of logged in Google searches, Google would feature pages from Threadless more in the SERPs you see for t-shirt related search queries than would normally be featured in SERPs shown to others for the same search queries. Likewise, pages from Threadless would be pushed higher up the search results than they would normally be.

Personalized Search has been in place for signed-in users for years, but this month Google rolled out personalized search to users worldwide, whether they are signed in to a Google account or not.

Apart from privacy concerns, the announcement has prompted the inevitable “SEO is dead” claims that always seem to surface whenever Google announce a change to their search functionality.

So let’s take a look at how/why personalization might influence search engine optimization.

Why Personalization DOES Impact SEO:

• If everyone sees different SERPs based on their searching patterns, how can you measure a consistent ranking? How can you reach an audience if their search queries are already *rigged* to show your competitor’s brand?
• On page optimization and link building will no longer have as much influence on your site’s rank for competitive search queries.
• Clients who opt-in to personalization and visit their own sites may have a false impression that their sites are ranking well in the SERPs and cease or refuse SEO services.
• Clients who opt-in to personalization and visit their competitor’s sites may have a false impression that their sites AREN’T ranking well in the SERPs and blame their SEO.
• Companies / brands with more traffic have a better chance to gain new business because searchers will see more impressions of snippets to their sites. This creates branding opportunities via snippets.
• Webmasters will start optimizing more for other search engines like Bing where they can have more of an impact on organic results.
• It will become even more difficult to rank for generic keywords and search phrases (as larger brands will tend to dominate based on market search share), meaning long tail search queries will become much more important in an SEO campaign.
• Search spam should start to be filtered out as very few people will be revisiting spammy pages. That should eventually push more relevant, naturally optimized pages higher up the SERPs, particularly those in competitive industries.
• Fresh content will give sites an advantage because new pages are more likely to stand out to searchers in personalized SERPs. Same goes for real-time content generated by Twitter, Facebook etc. Static sites are going to fall to oblivion.
• Audience targeting and snippet relevancy will become more important when optimizing web pages.
• PPC ads will have to try harder to compete with increasingly brand-biased SERPs.
• PPC will become more popular as people find organic SEO too complex and abandon it.
• Personalization should help normally lower ranked sites to get to the top a little faster via loyal customers and visitors.
• Titles, META descriptions and text snippet optimization will become SEO priorities.
• Top SERP performers will fall down the ranks if their snippets and offerings are not competitive enough, allowing lower ranked sites to take over.
• Manually checking your site rankings, or those of your clients with personalization switched on will result in skewed, inaccurate SERPs.
• Rank checking tools like WebPosition will no longer be accurate. Clients will stop asking for ranking reports (hooray!).
• Some think that Google could be using personalization to monitor user-driven search in order to tweak the PageRank algorithm based on what users actually search for.
• Brand new sites targeting competitive search queries have very little chance of appearing in SERPs customized by personalization, even with SEO.
• If you don’t rank well now for your target search queries, you might slip further and further off the radar as searchers refine their SERPs by clicking on the higher ranked sites.
• If clicking on SERPs begins to impact what users see, hackers may develop malware etc. that automates SERP clicking.

Convinced that SEO is dead yet? Hold your horses. Let’s aim for some perspective here.

Why Personalization DOESN’T Impact SEO:

• Personalization has been in place for some time already – since 2005 in fact.

• The main Google PageRank algorithm still applies, it’s just the delivery of the results that has changed.

• Any SERP emphasis is user-driven rather than algorithm driven and personalization changes only relate to search queries closely aligned to your web history.

• Most non-personalized SERPs are not identical these days anyway. There is evidence of changes even based on the same search query on same PC in the same location a few minutes apart. Different datacenters and Everflux between them mean consistently shifting SERPs.

• SEO isn’t just about SERP ranking. Think usability, keyword selection, conversion design, branding, social media, online reputation management etc.

• Even if a searcher’s favorite brands come up in the SERPs and even if they visit them, they won’t always find what they’re looking for and will keep looking through and clicking other results, leveling the playing field eventually.

• People won’t necessarily visit your site based on rank – if it’s relevant, it will get found.

• Real Time Search and Universal Search are pushing the organic results down the SERPs anyway. Personalization is unlikely to have as big an impact as those factors.

• Personalization will encourage repeat visitors for sites that can attract clicks. In this way, customized SERPs act as a search engine based bookmarklet.

• Web history only lasts for 180 days if you’re not signed in, so unless searchers do multiple related searches and click on results during that time-frame, personalization may not even apply.

• Although they are not revealing the percentage of search results impacted per page by personalization, Google keeps harping on about wanting diversity in the SERPs so they are unlikely to allow personalization to skew your search results too much.

• You can tell if personalized search has influenced the SERPs you’re viewing by the *customizations* link at top right when logged in. You can view the same search without customization to see how the SERPs look to persons who have opted-out of personalization.

• You can switch it off permanently!

Get a Grip, People

Personalization has been in place on Google for over 4 years. This isn’t a new algorithm, it’s simply a new delivery mechanism. It’s important to remember that a large number of Google users are logged in to a Google account of some kind when conducting searches anyway, so they won’t even notice the difference.

The other thing to keep in mind is that personalization is all about relevance and usability. Webmasters have been focused for too long on rankings and trying to crack a spot in the Top 10 search results for their target search terms. Similarly, searchers have been too lazy to look beyond the first page or two of search results. The rollout of personalization hopefully sees relevancy start to influence and drive our search behavior more so than rankings.

In some respects, Google has simply handed users the steering wheel and encouraged us to drive their search engine. So my conclusion is that while personalization does impact SEO, it is not a SEO killer so much as a search rank killer.

Rankings are dead. Long live Relevancy!

6 Website Redesign SEO Secrets Your Developer May Not Know

At the end of the year, many businesses start to think about redesigning their tired old website to breathe some new life into it. You may even be in the midst of a website redesign right now. If so, the first thing is to make sure you hire a design and development company that knows how to build the infrastructure of the website in a search engine crawler–friendly manner.

Beyond that, you need to address a number of additional SEO tactics before you get too deep into your redesign. The reason you need to keep SEO front and center during this time is twofold: so that you do not lose your previous traffic, but also so that you can gain additional targeted search engine visitors when the new site goes live.

Here are 6 SEO redesign secrets your developer may not know...ignore them at your peril!

1. Creating Your SEO'd Site Architecture

Search engines look explicitly at how all your pages are linked together in order to determine their place within the site. Pages that are linked from every other page will be given more weight than those that are only linked from a few others. This is all considered a form of internal link popularity, or in Google language, internal PageRank.

Recommendation: During your redesign, don't bury too deeply within the site any content that was previously bringing targeted search engine traffic. Ensure that any informational content that will be focused on the more competitive keyword phrases (for example, product and service pages) is high up in your site hierarchy.

In addition, all content contained in a specific category should be cross-linked via some sort of sub-navigation within that section.

2. Categorization and Avoiding Duplicate Content

When people are seeking information from a search engine, they usually have a question, a problem, or a need for specific information. The search queries they use at Google and the other engines reflect this. The more ways you can categorize your content for the various target markets you serve, the better.

Recommendation: Be sure that all top-level pages answer the potential searcher's (your potential customers') questions, and that it's clear that your products and services can solve their problem. In addition, you also have to ensure that regardless of how someone found any piece of content on your site, they always end up at the same URL to avoid PageRank splitting and duplicate content issues.

For example, if a specific product can be classified as both a product and a service, it makes sense that it might be listed under both categories. However, the page (URL) that the potential customer eventually lands on, regardless of which category they started in, should always be the same.

3. New Content Management System and Changing URLS

If URLs must change in the redesign due to a new content management system or back-end coding, search engines may take some time to index the new URLs as well as give them the same weighting they gave the previous URLs due to URL age factors.

Recommendation: It's critical to 301-redirect all old URLs to their relative counterpart within the newly designed website. This will pass the link popularity of the old URLs to the new ones quickly, as well as ensure that site visitors don't receive 404-not-found errors.

This will be easier if the new URL naming is similar to the old one, because you can use automated methods. If URLs must change completely with no correlation to the names of the old URLs, and hand-redirects are required, you'll want to at least redirect all the top-level pages, as well as those that you're sure receive keyword traffic from search engines. But, ideally, every URL should be redirected if at all possible.

4. Coding of Navigation Menus

Links contained within the navigation of your website should be coded in a search engine–friendly manner so that they are visible and crawlable. Some DHTML and Flash menus are invisible to search engines, which causes the pages linked within them to not receive the internal link popularity they should receive.

Recommendation: Make sure all navigational menus are coded with CSS that is visible to search engines. In addition, avoid drop-down box links as the main form of navigation (CSS mouseovers are fine). You'll also want to ensure that all content can be reached by hard-coded links – don't force the user to go through any kind of search box menu because those are traditionally search engine unfriendly.

5. Custom HTML Elements

While some level of automation for titles, metas, headers, URLs, and alt attributes for images can be helpful, it's critical that your new website's content management system allow you to create custom descriptions for these as well.

Recommendation: Make sure the content management system has fields for custom title tags, meta descriptions, heading tags, etc. There should be no limit to the number of characters allowed in these fields either, because every page may need a different number of words and characters.

6. Session IDs and Other Tracking Links

It's best not to use session IDs to track visitors, but if your system must use them, you'll only need to feed the "clean" URLs to the search engine spiders – otherwise, they may get caught in an infinite loop, indexing the same content under multiple URLs.

You'll also want to avoid any sort of campaign tracking links appended to URLs because these can split your link popularity by causing your content to be indexed under multiple URLs.

Recommendation: If this type of tracking is inherent in your system, use the canonical link element to maintain one URL for every page of content.

Don't be surprised if your developer isn't happy to receive some of these "secrets." He or she may feel that their authority is being usurped or their creativity is being hindered. Just remember that it's your website that you're paying them to create in a way that will make you the most money possible. Let your developer know up-front that these things are non-negotiable. If they tell you that they can't do any of the above, start looking around for a new developer – ASAP!

While there will always be a few unexpected bugs to work out when your site goes live, you won't have to be afraid of losing your search engine visitors as long as you know what you're doing. We've successfully helped many companies through this transition without any glitches. At the end of the process, there's nothing like the feeling of having your beautiful new website launched. But more than that, there's great comfort in knowing that the people looking for what you provide will continue to be able to easily find you in the search engines.

9 Hot Tips to Increase Site Conversions

"Site conversion" is a very dry and unexciting way of saying "how to get more profíts from the same amount of website traffic." Isn't that a more upbeat way of expressing it? Who doesn't want to get more profíts from the same number of visitors?

Increasing your conversion rate is a straightforward, even dramatic way of positively impacting your bottom line. It really cannot be emphasized too much that any improvement at all in your conversion rate means additional revenue that is total profít.

Remember this fact when you are told that the way to "make more money" is to invest in more traffic-generating schemes (and dreams, at times). Before you start spending more money to generate additional traffic, you need to do as much as you can with the traffic you are already getting. If you keep the horse ahead of the cart in your planning, you will have an efficient, stable, measurable conversion rate from which you can extrapolate x amount of additional profit from y amount of new-traffic generation.

The following tips are not in any particular order (except for Number 1), and can be modified and reordered to suit your particular situation. Take ownership of the change and improvement, and make sure everyone involved understands the importance of maximizing every revenue source, beginning with the existing ones!

1. Before you can repair or improve something, you have to have a good way of measuring where you are, what you're doing, where you're going, etc. You can sign up for a free Google Analytics account and use other low- and no-cost tools to develop your "analytics" and "metrics" - essentially fancy words that tell you how you're doing with numbers.


2. Create landing pages that are both keyword- and campaign-specific. Try separating any related pay-per-click keywords into smaller and tighter groups, and then create the landing pages for each of those new subgroups. Conversions will almost certainly be better if keywords, advertising approaches and landing pages are thematically related and tightly integrated.


3. Test different headlines and copy writing. This might be the most effective way of quickly showing improvements. Therefore, you need to write compelling copy or find someone else who can do it for you. There is plenty of free advice about this (much of it worth every penny you pay for it), but the importance of copywriting as it affects site conversions cannot possibly be overstated. This is key.


4. It is very important to test your pricing, as it really does make a huge difference in conversions. If your goal is to maximize customer value, then the highest converting price may not actually be the optimal one. In other words, if you raise your price by 50% and only see a 10% reduction in conversions, you will more than compensate for the drop. Going the other direction, if you lower the price 15% and this doubles or triples your ratio, your gain compensates for your price reduction. Test your prices, and test them in both directions.


5. Website load time has become an oft-overlooked item in this age of "broadband everywhere." Load time is critically important in reducing your "bounce rate" on landing pages. There are various online services that will measure your load speed (websiteoptimization.com), and when you know what it is, you can reduce it by compressing images, removing redundant items, optimizing your style sheets (CSS) and HTML code, and so on. The referenced website will also give you advice on other ways to improve your site's load speed.


6. Clearly identify the sales path(s) and discard any points of resistance, or bottlenecks. Even if you have just a single product, there may be a number of different "paths" that lead to a sale. Perhaps you have a landing page to acquire visitor contact data, which then takes them to a sales page, thence to an order page, and so on. Check your metrics and analytics carefully and you should start seeing patterns in how your visitors navigate your site. If you can see when, where and how visitors are leaving the site, you can delete unnecessary steps, enhance the sales copy or the "call to action," insert a few testimonials, emphasize your warranty or something else to capture that business. Do everything you can to keep the sales process simple and straightforward. The less confusing it is, the less resistance visitors will display.


7. Let your praises come from others' lips. Sometimes talking about oneself can sound egotistical, and it has been clearly proven that third-party testimonials boost conversions. In marketing it is called "social proof" when you bring in statements and assessments from others to buttress your message. If you add testimonials - short blurbs, highlighted quotes, letters - to your various landing pages, sales pages and even shopping cart pages, you will almost invariably notice an improvement in your conversion rate.


8. You need to understand the mind of your market, and your customer's experience with your website. Place an order on the site yourself as you step into the mind of a first-time visitor. Identify the hang-ups, inefficiencies and confusing or missing components that hinder your conversions. In concert with step #6 above, you want to identify why you are not converting, so that you can make the necessary improvements, whatever they may be, to improve your ratio.


9. Some people believe passionately in the power of media on landing, sales and order pages to raise conversions considerably. Others are not convinced, and there is not much hard data from controlled studies to consult. You should consider testing this idea yourself. You should try pages both with and without automatic play engaged. The idea is to lower buyer resistance, and if media helps, all the better. Music, motion graphics and video do add life and personality to your website, but there is a "sweet spot" (balancing point) and the fact remains that different age and cultural groups respond differently to the media. You need to make changes here in the context of your site's demographics. You wouldn't put rock music on your page of ladies' perfumes, probably - unless you have a 20-something demographic and it's a signature fragrance from U2 or some other chart-topping band.

Aren't most of these lists called the "top 10" this or that? You can count this tip as a bonus, then: Keep track of everything you do! Nothing "goes without saying" anymore, so you are hereby reminded that all your hard work can go for naught if you do not keep good records of what changes you are making, when, where, why and how. Chart your progress, review it regularly and don't be afraid to make continuing refinements as you move along your strategic path.

Finally, as a "super bonus tip" - use some kind of sales accelerator, "offer intensifier" or other method to move people faster through the sales process. It could be a special "one time" or "limited time" offer, a limited quantity offer or even a "special event" promotion. Research what's going on at other sites in your industry and others, and stay abreast of what seems to be working. Add your creativity to the mix, tailor things to your company's situation and you should start seeing increased conversion rates in short order.