Friday, August 28, 2009

SEO is pointless if your website does not convert

Getting listed on Google's first result page is great. It's not so great when you find out that you get a lot of visitors through your high search engine rankings but only a few customers.

Search engine optimization is pointless if your website does not convert visitors into customers. You'll actually lose a lot of money if you don't take the time to optimize the conversion rate of your website.

Why is optimizing the conversion rate of your website important?

Suppose you sell a product for $50. If the conversion rate of your website is 1% then 1 out of 100 website visitors will buy your product. That means that you will sell 2 units if 200 people visit your website.

If you want to double your sales, you have to double the number of visitors that come to your website. That's usually quite difficult.

If you optimize your web pages so that you have a conversion rate of 2% then you can double your sales without getting more visitors. Increasing the conversion rate of a website is usually easier than getting more customers.

What can you do to improve the conversion rate of your website?

There are several things that you can do to improve the conversion rate of your website:

1. Drive traffic to the most relevant pages on your website

Your website visitors should come to the most relevant pages on your website. If you advertise on Google AdWords for the search term "buy blue suede shoes" then your landing page should be a page about blue suede shoes and it should be possible to buy these shoes right on the page. The same applies for visitors that you get through your regular search engine rankings.

2. Check your website statistics for your pages with a high bounce rate

Analyze your website statistics to find pages on your site that have a high bounce rate. If too many people leave your website without fulfilling the desired task then you have to improve your pages and make them more relevant to the user's query. Also check your statistics to find "404 not found" and other errors.

3. Add a call to action on all of your landing pages

Every landing page should contain a call to action. Chances are that a website visitor will see only a single page of your website. That's why all pages should contain a call to action so that your website visitors know what to do.

Get more detail visit SEO Sydney..

The effect of the Yahoo/Microsoft deal on your website

You've probably heard about the Yahoo/Microsoft deal. This will have a major impact on the search engine landscape and there definitely will be effects on your website rankings and the number of visitors that your website will get.

The basic facts

Yahoo is going to give up their own search technology and use Microsoft's search technology instead. Bing.com will power the organic and the paid search results on Yahoo (except for premium ads on Yahoo).

Self-serve advertising (i.e. the AdWords competitor) will be managed by Microsoft's AdCenter. Microsoft will get access to Yahoo's search technology and can use it to improve its own search technology.

What does this mean for your website?

    1. You should optimize for Bing.com.

      Yahoo/Bing will have a search market share of at least 15% (that's the current market share of MSN and Yahoo combined - some statistics show a much higher market share).

      If you do not optimize some of your website pages for Bing, you'll lose a lot of visitors and sales.

      The optimizer works with the US version of Bing as well as with many country versions. Recent research has shown that Bing's traffic is more likely to convert.

    2. Yahoo's inbound link data will probably be lost.

      Yahoo is the search engine that currently returns the most inbound link data. When Yahoo drops its index, that data will probably be lost.

    3. A big PPC provider will be gone, an even bigger provider will appear.

      Microsoft will provide the search ads for Yahoo and Bing. Yahoo will close its own paid search offerings. That means that you will be able to manage your ads for both Yahoo and Bing in one user interface. It probably also means rising bid prices on Yahoo and Bing.

    4. Yahoo might close some of their websites.

      Yahoo might put its Internet directory into question as well as their alternative search applications SearchMonkey and SearchBOSS. Applications such as Yahoo Maps might also be reconsidered because Bing offers similar services.

    5. There will be two independent search result pages.

      Yahoo will have full control over the user interface of their search form. The ordering of the results, the layout and the whole search focus can be different from Bing. That means that you still might have to optimize your website for both search engines.
The deal still needs shareholder and legal approval. Yahoo and Microsoft hope that the changes will be in place by early 2010. If you want to participate from the change as soon as possible.

Get more detail!! Visit SEO Services..

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Search Engines Evolution

Search engines were not intelligent a few years ago. They were not able to give the most relevant results to the people who searched for specific information. They were called as the "meta search engines". But many things have changed now. Complex algorithms dependent on hundreds of factors are now deciding the best relevant pages to be shown to the searchers. Thus the strategy of a SEO professional must also change as these algorithms are tweaked constantly. Things to Remember About SEO·

Maintaining a natural link profile is very important since the search engines want to give more importance to the web pages which are not developing artificial links,
  • Diversifying the links is very important to see long term benefits,
  • Spreading your links in various domains is seen as a better practice than getting links from the same domain or same IP address,
  • Do not follow a single link building technique.
The following are the techniques you must follow to develop strong quality links:
Directory submissions - submit your sites to directories that have good amount of links to their main index pages,
Press release - this could lead to a viral link building campaign. There are also possibilities that your website will get hundreds of visitors through Google news,
Article submission - There are so many article sites which you need to use to develop links and to attract potential customers,
Social bookmarking - These are websites wherein the link of a webpage can be submitted to be listed in the appropriate category.

This is a nice way of getting links and to get traffic as these sites have a high page rank. Is Getting a Professional Service Better? SEO could be done by all webmasters. But it is a fact that you would either have no time or would not have confidence about your own SEO skills. Thus it is better to get help from a professional who would do the best quality job on your website and increase the sales of your product. Make sure that you are getting help from a person who has good experience in doing website optimization.

Visit SEO Services for more detail.

Make Money Blogging

How to make money blogging involves more than producing appealing content for readers, but the process is quite straight forward enough to understand for the benefit of those who aspire to know how to earn money blogging. Here are a number of of the strategies that you can use on your blogs.

Flagship blogs This requires you to concentrate on a small number of blogs in order for them to be able to accomplish popularity in their respective niche. A huge audience support and high visitor traffic are the prerequisite of flagship blogs. In order to succeed and make this work, you should possess adequate know-how in niche marketing and networking skills. It is very tiresome to keep up with flagship blogs, but there are many rewards in terms of more options in monetization fame and personal satisfaction.

Sponsored posts You are required to create multiple niche blog with this method, which can come up with their specific domains or powered by free of charge services such as Blogger. You have to churn out top quality content and concentrate on promoting their Google Page Rank and Alexa Rank. After that you can submit these blogs to websites such as Pay per Post, Review Me and Blogitive, which compensate you by per blog post.

Automated blogging You can also create blogs and set them up to extract quality contents from news sources, RSS feeds and search engines repeatedly. The contents will act as your websites' content. This method will involve very little work on your part, just regular maintenance and a little SEO.

Join a blog network If you really aspire to succeed in money blogging, this is one of the most successful methods to stick to. You will be paid for creating and maintaining contents for your blogs. Your remuneration will depend on the quantity of page views you obtain. You may be given part of the share of the ad revenue from the blog or a small nominal base fee. This helps to provide a more steady monthly take-home pay for you and also some valuable contacts.

More detail about blogging! Visit SEO Sydney..

Facebook As Marketing Platform

Facebook is an amazing advertising platform although most businesses still unaware that many firms are getting business from face book successfully. Some Factor you should consider if you are looking for business through social media sites like Face book.

If Facebook advertising works (and it does), why aren't more business using it as an effective advertising or recruitment tool?

Facebook is an effective tool to build successful campaigns.

Firstly some quick stats; these stats are always changing (for the better), but, in a nutshell, Facebook can rightly be called a phenomenon with 200 million active users, 18 million of those return daily. And its popularity is spread across all age groups; 12% of users are aged between 13-17, 29% aged 18 to 24, 30% aged 25- 34 and 29% aged 35 and above. This demographically even split makes Face book an amazing prospect for business advertising.

Face book enables advertisers to only show ads to those targeted users who would be interested based on the detailed information captured by each user. The key to Face book advertising is knowing and understanding your target demographic and making sure you reach them with adverts that resonate and are relevant. So the first action is to work out who you want to reach and build a targeted campaign against that demographic. Think about the possibilities here for who you want to reach and how they would register their interests on Face book the opportunities are endless.

5 factors you should keep in mind when you decided to start Facebook advertising campaigns:

1. Make Your Ads Campaign Specific.

So many businesses make the mistake of creating a general business ad with details of their company as a whole. The more specific the ad, the easier it will be for the viewer to decide whether it is relevant to them. Increasing relevant and cutting out irrelevant clicks. It will also allow you to more clearly specify your key demographic i.e. age group, gender, interests.

Create an ad for each specific product/service you provide.

For example: For a Search engine marketing institute instead of creating institute profile ad they should create ads for their separate courses e.g. a Pay per click management course ad with specific details about that course. This leads onto what you do with people when they get onto your site

2. Think Carefully About The Ad Landing page

You could have the best ad in the world but if the viewer isn’t taken to a landing page that matches the ad copy, they’ll lose interest. If you are recruiting land on the relevant work for us page. If you are a institute looking to increase enrolments, land on the right course page.

3. Make Your Ads Emotive

Create a reason for the user to click on your advertisement. Remember you are targeting ads to their interests. Ask your visitor a questionnaire.

For example: A further Search Engine Marketing institute may ask Do you want to be a Search engine Optimization professional? When alluding to their Search engine marketing course. Use strong emphasizes tags for Making bold statements that grab the Visitor attention will always gain you more clicks. Be daring as well as informative with your ad copy and you’ll definitely get a higher click through rate.

4. Choose a Memorable Picture

Facebook allows you to include a picture with your ad. Your company logo won’t always gain maximum clicks. Good innovative and ad specific pictures get more clicks than anything else, but images that closely relate to your product are always a good choice.

5. Be Competitive and Realistic with your Bids

Although quite self-explanatory it is important to take note that you can run your advertisement for a specific time period and can specify the date and time the campaign starts and finishes. Impressions are the number of times your advert is displayed on face book. Ensure your daily budget and cost per click is both competitive and realistic. It may take a certain amount of trial and error to gauge the right bid per click and you should start at face books suggested bid when you first start listing your ad.

Visit SEO Sydney..

Source: Articlesbase