Some Basic Tips for Conversion

Hi friends,

Here are some of the guideline and shortest summery of the facts, tips and skills about Internet marketing that I collected from different sources . I will be coming with more descriptive ideas shortly covering more points with each of the points below.

As we are sitting far from our visitors, the only medium between us and them is our website. So you may be considering thousands of skills to organize your site but only one odd is enough to drag the visitor out off your site, so be careful and implement things judiciously.

User feedback

A normal visitor likes to go through others comments, feedbacks before he invest something or consider something. For example take Amazon; they added value to their products by allowing user feedback, related suggestions. That makes them more useful than most other bookstores

Site Design/Page layout

Appropriate color schemes can project a sense of dependability and responsibility upon users by which he may be a prospective client of your site or at least stay for some time on your page. The color should match to the psychology of the visitor depending upon the theme and depending upon the generation you are targeting.

Colors and their common connotations

Color Positive Negative

White Clean, Innocent, pure Cold, empty, sterile

More… at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/frontpage/HA010429371033.aspx

Colors and their thematically connotations

RED is associated with love, passion, danger, warning, excitement, food, impulse, action, adventure.

BLUE is associated with trustworthiness, success, seriousness, calmness, power, professionalism.

WHITE is associated with innocence, purity, cleanliness, simplicity.

BLACK is associated with seriousness, darkness, mystery, secrecy.

More… at http://www.2createawebsite.com/design/color-psychology.html

Logo, banners

A good quality logo, banner, tags has also a role for conversion, these are vital because these are the objects, which comes 1^st to the sight while your page is opening up. You can able to establish a good impression from the beginning.

“People process an image in their mind more readily than words alone. A logo serves as the visual stimulation to kickstart the audience's memory, leaving a greater and lengthier impact than words alone can do. It is the simplest and most direct way in promoting a business presence; it's a "what we're about" statement without the long-winded speech.” More… at http://www.lowcostdesigning.com/faqs.htm

Quantity vs. Quality

The low cost of content creation can lead to poor document quality. If you say one wrong thing you may lose the trust of prospective customer, some times for life so.

1. Do not be in hurry while creating a document.
2. Do not put wrong information on the web (conform before publishing)
3. Try to do some thing, which is not done before, or do it in a way that is better than what any one else is doing. But stay within your limit.
4. Try to built or show up long term business strategy

Navigation structure

1. Let the user navigate easily wherever he wants in between site.

2. Let the user know where he is present in you site.

3. Let the user know where he can go and find the required information form the present page.

4. Implement both image and text navigation system.

Sell upward

Most Major Corporation knows it is easier to sell again to a person than it is to find a newer one. After a person contact you order something send them a thank you page. Give them small fee gifts; strengthen their bond with you. Make them feel good about their decisions.

Focus on the users

1. Always think from a audience point of view

2. Make it a flow - don’t not change the topic frequently, a flow needs to maintain between paragraph to paragraph. Small sentence and paragraphs with common words make writing flow easy also.

3. Make paragraphs, headings and subheadings

4. Write “we” instead of “you”

5. Make the content like a conversation.

6. Put real time examples, questions and answers.

7. Don’t use jargons

8. Use shorter text

9. Focus on benefits rather than only features.

10. Place your most important and valuable concept at the beginning of the content.

Good usability

1. Allow users to contribute their experience.

2. Don’t use excessive text inside images

3. Keep a consistent site design.

4. Use alternate text tags images.

5. Use small size files.

6. Put a search facility within your site.

7. Live support to handle online query coming to the site

8. Use common standards.

Establish trust

You can establish the trust a visitors by

Putting some texts on you site like “we value your privacy”, “your email is secure”, “you can unsubscribe anytime”

Putting visual adds of you well know clients with their testimonial.

Price and value of your products

Most people think 3, 7 as their lucky number, try to use this number on the value of the product, do not round up prices

Product to Market

Market the product initially,

Which is more popular among the products you have

Which has more demand on the markets

Which has a greater possibility to establish specially on the web quickly

Call to action

It is ‘a prompt to the visitor to take an action’. It can be an ‘Inquire Here’ button or an email subscription text box, or an ‘Add to Cart’ button, depending on your website goal.
In simple words ‘call to action element’ is ‘a link or a phrase or an object which directs a visitor to an action requested’. Visitors don’t read the entire content; they just scan through the pages. Remember, not only you in the web offering the same to your visitors, there will be 100s other websites. Don’t expect your visitors to search for a Call to Action element. If they couldn’t find an ‘Inquire Button’ or an ‘Add to Cart’ option, within seconds you lose a customer. Place it in a highly click able area of your page

Few Landing Page tips

Remove navigation: Unless it is necessary, remove other options. Let people do what you want them to do, and don’t give them many other choice.

Make link text appealing: People tend to glance over copy instead of deeply reading every word. Sine links are action point people tend to pay more attention to link text. Make sure link text is appealing since it is far more likely to get read than most of the page copy.

Picture of people: People like to look at other people testimonials appear more legitimate if they have pictures next to them.

Give them a clue that they have found the correct page: Place the words they searched for in large text at the top of the page to show them they are in the right location. If you are a large merchant with many products may be use something like search results for their search term. In many cases it is best to point people at a landing page instead of the home page.

Load time: the file size needs to be small enough so that it will load on the users browser in a short time usually less than 6 sec. Don’t place excessive image, flashes. Try to show up some important things before the page will fully load.

Browser friendly: Make your page display equally on every popular browser and resolution.

Page layout: Use short paragraphs and sub headers. Your page should look comfortable to the eye (give space between lines; use a normal style and size for fonts).

Call to action point: Place your call to action point at a highly click able area with an appealing text.

Remove Unneeded Object: remove the things that are not so important in this instance. Optimize your forms. Make the input cursor hop to the next field after a user finishes the current field. Allow the user to tab around fields. Auto-populate any fields you can. Remove all unneeded fields. Don't ask for city/state/province if you ask for a Zip or postal code. Focus on the essentials. If you’re asking users to register for a newsletter, ask for only an email address. You don’t need their name now. Get rid of the reset button. It’s dangerous for both the user and you.

Run Multi-Level Split Testing of Targeted page elements:

Sources:

http://www.seobook.com/overture-adwords.pdf
http://seldomstatic.com/top-landing-page-tips-from-the-pros/

http://www.digital-web.com/articles/11_ways_to_improve_landing_pages/

http://www.vertster.com/page.asp?article=1052

Keyword selection process

Keywords are typically two to five word phrases you expect people to search for and find your website. Keywords are not about what you call your stuff, keywords are what that average surfers (or your prospective site visitors) may type in a search box. As we know keywords are the medium, which will take us to the visitor as far as search engine is concerned and most of the surfers search for information on the web by using various search engines.

Selecting keywords is the most important part of search engine optimization. Roughly if we will divide the whole SEO process as two parts then no doubt selection of keywords will be the 1^st one and the 2^nd one is all other SEO activities. Main aim of the keywords selection process is to find out the keywords, which are less competitive, have high search volume and which are targeted towards the specific visitors that we want for us.

What & why high search volume: - Consider a keyword, which is being searched, by no one or a very less number of visitors are searching for it. Now even if we got a position for that keyword then there is a less chance of getting business.

Why less competition: - It is always better to start your business campaigning from a lower competition. If there is more competition then there is less chance of your visibility. It will take time, money and manpower; so initially it is not affordable and wise.

Single word keywords are usually not well targeted and hard to obtain. Longer keywords are easier to rank well because they have less competition and typically have better conversion rate

What should be my keywords?

You will get an initial idea by answering the following questions from a normal visitors point of view.

What would you expect people to type in the browser to find your website?

If you were looking for your product what would you type?

What type of problems does your product or service solves?

What is the specialty about your product or services?

Finding keywords

There are different ways to finding good keyword list.

i. Data mine your site level search information if you have a site level search product.

ii. Problems your prospective customers may be trying to solve with your product or services (even if they don’t know you exist)

iii. Keyword tags on competitors website.

iv. Visible page copy on competitors website

v. From adword keywords list if it is running

vi. Related search suggestions on large search engines

vii. Keyword suggestion tools.

Keyword suggestion tools

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

This yahoo tool combines singular and plural version of a word ad only a track those terms, which already have ads in place. Since yahoo makes money by selling ads and many automated bots search through the distribution network their result may run high (some highly competitive commercial terms are off by a factor greater than 10 fold). If you find the term “barber shop” gets 15 monthly search and you find a term like “Seattle barber shop” gets 37 monthly searches then likely some Seattle barber shop is frequently checking his ranking

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you're typing and offers suggestions in real time. This is similar to Google's "Did you mean?" feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, except that it works in real time. For example, if you type "bass," Google Suggest might offer a list of refinements that include "bass fishing" or "bass guitar." Similarly, if you type in only part of a word, like "prog," Google Suggest might offer you refinements like "programming," "programming languages," "progesterone," or "progressive." You can choose one by scrolling up or down the list with the arrow keys or mouse.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The Keyword Tool is a great way to find new keywords for your ad campaigns. For example, if you run a budget hotel, the Keyword Tool can suggest helpful related keywords like "hotel discounts" or "motels." Adding these alternate terms to your ad group keyword lists can help you find new customers that you might otherwise have missed.

The Keyword Tool is especially helpful in three situations:

* When you first create a new ad group

* When your current keywords are performing poorly and you need to find better options

* When you have one keyword that really works well and want to find more like it

http://www.wordtracker.com/

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/?

With Wordtracker's intuitive, easy-to-use interface, you can generate thousands of powerful keywords in just a matter of minutes. That means getting your keyword research done faster and putting the results to work sooner. The full version of Wordtracker allows you to quickly carry out searches on Google, Google News, Yahoo, MSN and other important targets so you know how much competition you're facing.

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

Digital Point’s Keyword Suggestion Tool combines data from both Wordtracker and Overture in one tool.

Enter a keyword phrase.
Enter the security code they provide. (This is to prevent spamming. Only need to enter this once per browser session.)
Digital Point returns two columns of data. The first column is Wordtracker and the second column is Overture. Each column is made up of the searched term plus alternative search terms. Next to each search term is the potential count. The count is the number of times a term is searched for per day.

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/international/

Using the SEO Book keyword suggestion tool is a great way to choose the best search phrases for your website. You can type in any search word or phrase, hit suggest and the tool will look at how many people searched for the term on Yahoo search engine in the last month, the tool then estimates how many people have searched for the term on Google and MSN and gives you a good idea about how many people a month are searching for the term in total.

When you are using the tool type in what you think are going to be the biggest search phrases for your website, each time you use it the tool will tell you approximately how many people have searched for the phrase in the last month and it will also come up with other variations of the phrase you have typed in that you may also want to target.

http://www.kwbrowse.com/

Type in your main keyword and subtopic keywords. This free tool gives you related keywords that you can add to your research.

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/

This tool will analyze your chosen URL and return a table of keyword density values for one-, two-, or three-word key terms. In an attempt to mimic the function of search engine spiders, it will filter out common stop words (since these will probably be ignored by search engines). It will avoid filtering out stop words in the middle of a term, however (for example: “designing with CSS” would go through, even though “with” is a stop word).

http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html

Research your keywords and general page properties from an SEO point of view. Shows your keyword density and placement (prominence). The tools features options to show the page's headers, page elements, outgoing links and more. It will warn you when it detects possible stop words, adult words and 'poison words'.

http://www.ranks.nl/tools/keyword_combinations.html

A keyword list generator. The Keyword Combinations tool is made to create phrase / keyword lists by combining keywords. The generated lists can be useful when advertising on PPC search engines such as Google Adwords or Overture.

http://www.webmaster-money.org/tools/meta_tag_generator.php

Just cut and paste the contents of your site into the text box and click submit. Or type your sites URL into the text box at the bottom. This process is intended more to allow you to see what keywords are most common in your site text and to see if these match the kinds of keywords you want to be targeted within the search engines.

http://www.seotoolset.com/cgi-bin/checktraffic.cgi

This tool will produce an estimate of daily search activity for a specific keyword phrase on the Internet across the major search engines. This is only an estimate, and on a daily basis your mileage may vary.

Steps to follow

Use the above tools effectively and judiciously whenever they require and follow the steps.

1. Collect the seed keywords
2. Extract and generate keyword list by taking help of the tools.
3. Filter the keywords according to their relevancy to the site
4. Find out their search volume and competition.
5. Choose the keywords by considering search volume and affordable competition.
6. Distribute the keywords according to the site structure. Target the generic keywords for top-level URLs and slightly less generic keywords to the immediate low level and go accordingly from top to bottom.

It makes sense to optimize the same page for keyword phrases that shares some of the same keywords. A page that ranks well “search engine marketing” should easily be able to rank well for “professional search engine marketing” or “search engine marketing services”.

The goal of keywords is to choose terms that will bring well targeted traffic to your website. Each page on you’re a be targeted for a few different keyword phrases, Typically I like to just do about 1 to 2 primary and 2 to 3 secondary phrases.

Finally Choose the keywords that are descriptive enough for you to qualify the person and describe your product and the search term need to be general enough to be something that is frequently searched

Google's April fool

Friday, March 28, 2008

Rank Checking Tool for Firefox

Now check your ranking for a group of 20 keywords at a time with firefox addon. you can find this tool from http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/. The tool works in a effective way, consumes less time and very accurate with the international version of search engine (Google, Yahoo, Live) for top 200 results.

Factors to consider While Doing Competitive analysis

Once you have selected keywords and corresponding landing pages, now it’s time to change the pages so that it will available on the top SERP. Competitive analysis not only gives you a solid idea about what you need to do but also save your time to take decisions. The more number of competitors and keywords you consider the greater will be you outcome. I recommend considering top ten competitors per keywords.

Here are the factors, which you need to consider while doing competitive analysis on priority basis :-

Keyword use in document title - The document title is the text within the title tags in the HTML code of your web page.

Global link popularity of web site - The global link popularity measures how many web pages link to your site. The number of web pages linking to your site is not as important as the quality of the web pages that link to your site. All major search engines take the quality and the context of the links into account. Search engines assume that your web page must offer relevant content if many quality sites link to it.

Link texts of inbound links - Inbound links are links from other web sites to your site. If many other sites link to your site, then search engines consider your site to be important. However, the number of links is not as important as is the relevance of the linking page and the link text used in linking to your site. Note that search engines do not reveal all inbound links to your site. The more inbound link texts are analyzed, the more meaningful is the quality of the advice. To get statistically significant results, you should analyze at least 50 inbound link texts.

Keyword use in body text - The body text is the text on your web page that can be seen by people in their web browsers. It does not include HTML commands, comments, etc. The more visible text there is on a web page, the more a search engine can index.

Age of web site - Spam sites often come and go quickly. For this reason, search engines tend to trust a web site that has been around for a long time over one that is brand new. The age of the domain is seen as a sign of trustworthiness because it cannot be faked. You can get the data from Alexa.com, whois.org, domaintools.com, Archive.org

Keyword use in H1 headline texts - H1 headline texts are the texts that are written between the ... tags in the HTML code of a web page. Some search engines give extra relevance to search terms that appear in the headline texts.

Example: your very big headline text

Keyword use in domain name - The domain name is the main part of the web page address. SE’s gives extra relevance to search terms within the domain name.

Example: "your-keyword" is the domain name of http://www.your-keyword.com

Keyword use in page URL - The page URL is the part after the domain name in the web page address. SE’s gives extra relevance to search terms within the page URL. Separate your search terms in the page URL with slashes, dashes or underscores. Example: "keyword/another-keyword.htm" is the page URL of http://www.domain.com/keyword/another-keyword.htm

Links from social networks - On social network sites, people decide which web sites are popular. This means that the popularity on social network sites cannot be easily influenced. For this reason, search engines might trust web sites more if they are popular on social networks. (Del.icio.us, Digg, stumbleupon, squidoo, hubpages, …..)

Server speed - Popular web sites often have faster server response times compared to smaller unimportant sites. In addition, most search engines index more pages from fast web sites. Consider how long it takes on average for web pages on the top ranked sites to load.

Keyword use in H2-H6 headline - H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6 headline texts are the texts that are written between the ..., ..., etc. tags in the HTML code of your web page. Some search engines give extra relevance to search terms that appear in the headline texts.

Example: your big headline text

Keyword use in IMG ALT attributes - The attribute defines an alternative text for an image when the user uses a text browser or when the user has turned off the display of images in the web browser application. Microsoft's Internet Explorer displays the alternative text if the user puts the cursor over the graphic. Find out if the search term included in the attributes to improve your rankings.

Example:

Top level domain of web site - Web sites with certain top level domains (TLD) are statistically more likely to contain higher quality, trustworthy contents. For this reason, search engines prefer web sites with restricted TLD (.edu, .gov., .mil) over younger TLD (e.g., .biz, .info, .jobs). In addition, country code TLD (e.g., .ca, .de, .fr) are often preferred in the country's local search results.

Keyword use in bold body text - The body text is the text on your web page that can be seen by people in their web browsers. The bold body text uses a darker and heavier face than the regular type face. It appears between ... or ... tags in the HTML source of your web page. CSS is not recognized.

Number of visitors to the site - Search engines might look at web site usage data, such as the number of visitors to your site, to determine if your site is reputable and contains popular contents. The Alexa.com traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and number of site visitors.

Keywords use in same site link text - Link texts are words and sentences that are used as links. Same site link texts are the link texts of the links that point to a web page on the same domain. SE’s takes search terms in same site link texts into account.

Example: The HTML tag Contact information contains the same site link text "Contact information".

Keywords use in outbound link texts - Link texts are words and sentences that are used as links. Outbound link texts are the texts within the ... tags when the tag links to a web page on a different domain. SE’s gives relevance to search terms in outbound link texts.

Example: The HTML tag About the company contains the outbound link text "About the company".

Keyword use in same site link URL - Links connect one web page to another. Same site links are the links in attributes that point to other pages on the same domain. examine if search terms in same site link URLs are relevant to SE.

Example: The HTML tag Contact information contains the same site link URL "contact.htm".

Keyword use in outbound link URLs - Links connect one web page to another. Outbound links are the links on a web page that point to web pages on other web sites, i.e. links to other domains. Examine if Google.com gives relevance to search terms in outbound links

Example: The HTML tag Click here contains the outbound link URL "www.not-your-site.com/info.htm".

Keyword use in meta description - The Meta Description tag allows you to describe your web page. Find out if SE takes the Meta Description tag into account. Some search engines display the text to the user in the search results.

Example: Even if the Meta Description tag might not be important for ranking purposes, you should use the Meta Description tag to make sure that your web site is displayed with an attractive description in the search results.

Number of trailing slashes in URL - The number of trailing slashes (/) in the URL indicates where a web page falls in a site's overall hierarchy. If the URL contains many trailing slashes, meaning it is placed in a sub-sub-directory, then the webmaster does not seem to think that the page is important in relation to the other pages.

HTML validation of web page to W3C standards - Web pages are written in special languages called HTML and CSS. Like any language, HTML and CSS change constantly. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the governing body that establishes what is valid HTML/CSS and what is not. Search engines obey the HTML/CSS standard. If there are errors in the HTML/CSS code of your web page, then search engines might not be able to read everything of your web page.

Readability level of web page - The Flesch Reading Ease test is a United States governmental standard to determine how easy a text is to read. It measures the approximate level of education necessary to understand the web page content. Higher scores indicate the text that is easier to read, and lower numbers mark harder-to-read texts. Scores among different languages are not comparable.

Keyword use in meta keywords - The Meta Keywords tag allows you to define which search terms are important to your web page according to your opinion. It should be placed between the ... tags in the HTML code of your web page. Though it has lost its importance as far as ranking is concern, but there is nothing harmful we one will put it on his pages

Keyword use in the first sentence of the body text - The first sentence of the body text is the first sentence after the tag in the HTML code of your web page. Some search engines give more relevance to search terms when they appear in the first sentence. Some will use your first sentence as the description of your page on the search result page.

Example: Here goes the first sentence. This text is not the first sentence.

Keyword use in HTML comments - HTML comment tags are "hidden comments" in the HTML code of your web page. They are not visible to the user. try to find out if search terms in the HTML comment tags are relevant for a good ranking on SE’s

Search engine compatibility – Check how compatible are your pages with comparison to the pages of your competitors on various SE’s

Consider the above factors of your competitors and compare them with the existing elements on your page and modify accordingly. Importantly extracting above factors manually will definitely consume more time for that you can take help of some online tools. The one most appropriate tool in my knowledge is IBP, which I have been using from last few years.

Beginning of my ambition

Hi Friends,

Finally I have decided to do some thing for my self and for my friends. This is only one of the practice, by which I want to share and receive recent happening in the world of search engine. inspiration, creativity,news, articles, strategy, facts, tips, tricks and ranking secrets of search engine, internet marketing will be my primary focus.

I welcome every one to be a part of this,
Still a lot to do..

Suggestions? Complaints? Feedback? Requests? All are welcome.