Businesses spend a great deal of time concentrating on driving a high number of visitors to their websites, and often forget the most important thing — the need to drive targeted visitors to a website.

This article focuses on four areas that can improve the performance of your website. The underlying assumption is that you have optimised your site to least at a basic level, using the right keywords related to your product or service.

How do I improve my conversion rate?

Once your initial SEO campaign setup has been completed, much of the focus needs to be on what visitors do when they get to your site. Unless you know what visitors do when they come to your site, you could be wasting money on your search optimisation campaign.

If you haven’t already done so, I recommend you setup Google Analytics or something comparable on your website, and make sure you set some conversion goals to track the number of sales or leads you are receiving.

Once you know how your website is performing, you will have a good basis for where you need to focus your SEO efforts, thus improving your conversion rates and ultimately your bottom line.

Click here to read more on Google Analytics in a previous article I have written.

Now that you have an idea of what is, and isn’t converting well for you, what should be your next step?

Analysis of your conversion rate

If your website is not purely an online selling tool, then at a basic level there are two issues you need to consider in determining your conversion rate.

• Number of sales or leads you have received through the site

• Providing you have the ability to accurately track leads (i.e. you have some sort of ‘thank you’ page that shows up when a sale or lead has been submitted) then this is very easy to track as Google Analytics will provide the total number of conversions for you, and you simply divide this by the total number of visitors to your site.

• It often surprises me how many people are scared to ask enquirers how they heard about their business. As long as you keep it simple, most people don’t mind being asked this question. Simply ask “Would you mind telling me how you heard about us?” Without this information, you won’t have a clear understanding where your marketing efforts are working (through internet marketing, or ?), and essentially, you could be wasting money on ineffective marketing. Alternately you can setup a special phone number that is only used on the website and get a phone company report showing how many calls you receive for that number.
• Make sure that you collate this information and provide it to the person who tracks the website statistics. This should then be compiled to work out the conversion rate. If your site is for lead generation, then to work out your conversion rate, it would be ‘total number of web generated conversions’ + total number of phone enquiries’, divided by the total website visitors.

If you find you are getting a high number of phone calls to your business when the site should be more geared towards receiving online enquiries, then it is time to examine your content and to look at how you can make your site more enticing to receiving these enquiries through your website.

Improving your Conversion rate

Now that you have a good understanding of your conversion rate, it is time to look at what you can do to increase it. In order to do this, you need to find which pages are either ineffective, or have room for improvement, and these are usually the pages with the highest number of exits.
Note: An exit is defined as the last page a website visitor views, before they leave the website.

Analysing Exit Pages

If you have a very low number of visitors leaving your site, without contacting you, then congratulations! However in most cases, improvement can be made.

Focus on the most important pages on your site that have the highest number of exits. This is of vital importance. Take a look at these pages and see if the answer to why you are losing clients is immediately obvious.

• Does this page quickly tell your visitor what this product or service is about?
• Is your message clear?
• Are you using a whole lot of technical jargon to a market that doesn’t understand it or is only interested in what the product or service can do for them?
• Are you connecting with your target market’s wants or needs?
• Does your page have a ‘call-to-action’?

If you are really unsure, start asking co-workers, business partners or even your customers for their feedback on what they think could be done to improve your page(s). Alternately, hire a professional company whose expertise is in improving conversion rates.

Testing your changes

Once you have improved your page, it is time to start testing. The great thing about measuring the performance of a website is that once you have made changes, you can easily measure how effective, or ineffective they have been. If your web analytics tool has the ability to provide you with data comparisons, don’t forget to compare the new data against comparable historical data; allow for such things as seasonal factors, if they apply.

If your changes don’t bring you any improvement, then follow the steps above and keep testing until you achieve the results you desire. If you are still not seeing the improvement you want, then it is time to get a professional involved.

Entry (Landing) Pages

An entry page is defined as the first page someone comes to when they find your site.

One of the great things about organic search is that if your site is properly structured, people are more likely to land on the most relevant page associated with the keyword that you used in your search. However if you have a Pay-per-click campaign, it is a different matter.

If your Pay-Per-Click campaign is setup to target a specific product or service, then you will have specific ads for each of these. To this end, it is important that when a website visitor clicks on your ad from their keyword search, the landing page they come to immediately gives them the information they are looking for. Some companies make the mistake of advertising a specific service or product, then providing a link to their home page because they want to show their website visitors everything they offer. The harder it is for a website visitor to get to the information they want on your website, the less likely they will stay long enough to become your customer.

This article is really only touching on how to go about improving your conversion rate, but I hope it has helped lead you in the right direction. There are many more important elements you can focus on to make sure your website is successful, and I will cover these in future articles in this series.

About the Author Andrew Seidel is the managing director of Quantum Web Solutions. The team at Quantum Web Solutions specialise in increasing traffic as well as conversion rates for our customers. If your serious about making your website work for you, contact us today to find out how we can help.

This article may be republished providing it remains intact including the author bio.

Repeatedly my sales and consulting staff find themselves explaining that using duplicate content can and will negatively affect search engine rankings and it is heartbreaking to see clients having to rebuild rankings due to such a simple mistake. As a result, I felt it was time to write this article and hopefully dispel many misled website owners.Why write an entire article on something as simple as duplicate content? Well probably because it is not as simple as it sounds and many website owners find themselves in the grey area of duplication; where they don’t know for sure whether they are risking rankings or not.

The following is a sectional breakdown of the most common duplicate content issues we see defined from the standpoint of a question hopefully making this article a little easier to read. After all, I have no illusions that reading up on duplicate content rules is exciting.

Duplicate Websites

Definition: a duplicate website is a website that has many if not all of the same pages as another live website.

Note: the following questions are based on a person who owns two websites that are duplicates.

Q: “Why is a duplicate website such a bad idea?”

A: The major search engines are constantly trying to improve the quality of their search engine results in an effort to provide the best quality content for users. When duplicate content is indexed by search engine spiders, valuable time and processing power is wasted. As a result, search engines have blocked sites that used duplicate content from their database, ultimately favouring the site that either had the content first, or I believe, the one site that has the greater online history. In addition, the major search engines have a bad taste after dealing with so much duplicate content created by spammers over the past several years. As a result, posting a duplicate website is an offense that can quite literally blacklist a domain; there are few things the search engine properties dislike more than being gamed by spammers.

Q: “What should I do with my duplicate website then? Just delete it?”

A: Deleting the site is the only option unless you want to create an entirely new website with unique content and a unique purpose. That said, by deleting the website you can still ensure the effort you put into promoting the old site does not go to waste by pointing the domain to your new website’s domain using a 301 redirect. A 301 is a term used to describe a server protocol which Google and other search engines will ‘see’ when they visit the old site. The protocol essentially says that your content from the old site can be found on the new site and that this is a permanent forwarding of all traffic. 301 redirects are by far the best way to minimize your losses from shutting down a website that just might have traffic or inbound links.

Q: “Which website should I shut down? Is there anything I should consider first?”

A: Yes, it is very important that you choose the website that has the most backlinks and has been online the longest. The reason I say this is that Google tends to favour entrenched websites; they have been around a while, are well backlinked and overall appear to have a positive history.

Whatever your decision is, it is vital you understand switching a website to a new domain is a dangerous step. This is because of Google’s famed ‘sandbox’. The ‘sandbox’ is really only an overused turn of phrase that represents a portion of the Google algorithm which considers the age of the domain as a signifier of trust. Generally, new websites will require 6 months to a year before substantial rankings are evident; this is kind of a right of passage that Google appears to be enforcing on the average website. Sites that are obviously popular and quickly gain a load of legitimate link popularity will easily avoid the sandbox (because Google can not afford to miss a ‘great’ website) but this is not the common scenario.

Q: “Will using a 301 redirect pass on the benefit of the deleted site’s link popularity?”

A: Link popularity is passed onto the other website when a 301 is used but how much this pass-over will benefit the website seems to fluctuate on a case-by-case basis. Usually the fluctuation is only present when popularity from one domain is passed to another with differing content/topic. In this case, since the link popularity is being redirected to an identical website I expect the benefit to be virtually lossless.

Duplicate Content

Definition: content appearing within a website that is duplicated elsewhere on the same website or elsewhere on the Internet.

Q: “I need content for my website; can I just copy content from industry journals and benefit from that quality content?”

A: No, aside from the copyright concerns of using content that is not yours, your rankings (if they exist) would suffer because it is highly likely the major search engines would detect the duplicate content. As a result, the page that you create may get flagged as duplicated and it would be ignored at the very least. The page could even devalue your site’s overall credibility. Credibility is a critical component of Google’s algorithm so sites with less credibility tend to have a harder time staying (‘sticking’ if you will) in a particular ranking.

Q: “I use a content management system to manage my site and it uses a particular set of templates. These templates have some duplicate content within them and they are spread all throughout my website. Should I be worried?”

A: No, in most cases the amount of duplicate content used within a template in a content management system (CMS) is negligible. If, however, you have a large number of pages created using a page where 90% of the text is duplicated and only 10% is unique you do have a reason to make some changes. In my opinion it is crucial that every page within a website be composed mostly of unique content with the exception of catalogues and shopping carts where text simply has to be reused over and over.

Whatever your situation make certain that your site contains a large number of pages composed of unique content that has been well optimized by yourself or your search engine optimizer (SEO).

Q: “How much of my page should be unique? Is there a standard ratio or percentage you can share?”

A: There is no industry standard formula but, if I had to state a percentage, I would say a minimum of 70% of the page should be completely unique to thwart any concerns of duplication. You may be able to get away with less than 70% unique content, but I would suggest this is playing with fire. Either way, this statistic is moot since every page you create needs to be created with the intention to provide a powerful resource; after all search engines are only a small part of the plan – you do need visitors to like what they see and buy your product or service!

Q: “My blog currently has many different ways to find content and depending on the route a visitor may find the page is actually shown on a different URL (i.e. archives, search by label, etc.). In this scenario am I not in danger of a duplicate content penalty?”

A: Yes and no. Yes that this is duplicated content but no you are not likely to be penalized by this simply because a majority of blogs offer these additional methods of finding content so it would be detrimental if search engines penalized this application right now. That said, search engines do have to have some way to handle this duplicate content. I expect when Google (picking the most advanced search engine) finds duplicate blog postings on a website its algorithm chooses the most popular posting as the primary page to provide in its ranking results. In other words, the posting URL that has the most number of inbound links or was spidered first will be the page that attains rankings.

For those unfamiliar with blogs, the following is an example how a blog can easily have 3 duplications of a single article. In this scenario, I recently posted an article on our SEO Blog called “SEO Answers #12“. Upon posting this article was immediately posted in 3 places: once on the home page (because it is the latest article), second on its own page for permanent linking purposes, and third within the label “Local Search a topic related to this posting.

1) SEO blog home URL: http://news.stepforth.com
2) Permalink URL: http://news.stepforth.com/blog/2007/01/seo-answers-12-my-couk-domain-lost.php
3) “Local Search” label URL: http://news.stepforth.com/blog/labels/Local%20Search.php

In the future I expect blog systems will offer an option to specifically add a NO INDEX tag to the top of posts located within the labelled search section. After all, every additional label I added to this article created a duplicate version which is something that I expect search engines will soon either ignore or require a NO INDEX tag.

Conclusion

I am sure I didn’t cover every question regarding duplicate content, but I am fairly certain I touched on the most common questions we see at StepForth. If you would like to submit a duplicate content question or any other SEO question please go to our submission page and I will endeavour to respond as soon as possible; likely in an article format or SEO blog posting.

About The Author
Ross Dunn is the founder and CEO of StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc. Based in Victoria, BC, Canada, StepForth has provided professional search engine placement and management services since 1997. Ross is a search engine optimization and placement expert with over 9 years of marketing experience and is a Certified Internet Marketing and Business Strategist (CIMBS). Blending his experience in the art of web design and search engine optimization, Ross offers a unique and informed perspective on obtaining top search engine placements. Ross can be reached at ross@stepforth.com.

A landing page is a website page that is created for one purpose – to persuade the site visitor to convert into a customer by making a sale, completing a form (thereby becoming a qualified lead), signing up for a newsletter, etc.We provide this landing page quick reference so you can pull it out every time you are creating a persuasive landing page. It is divided into 4 sections and is intended to be an all-inclusive tip sheet.

Most importantly, consider that you have 8 seconds or less to convince your visitor to act. If you haven’t convincingly made your case in this time then your visitor will move on and will be lost, as the Internet has created the most fickle customer in salës history.

Page Layout

• Place your logo at the top left. Visitors expect it there so display your branding where it counts.
• If the visitor came from a search engine keyword search or a PPC ad, then place the keyword terms in bold at the top of the page. This reinforces to the visitor that they came to the right place.
• Always keep the Golden Triangle in mind. It is the most important and scanned part of the page. It is the area of the page that starts at the top left of the page moves to the top right side of the page then down diagonally to the bottom left of the page just above the fold. The fold is the area of a web page that the visitor sees without scrolling vertically. You should nevër force a visitor to scroll horizontally. This means that your landing pages should be able to be seen completely on an 800 x 600 screen resolution. Place your UVP (Unique Value Proposition) in the middle of the Golden Triangle.
• Contrast your Calls to Action with respect to the rest of the page – use contrasting colors, round vs. rectangular, straight vs. slanted, warm color vs. cold color, big vs. little. Make sure you can spot the Call to Action from 6 feet away.
• Place assurances, testimoníals and guarantees in the far-right column
• Place logos to appropriate associations or online companies at the bottom of the page to show credibility – Verisign, BBB Online Reliability, certified by…, Alexa rank (if good), powerseller, live support, credít cards supported, open 24 hours a day, Hacker Safe, as seen in Entrepreneur Magazine, Chamber of Commerce, etc.
• Don’t place external links on a landing page. Just allow them the option to proceed into completing the form and converting into a customer.
• Place privacy policies on the landing page. This instills confidence.
• Think of the Amazon.com website. Note their Call to Action is the hotspot at the top-right of all pages – add to cart, one click ordering, etc. This may also apply to you.

Writing Style and Content

• Spend time on your Unique Value Proposition (UVP) and place it into the center of the Golden Triangle. A UVP is the core differentiation of a company’s product or service from those of competitors. A complete UVP will describe the market and a company’s competitors and the key difference between competitors and your own company.
• Ensure that you don’t have big paragraphs. Visitors tend to scan pages instead of reading all of the text on them.
• Write using headers above paragraphs that summarize the following text.
• Use bullets where possible as visitors can quickly scan them. Search engines also prioritize bullets instead of long paragraph text.
• If you want to add a picture ensure that it is going to reinforce your message. You can easily löse significant salës by having the wrong picture on the landing page.
• If the purpose of the landing page is to provide a white paper or article then create an image for the paper with enlarged text like the one below and place it on the page:

The Form

• Keep the number of fields on the form as small as possible. This is critical in getting them to complete the form.
• Add a Comments textbox asking for the visitor’s input. It can be key to qualifying leads. Those that complete this form with the services they are looking for should be contacted immediately. Here are some requests you can use for this Comments box:
• What is biggest problem that you need to solve now?
• What is the purpose of your project?
• Please list your goals for this project.
• How can we help you?
• In case the visitor doesn’t complete the Comments textbox on the first page, add a 2nd page with only a Comments textbox on it requesting the visitors comments again. Tell them that if they complete the Comments box now then they will receive an extra free white paper that is relevant to the same visitor. These visitor comments are important.
• Have the visitor chëck a box that says something like “YES! Send me the free white paper that will change my life.” It is the psychological method of coercing them into completing the rest of the form.
• Prominently list the benefits of completing the form. It is a major validation. Make sure to write the benefits in terms of the user’s benefits instead of the features of your product or service.
• Ensure you save the form information into a database and send emails out as soon as the form is completed so you can immediately contact the visitor. The lead’s effectiveness drops dramatically as time goes by. Contacting a lead within minutes is ideal.

Landing Page Mistakes to Avoid

• Graphics or text unrelated to the offer – limit copy to only the point of the landing page
• Long forms with unneeded fields – limit your form to what is absolutely essential
• Difficult to read fonts
• Navigation off of the landing page
• Placing important persuasive copy below the fold

About The Author
Michael A. Cordova is a managing partner at Mercury Leads, Inc. For questíons about our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Internet Marketing services go to MercuryLeads.com or call us today at 303-744-2178.

What is one of the main keys to successfully positioning your website in the search engines? The simple answer is, Content!

Why is content so important to your website?

Many businesses feel that having a small amount of content is enough, and the rest of the website will sell itself! This may be the case with a small percentage of business websites, but in the majority of cases you will lose out by not having strong content throughout your site. Read on, and you will find out why…

The aim of most businesses with a website is to successfully market their website and increase sales. This is a much cheaper form of advertising than other main stream advertising media.

There are quite a few components that make up a successful internet marketing campaign. They include,

1) Competitor Analysis
2) Keyword research
3) Linking – Internal and External
4) Coding your meta tags i.e. Header Tag, Description Tag, Keyword Tag.
5) Well optimised Content

The focus of this article is website content. That website content is a very important element in most successful internet marketing campaigns, cannot be stressed enough.

Now don’t get me wrong; I am not saying website content is the only component you need to have for a successful internet marketing campaign, other elements are also very important. Content is a very strong element if the search engine is to correctly identify where a website belongs in its search engine listings. Other elements used in search engine marketing -see the elements listed above- can be manipulated to try and deceive the search engines, but good solid website content will give you an advantage over your competitors that have little or no content.

Why will it give you an advantage? If your website content is dedicated to a particular subject or theme, then search engine logic will be able to determine where your website will best fit within its search pages.

Even though this article is mainly focused around the benefits that strong content brings to your search engine rankings, don’t focus purely on the search engines when writing content for your website. After all, the main purpose of having a website in the first place is to attract customers who will buy your product or service, not search engines!

Website content should have the following components:

1) Relevance to the product or service you are offering;
2) Incorporate targeted key phrases throughout;
3) Focus on the relevant sales message per product/service, as well as making it informative.
4) Free information, articles or hints and tips.

1) Relevance to the product or service you are offering;

Many websites make the mistake of covering multiple products or services on a single page. Not only can this be confusing for visitors to your website, but it also means that your overall keyword density on each page is weak. The aim is to ensure your relevant keywords appear often enough throughout your content to give you the opportunity to attain high rankings in the major search engines for your targeted keywords.

Note: Wherever possible, make the focus of each web page relate to one particular product or service.

For businesses that offer a range of different products or services, this can sometimes be quite difficult to effectively manage and organise. This is where it is of more benefit to hire a professional web designer to manage the structure of your website more effectively. Your website needs to be clear and concise for your customers as well as being effectively optimised for the search engines.

2) Incorporate targeted key phrases throughout;

Key phrases are an important part of any search engine marketing campaign. Most search engine marketing specialists will tell you that your keywords should make up approximately two to five percent of your content for optimal results.

Note: This percentage range is an estimate as there is no documentation provided by any search engine company to support this.

I will not go into too much detail here regarding key phrases, but if you would like to find out more, look out for my article on researching search engine key phrases which is coming soon.

3) Focus on the relevant sales message per product/service, as well as making it informative.

a) Relevant Sales message:

“Click here to find out about our special offer for the month of December!!!”

This statement is referred to as a “call-to-action”. A Call-to-action triggers a user to perform a certain action; in this case the action performed is clicking on this special offer. Various sales and marketing research shows that when a call-to-action is used, the conversion rate to sale or enquiry is significantly higher.

b) Detailed information relating to the product or service being sold:

There are two main types of users that visit websites: those that like detail and those that want the information they are looking for delivered in brief summary.

For the purpose of this example, let’s refer to:

Detailed person – Person A
Summary person – Person B

An article like this is written to target “Person A”, as “Person B” generally isn’t interested in reading an article of this length.

With this in mind, when writing website content that has a sales focus, ensure that you provide your summary or sales message in the initial one to three -short- paragraphs, and then continue with the detail in the following paragraphs. Alternatively, where it fits the structure of your web page better, provide your product or service summaries on a main page, with links from each category to a page dedicated to the full content information.

The last thing you want to do is overwhelm someone with so much information that they don’t end up reading anything, and opts out for a website that provides information that is delivered in a much simpler format.

4) Free information, articles or hints and tips.

Create reasons for your customers to keep returning to your website!

How do you create reasons for visitors to return to your website? Free information that relates to or compliments your product or service is a great way to keep visitors coming back to your website, i.e. if your website focuses on bathroom tiles, provide free tips on how to care for your tiles, or on the best method for laying the tiles for those that want to “do-it-yourself”. You could create a dedicated section within your website titled “Do-it-Yourself”.

By providing free helpful information, not only are you adding extra fresh website content; you are also providing extra reasons for your customers to keep returning to your website.

Note: A visitor to your website may not want to buy from you today, but if you can give them a reason to remember your website when they are ready to buy, there is a very good chance you will get a sale from them at a future date.

How often should you add Content?

Ideally if you could add or make changes to your website content everyday it would greatly benefit your site in terms of search results. However, unless you have someone managing your website full-time, this is often difficult to manage.

I recommend that you make at least small adjustments/changes to your website on a weekly basis, and add fresh content on a weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis. This will keep the search engines interested in your site, and when you do make changes they will be quickly picked up and listed in the search engine results.

For any content on your website that is no longer relevant, or is out of date, either remove it, or where applicable archive it on your site. Blog software is ideal for effectively managing articles or updates on your website. Just ensure that if you do setup a Blog on your website, that it has the ability to archive and sort your articles and updates effectively. An example of a Blog used in this way, is the current Search Engine Marketing Blog I use on my website.

Writing Articles

Ideally I recommend you write articles or hints and tips yourself wherever possible. The benefits to you and your business will include;

- Credibility in your customers’ eyes as they will feel comfortable about your confidence and knowledge of your product.
- Fresh original content for your website which search engines (especially Google) love.

If you are unable to write content for your website due to time restrictions, or feel you don’t have sufficient skills to write a professional content, there are other resources available to you:
- Free articles sites where you can download and use articles on almost any subject you can think of.
- Hire a professional copywriter to write your content for you. This is a more expensive option, but gives you the added advantage of fresh original content.

Having a website that is rich in well optimised content will have your website well on the way towards being successful in your search engine marketing campaign. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t have much content on your website now. It is never too late to get started, and no time is better than the present!

Note: To-date, no matter what search engine algorithm changes occur, content has always remained an important component for search engines to determine where a website will rank for specific keywords within their results.…