Tips to convert visits into leads for your site

Return On Investment (ROI). Without it, all the online marketing and web traffic in the world means nothing. And for those companies who conduct a majority (or all) of their business online, positive ROI is essential to having a successful business.

From an SEO standpoint, showing a positive ROI is critical in building and maintaining client satisfaction. Sure, the primary goal of anySEO company is to drive traffic through a variety of methods (rankings, social media, viral marketing, etc.). And for the purpose of sales, getting tons and tons of traffic is great- if that traffic is converting. Otherwise, you'll have the most popular, but least profitable website in your industry.

So, how do you get your web traffic to convert into sales? There are a ton of techniques out there that, depending on your site and your niche, may or may not work for you. Here are a few tried and true methods that we have come across and implemented on a variety of our client's sites:

1. Begin with a Solid Website Design or Improve Your Current Site - If the foundation of your online business (i.e. your website) is shaky, don't expect to convert many visits into sales. I've spoken with several business owners who settled for a cheap, easy website over a more professional one and have suffered because of it. Think about your own online buying tendencies: Do you purchase from a website that looks like a college student's side project, or do you purchase from a clean, organized, professional looking site? Putting up some extra cash for the creation of your site and lead to much better conversion rates down the road. If you've already made the mistake of cheaping out on your website, then a re-design may be the next best solution. Your goal should be to create a clean, unified look while providing easy navigation for users. You want your pages to share a common theme and be pleasing to the eye in order to draw visitors deeper into your site. Keep in mind that loud and flashy is not always the best way to convert visitors.

   

2. Create a Prominent Call to Action - A common theme we see with sites who are having trouble converting visitors is that their call to action is located at the bottom of the page or in some other obscure area. How are visitors supposed to buy from your site when they can't even find the checkout page? Placing your call to action toward the top of the page (preferably above the fold) will let visitors know exactly where to go to place an order. Make the call to action stand out using enticing language (i.e. "Buy Now", "Order Today") and bright coloring (make sure the design/ coloring fits with the overall theme of your site).
   
3. Get Visitors Involved- If people are coming to your site and leaving right away, you have no chance at getting sales. Decreasing the bounce rate on your site decreasing bounce rate on your site by improving the "stickiness" will keep visitors looking at your pages longer, which means there's a better chance they will convert. Improving site stickiness can include adding a search box, restructuing content to be more reader friendly, or implementing a forum where visitors can actively participate.

4. Funnel Visitors to Important, Sales-Focused Areas of Your Site- Funneling visitors to specific areas of your site incorporates aspects from the above three techniques. Make it easy for visitors to find your products and navigate through your site. If possible, include your best-selling or most important products on your homepage in a prominent location. Allow visitors to reach all of your products is as few clicks as possible. Any more than three or four clicks, and you run the risk of losing people's interest. One method that works well is to place product images or references on the side of your blog and then submitting to popular social media sites.
   

6. Focus on Your Target Market- Taking a"shortgun"approach to marketing your website may lead to a conversion here and there, but focusing your efforts on your target market will yeild much better results. Put yourself in your potential customer's shoes: where would you look and what would you look for when searching for your product or service? Your goal should be to place your website in front of as many potential buyers as possible. Do some research and find out where your potential buyers may be visiting and what they may be searching for, then tailor your website to match those results.

Google PageRank, How is it calculated and How to Get It

Google's PageRank (PR) is one of the most sought after, and yet misunderstood, web page attributes. PageRank, named after one of the founders of the Google search engine, Larry Page, was the innovative foundation that the Google search engine was built on.

The theory was that a link from one web page to a web page of another site was in essence a vote for that page. The reasoning was that webmasters would only link to pages that they thought were interesting and of value to their viewers. Google used the number of inbound links (IBL) to a page to judge the importance and relevance of that page, and based on this calculation, and other factors, decided where to place that page on the search results page (SERP).

They devised a scale of measurement for PageRank from 1 to 10. Then for the information of webmasters and interested people they produced a toolbar that can be deployed in Internet Explorer that will indicate the PageRank value of any page being viewed in the browser. These values have become known as PR0 to PR10.

Since PR values are a result of IBLs, Google decided to give them their own name and refers to inbound links as backlinks. As part of the toolbar there is a quick lookup of the number of backlinks that Google reports for the page that is currently being viewed in the browser. This search can also be done without the aid of the toolbar by simply typing "link:http://www.yourURL.com" into the Google search box.

The one trick to this link search is that Google does not display all backlinks. At one time it was thought that they only listed pages with a value of PR4 or greater. Today however, you will find backlinks reported from pages of lower PR values. So, at best, Google's backlink search seems to present some sample of pages linking to the site. Suffice it to say that this search is not a reliable measure of all IBLs to a page.

How is PageRank calculated

In simplest terms PR is calculated by the sharing of PR from all the IBL links to your page. This is not strictly accurate because Google also uses the internal links within a site in the calculation of PR. Each link to a page carries with it and passes PR value to the target page. The PR points or value passed depend on the PR value of the page they come from, and the total outbound links from the page. It is generally agreed that a page will only pass about 85% of its value to the page it links to. So a PR5 page with a single outbound link will pass 85% of the value of a PR5 page to the page it links to.

But virtually no page has only a single link -- remember internal links are also used in the total outbound link count -- so the value passed to any page is 85% of the PR, divided by the total number of outbound links.

The question now becomes what is the PR point value of the different PR levels. Most observers believe that the relationship between PR levels is logarithmic rather than linear. In other words PR5 is not worth 25% more than a PR4, but may be worth 4 to 6 times more.

It is also understood that a PR value is not a single number, but is in fact a range of values. So not all PR6s are equal. As the chart below shows a PR6 maybe just on the upper boundary of a PR5 or it maybe just short of the entry point for a PR7.

The chart that follows shows the range for each PR value. It also shows how much PR value or PR points a page with 50 outbound links will pass depending on of its own PR rank. From this I have calculated the number of links required from each value of PageRank necessary for a page to attain a desired page rank.

The assumptions and the mathematics:

For those who are interested I have used logarithmic values of base 5.5. In other words the value range for a PR1 lies between 5.5 to the power of 1 and 5.5 to the power of 1.99, and PR2 lies between the value of 5.5 to the power of 2 and 5.5 to the power of 2.99 etc. The rest of the chart is fairly straight forward. It assumes that there are 50 links per page and that 85% of the PR value is passed to the recipient page.

The number of links required to attain any ranking is based on the median value of the donor page and the entry threshold of the desired PR value. In other words to achieve a PR5 you need 5,033 points and the average points available from a PR6 page with 50 links is 1507.

The chart was calculated with an Excel spreadsheet and it can be downloaded if anyone wants to play with the calculations and assumptions. It might be interesting to work with a different base number for the logarithmic calculation. And it is also interesting to see the impact of more or less outbound links from a page.

Nobody knows for sure how Google calculates PR. I have shown this chart to a number of knowledgeable people and they have all agreed that my calculations look reasonable. One SEO guru from a major firm said the results were very similar to independent research that his firm had conducted.

So take it or leave it. It is probably a fair reflection of how PR is passed and accumulated.

The lesson that can be drawn from this explanation and chart is that if you want to increase your PR you need a few links from pages with equivalent or higher PR, or a great many links from sites with lower PR.

URL: Very Important for any Website

Matt Cutts answers to some of the very
common queries on URLs

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?

A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

• www.example.com
• example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

Q: So how do I make sure that Google picks the url that I want?

A: One thing that helps is to pick the url that you want and use that url consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to http://example.com/ and the other half go to http://www.example.com/ . Instead, pick the url you prefer and always use that format for your internal links.

Q: Is there anything else I can do?

A: Yes. Suppose you want your default url to be http://www.example.com/ . You can make your webserver so that if someone requests http://example.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.example.com/ . That helps Google know which url you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect can be an especially good idea if your site changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.).

Q: If I want to get rid of domain.com but keep www.domain.com, should I use the url removal tool to remove domain.com?

A: No, definitely don’t do this. If you remove one of the www vs. non-www hostnames, it can end up removing your whole domain for six months. Definitely don’t do this. If you did use the url removal tool to remove your entire domain when you actually only wanted to remove the www or non-www version of your domain, do a reinclusion request and mention that you removed your entire domain by accident using the url removal tool and that you’d like it reincluded.

Q: I noticed that you don’t do a 301 redirect on your site from the non-www to the www version, Matt. Why not? Are you stupid in the head?

A: Actually, it’s on purpose. I noticed that several months ago but decided not to change it on my end or ask anyone at Google to fix it. I may add a 301 eventually, but for now it’s a helpful test case.

Q: So when you say www vs. non-www, you’re talking about a type of canonicalization. Are there other ways that urls get canonicalized?

A: Yes, there can be a lot, but most people never notice (or need to notice) them. Search engines can do things like keeping or removing trailing slashes, trying to convert urls with upper case to lower case, or removing session IDs from bulletin board or other software (many bulletin board software packages will work fine if you omit the session ID).

Q: Let’s talk about the inurl: operator. Why does everyone think that if inurl:mydomain.com shows results that aren’t from mydomain.com, it must be hijacked?

A: Many months ago, if you saw someresult.com/search2.php?url=mydomain.com, that would sometimes have content from mydomain. That could happen when the someresult.com url was a 302 redirect to mydomain.com and we decided to show a result from someresult.com. Since then, we’ve changed our heuristics to make showing the source url for 302 redirects much more rare. We are moving to a framework for handling redirects in which we will almost always show the destination url. Yahoo handles 302 redirects by usually showing the destination url, and we are in the middle of transitioning to a similar set of heuristics. Note that Yahoo reserves the right to have exceptions on redirect handling, and Google does too. Based on our analysis, we will show the source url for a 302 redirect less than half a percent of the time (basically, when we have strong reason to think the source url is correct).

Q: Okay, how about supplemental results. Do supplemental results cause a penalty in Google?

A: Nope.

Q: I have some pages in the supplemental results that are old now. What should I do?

A: I wouldn’t spend much effort on them. If the pages have moved, I would make sure that there’s a 301 redirect to the new location of pages. If the pages are truly gone, I’d make sure that you serve a 404 on those pages. After that, I wouldn’t put any more effort in. When Google eventually recrawls those pages, it will pick up the changes, but because it can take longer for us to crawl supplemental results, you might not see that update for a while.

How Google Handles Multi-Language Sites

While there probably aren’t too many website that have multiple languages, Google does have a different way of handling these types of sites.

Matt Cutts recently shared the answer to the following question in a video:

“How would Google consider (and rank) a site that uses meta data and URLs in a language (Italian) and has the h1 of the pages in another (English) considered more appealing for users?

ex:
title: Pallacanestro
h1: Basket
url: site.com/pallacanestro/”

Matt says that if a page on a site has mutiple languages, then Google will identify the main language on the page and return it to the search results which are most appropriate. However, if they have trouble determining the right language to use then this could affect the ranking of your site.

Matt suggests having only single languages on a page. If this means you need to have two versions of a page (in different languages) then this is fine as it means your website can rank for both languages in the separate SERPs.

If you would like further explanation, then check out Matt’s video below.

Internet Marketing techniques and Strategies

Writing a blog is sometimes like writing an article. Titles are to draw people’s attentions and content are the keys whether people will come back to visit your site. The most important thing is to provide excellent content. The following are 5 tips to make sure that people will read the blog posts and come back to visit your blog to read more.

1. Choose Suitable Tone for Your Blog:

The first time you start to open a blog, you must be aware who you want to read your blog which is also called target audience. Consider the questions on the side of your audiences and think about what kinds of articles they want to read and why. Will your post give them a great impression or make them laugh? Try your best what your readers are expecting for and then decide what tone is the most suitable one for your blog and continue writing in that way.

2. No Links List:

Someone is writing a blog to post a business and they will add links in the post. But in my opinion, at first, this is a good way to promote a business. Blogging is one thing that will be time-consuming and you should make sure you can achieve more in the long run. As a matter of fact, you shall never just list links to other sites where you want your readers to follow. It is a better thing if you can write your personal point of view about the links and why they should follow your link. If you just add a link with no context, you may have great possibility of losing readers not keeping them.

3. Keep Telling the Truth in Your Blog:

If you can write a blog in an honest voice, this is a great success and will certainly be popular. Writing a blog is like to make friends online to some extent; writers should be honest with the audience and write posts that to be the truth. In simple words, remember to be honest. It depends on the writers’ honesty whether they can keep the readers’ loyalty.

4. Write Your Own Blog:

This means never steal the content from another blog or a website. If your quote something from somewhere, remember to provide a link to the original source.

5. Short Paragraphs are Preferred:

Don’t write something too long that will bother readers a lot to read. 2 or 3 sentences in a paragraph are a good way to write. To tell you the truth, if someone happens to visit your blog for the first time, he/she will just skim a blog post before continue reading. So make sure your page isn’t hard to read and this is also good to keep readers coming back to your site.

Role of meta Tags in Website

Meta keywords acts as multi-storeyed building entrance’s name plates. When we enter in to the building we see list of names on the board. Name Board gives us an idea that who stays where and the navigation path to reach the flat.

Same way, your keyword meta tag also plays the same role as the NAME BOARD and content as FLAT.

A visitor comes in search of XYZ person and enters into the building and gets information at entrance for navigating to reach your flat.

Search Engine spider comes into your webpage and at the entrance that is your Meta Tag, finds the information and it spiders the relevant keywords which is matching with the content.

Imagine an instance, a visitor comes in search of XYZ person and enters into the building and he gets navigation to reach the flat but when he reaches to the flat, he sees NO flat existing as per the navigation details. How do you feel that time as a visitor?

I have seen many websites try messing up with keyword meta tag. They try to mention keyword1, keyword2 , keyword3, etc., which does not exist in their content. Shockingly I have seen many SEO companies also try to do the same.

We have to clearly understand that these human built search engine spiders also have some emotions and they only try to index those keywords pertaining to your content only.

Your CONTENT is your Flat and the KEYWORD is your Name Board. So don’t misguide the search engine spider. If your flat is existing then only mention it at the entrance name board, that is if you mention the KEYWORD then make sure it exists in the CONTENT too.

Otherwise search engine spiders has to return back home with unhappy face. Don’t dissatisfy them.

By this we have understood that we should not mess up with keyword meta tag and mention only those keywords which are existing in the content.

4 Site Content Tips Your Competitors Don’t Know About!

One of the simplest ways of making your website stand out from the crowd is through unique content that appeals to searchers.

Generally, people are not looking for your products or services to purchase immediately; they are looking for information about them. They want to learn something new and this is where you can get the jump on your competitors.

SEM expert Stoney deGeyter says that key to unique content is thorough Keyword Research. He outlined4 things to look out for during your research:

• Easy to Rank Phrases

When looking for good traffic, you can always start with phrases that have little or no competition. Find queries that match what you provide that others have not yet optimized for. This gives you a chance to build up some rankings and traffic for good (yet lower traffic) phrases. You can immediately start siphoning off traffic from your competitors and start building a loyal audience that will keep coming back.

• Niche Areas

Look for an area within your industry that your competitors are not covering or not covering very well. Find obscure topics that people are interested in, but, after conducting a few searches of your own, show that the available content on the web isn’t sufficient. This creates an opportunity for you to fill in the gaps and create authoritative information of your own.

• Highly Targeted Phrases

These are long-tail phrases that are very targeted for your audience, addressing specific areas of interest. Highly targeted phrases are generally pretty easy to get ranked but they also bring in an audience that has a very specific need. Write information that targets these searchers by providing new information, a new spin, a new take on, or a new way of looking at things.

• Info Queries

They are typically the queries with a question that answers questions, such as “how to…” or “what is…”. These queries provide a great opportunity to provide content beyond simple text. “How to” videos, diagrams, flash animations, and podcasts are all great ways to provide this type of content in a way that people find valuable. Telling someone how to do something is great, but showing them how to do it is even better.

So, if your website is looking all to like your competitors, then its time for a change! I hope Stoney’s advice will help you achieve this.

Creating "Hallway" Pages to Improve Rankings

Many people believe that submitting a Web site is as simple as typing the URL into a search engine's submission form and pressing the "submit" button. However, the way you perform the actual search engine submission will help determine whether your Web site achieves top 10 rankings for keyword searches or if your site joins the land of the lost.
Technique #1: The first technique attempts to capitalize on a growing search engine preference. Some major search engines are scoring pages higher that were found by a search engine spider instead of having been individually submitted by someone. Therefore, you may be able to boost your site's rankings by creating what we call a "hallway" page.
A "hallway" page is a page that has links to all your different "optimized" pages you've optimized for each search engine. When this hallway page is submitted to a search engine, the search engine's spider travels down the page and branches off to these links indexing those pages you really want indexed. In theory, the pages it spidered will rank higher than the hallway page and higher than they would if they were submitted individually.
Therefore, be wary of submission programs that employ "deep promotion" or a similar term whereby all pages on the site are submitted at once. This can potentially cause a lower ranking by submitting the URL directly, and on some engines will definitely cause you to exceed their daily limits of how many URLs they will accept per day from a single domain. (Luckily, WebPosition Gold's Submitter will track your submissions per day, and warn you before you exceed known submission limits.)
(New readers: Optimized pages are simply pages that you've optimized to rank well on one or more search terms for each search engine. Optimized pages act as alternate entrances, or "optimizeds" to your Web site. Because search engines index many pages of a Web site, not everyone will find your Web site through your home page.)
We know that many major engines now rank home pages higher than other pages, all other things being equal. Therefore, my feeling is that you'll do better if you add these hallway page links to your home page versus a sub-page. This effectively makes your home page the hallway page to the rest of your site and to your optimized pages.
For even more leverage, place your hallway page on a separate domain that you own and submit it. This way you'll realize two benefits:
1) You raise the link popularity rating of the site you link to since to most search engines it will look like a third party is linking to your domain.
2) It appears to the search engine that it found your site on its own accord by following the links from another site.
The only drawback to not submitting your URLs directly is that you're dependent on the spider to traverse the links and find your other pages. They often put a lower priority on this; therefore it could take longer for you to get indexed than if you'd submitted the URLs directly. However, the wait can be worth it, particularly if you're in a competitive industry and need any extra boost you can get.
Tip: Make use of the URL Verification feature in WebPosition Gold's Reporter to make sure your optimized pages get indexed in a reasonable amount of time. If they don't, either re-submit the hallway page, or submit the individual pages separately as a last resort.
Technique #2: If you plan on using hallway pages to point to your different site pages and optimized pages, make the hyperlink (the underlined text you click on) a keyword. This can sometimes increase your rankings even more. For example, if you sell "blue widgets" and own two domains, one called www.DomainA.com and another called www.DomainB.com, place a link to DomainB from a hallway page on DomainA like this:
blue widgets
Some search engines will recognize that another site is linking to www.DomainB.com using the targeted keyword phrase "blue widgets" as the hyperlink. The search engine logically concludes that www.DomainB.com has something to do with blue widgets, and therefore will rank the page higher for that term.