The importance of appearing in the top results is beyond doubt: nearly all clicks are made from the first page, so even if you’re on the second or third page you are likely to be missing out.

SEO involves many factors, which take both design and content into account. This article focuses on the writing side of SEO, explaining the four most important rules of SEO copywriting to get your website found by the search engines.

Rule 1) Quality Beats Quantity

Some people think that to get the most from SEO copywriting they have to go and produce hundreds of pages of content incorporating their chosen keywords wherever possible.

Quantity is not a bad thing in itself, and if you can pump out hundreds of pages of content then by all means do so. But the amount you produce doesn’t beat the quality of the writing. One page of good quality SEO copywriting is better than 10 pages of poor writing (of which you will find a lot on the internet).

The reason for this is that a lot of the power of SEO comes from backlinks to your website. If your content is terrible, people will not want to link to it. You therefore need relevant, interesting and informative content that people actually want to read. This obviously takes more time, but it is well worth the effort to get the most from SEO copywriting.

To produce good quality writing, always ask yourself who you are writing each piece of content for, why you are writing it, what your readers will get out of it and whether you would want to link to it if you were them.

To produce high-quality SEO copywriting, it’s also important to stick to good web-writing practices. This includes using short paragraphs and sentences, short words rather than long ones and the use of subheadings and bullet points to break the writing up. Blocks of text intimidate the online reader, so make sure your content is easy to read.

Rule 2) Keyword Research is NOT Optional

It can be tempting when you first approach SEO copywriting to assume that you already know what your customers are searching for. You may even be right – but you’ll never know for sure unless you carry out keyword research.

Keyword research is not too difficult, and with a few hours’ work you will be able to save yourself a lot of wasted effort when it comes to creating your content. The truth is you are likely to be surprised: rarely are people searching for the words that you think they are.

When it comes to choosing your keywords, you don’t necessarily want to choose the keywords with the highest amount of searches. In fact, this can backfire when it comes to SEO copywriting because the keywords are too competitive.

A better tactic if you are just starting out is to use long-tail keywords (keywords made up of more words). These don’t lead to as many searches, but they will be less competitive and will therefore give you a good chance of getting to the top of the SERPs in a shorter time period.

Rule 3) Use Keywords Properly

Having decided upon the best keywords for your content, the next part is to use them properly. SEO copywriting does not involve cramming as many keywords into your content as possible. This is something that many people simply refuse to believe or adhere to, because it means more work for them.

You are writing for humans first. Keywords are used to make your writing relevant to the search engines, but if your SEO copywriting is not interesting or attractive to humans you don’t stand a chance. If you use keywords in your copy so much that the content becomes unreadable, you will suffer from a lack of backlinks which will hurt your SEO efforts.

Use the keywords throughout the content wherever they fit naturally. If the writing starts to sound forced or unnatural then take them out. By all means be creative and find ways to adapt your writing to incorporate your keywords, but not to the extent where the quality of the writing suffers.

As well as using keywords in the main content, SEO copywriting involves using your keywords in the headline, the title tag, the first paragraph, the last paragraph and subheadings. The position is much more important than the amount of times it appears, but just remember not to go over the top.

Should you worry about meta tags and meta keywords? The jury is still out on that one, but if you can get any extra SEO benefit from filling in this data, no matter how small, then it has to be worth a few minutes of your time.

Rule 4) Spend Time on your Headline

This is perhaps the most important part of copywriting, SEO or otherwise. As well as including the keyword if possible, your headline also has to stand alone to capture the attention of the reader.

Think how many headlines internet users are presented with every day and hour – far too many to ever read them all. You need your content to stand out to your readers so that they will choose to invest their time in it.

Whole books have been written about writing good headlines. As a general rule, try to provide a benefit, attract the interest of the reader, offer an answer to a common problem, make them curious and generally provide a reason for them to read on. Just remember that if you don’t spend time on this then you can forget about the success of your SEO copywriting.

Stick to the Rules for Good SEO Copywriting

Successful SEO copywriting is a combination of all of the above factors. Keep your writing interesting and readable, choose and use your keywords wisely and make your headline stand out and you should be well on your way to achieving your SEO targets.

Related posts:

1. 10 SEO Tips For Small Business
2. Best Practices for Conversion Rate Optimisation

But what exactly does conversion rate optimisation involve? Here are a few simple techniques that you should put to use if you are serious about converting in a competitive environment.

Content Matters

The content on your website or landing page is the most important thing when it comes to conversion rate optimisation techniques. The words that you use, and the way that you use them, have a direct impact on who will buy and who will walk away.

Make your headline stand out

Headlines get noticed before anything else, and they therefore have a big responsibility. Your conversion rate can take a dive simply through getting the headline wrong.

Your headline has to speak directly to the reader: offer a benefit if they read on; imply the answer to a problem lies within the content; rouse their curiosity, at least enough to read the first paragraph.

Web users are hardly prepared to spend time investing in a poor headline that does not instantly capture their attention. If your headline fails, there are plenty of others out there to distract them.

Use subheadings

Just as headlines need to capture the initial attention of the reader, subheadings need to keep them reading. Many of your visitors will not read the whole article, preferring instead to skim read. Conversion rate optimisation involves helping your visitors along with well-placed subheadings that provide them with the facts and are interesting enough to keep them reading.

Include testimonials

It’s not good enough to just announce that your product or service is the best: visitors to your website want hard proof, and conversion rate optimisation involves providing them with this.

One of the best ways to do this is in the form of testimonials. And don’t think you can get away with the ‘Bob from Brighton’ class of testimonial: you need full names, company details if possible, even an email address. The more information you can provide, the more genuine the testimonials will be and the more confidence the visitors will have in your product.

Provide a guarantee

You are a stranger to your visitors. No matter how genuine and trustworthy you are, they don’t know that. Give your visitors confidence to make the purchase by providing them with a solid guarantee. Offer them a full refund if they’re not 100% satisfied, or something else along those lines. And then stand by this guarantee completely: if your product is as good as you say it is you shouldn’t need to use it much.

Make an offer

Whereas you may know that your product alone is enough to make their lives better, your visitors will need a bit more convincing. An offer will persuade them that they would be foolish to miss out on the deal. Send them a freebie along with the product; provide them with a discount if they buy in the next week; allow them to pay in instalments. All these things are key to good conversion rate optimisation and will help to get your visitors over the final hurdle.

Address visitor objections

You know that your product is in a class of its own; but if you really had to think hard, what possible objections could your potential customers come up with to leave your website? Might your product be on the expensive side? Or the opposite, suspiciously cheap?

Whatever they think of, you need to think of it first and come up with a suitable response to make them realise they were wrong all the time.

Design Matters Too

If the content is the most important aspect of conversion rate optimisation, the design of your website must surely come in a very close second. This doesn’t mean you need to invest in a really expensive website with all the bells and whistles: it simply means sticking to a few proven techniques that can help to boost your conversions.

Above-the-fold content

You already know very well that internet users are an impatient bunch. So why would they hang around on your website unless they immediately found what they were looking for? Just as headlines have to catch the visitors’ attention and draw them in quickly, all the important information needs to be visible as soon as someone arrives on your website. Put all this information above the fold, meaning it is in view straight away, and don’t give them an easy excuse to leave.

Use images that do something

We all like a bit of colour in our lives, but images are only worth including on your website if they are doing a specific job. Too many websites contain vague images that don’t have any specific purpose and do nothing for conversion rate optimisation.

Infinitely more effective are images that: show customers using your products; display how your product can be used to solve a specific problem; present before and after situations, etc. Give your images a job to do and the conversions will come easier.

Call to actions throughout

You have to tell your potential customers what you want them to do. But on a landing page, why leave this until the end? Ideally, your call to action should appear throughout the page so that whenever the site visitor finds a reason good enough to buy they don’t have to search too far for the next step.

Bullet points

Although too many bullet points can become a distraction, presenting a few key benefits or important portions of information in this format is sure to catch your visitors’ attention.

But don’t just include anything in your bullet points: include important information and benefits that will present a convincing case for your visitors even if they don’t read the rest of the content.

Font size and colour

This is another conversion rate optimisation tactic for those impatient visitors who simply refuse to read every word of your carefully-crafted landing page. Bold, italics, underlined, highlighted, larger letters: used sparingly and in the right places these are sure to get a bit more attention.

Multivariate testing

That’s quite a lot of ways that content and design play a big role in conversion rate optimisation. And it’s only really the beginning: there are literally hundreds of factors that can help you to increase your conversions. The problem is that sometimes you just don’t know which one to focus on.

That’s where multivariate testing comes into play. This allows you to test each and every aspect of your website to see what’s working and what’s not. You can test different headlines to see which gets the most attention, you can find out why that advert in the top right corner is better than the one in the top left corner or why one first paragraph works better than another.

If you have a budget for multivariate testing then by all means give it a go. But start with the above techniques and you’ll be well on your way to improving your conversion rate optimisation.

Related posts:

1. Ecommerce Usability: Best Practices for High Conversion Rates
2. SEO Copywriting: 4 Rules for Writing Optimised Web Content
3. The Perfect SEO Layout For a Web Page

To remain competitive in the UK e-commerce sector, a website should meet users’ requirements at different levels. Devising the mantra for a successful e-commerce website design, Jakob Nielsen, the usability guru, identifies the following critical components for a rewarding online shopping experience:

• Researching help
• Relationship building measures
• Assistance in decision making – comparing different products in the same category
• Buying – payment and shipping
• Support services

These parameters are based on the consumers’ online shopping behaviour. According to Nielsen, an e-commerce website should integrate essential tools to assist consumers at each of the stages.

Assisting Consumers with Product Search

Google is certainly the most prevalent method for any user to search for a product. However, an e-commerce website should provide the ‘search box’ option that offers both intra-site and web search results. Include advanced search options or layered navigation to enhance the user’s online shopping experience. Advanced options should empower the user to sort products based on size, colours, price range and manufacturer.

The search results for any product query should appear in a catalogue format, very similar to the brick and mortar store where products are displayed in an arranged fashion. Catalogue browsing is one of the most significant features of an e-commerce website. The product catalogue includes photographs and specifications related to every product on display. The zoom-in feature is an added advantage which allows users to have a closer look at the products on sale. It can direct the user to individual product pages, which contain a full description. Some e-commerce websites also contain multimedia slides or videos for every product. However, this is not successful in regions with low-bandwidth internet, as the page load time can irritate users. Catalogue browsing should also provide merchandising capabilities, such as cross-sells, up-sells and related items.

Add a catalogue management system in the e-commerce website design. It facilitates the catalogue updating process and allows quick template changes. Integrate Google Base into the catalogue management system. This will allow automatic Google Base updating for every new product added to the catalogue.

Relationship Building Breeds Consumer Loyalty

In the online environment, relationship building with consumers is even more vital than in the conventional shopping method. It works at different levels:

• Answer consumers’ queries regarding online purchases
• Provide additional information
• Increases brand loyalty
• Stimulates users to shop more

The relationship building process takes a different shape in the e-commerce environment. The most prevalent form is to engage users in live interactions – chat sessions. Allow users to initiate chat sessions with customer support executives. Add phone-in support and email queries for a greater scope of interaction.

Integrate a personal account management system to develop a comprehensive user database. User accounts allow the website owner to track the buying behaviour of every consumer. The database can also be used for promotional purposes, such as for sending discount coupons and newsletters.

An individual accounts system can be used to offer a plethora of services to consumers. Every user can track the purchase history and monthly purchase statement. A user login system saves the time for filling payment and shipping details for every purchase. Users can also rate products, post reviews and interact with other users. Thus, the relationship building concept transgresses to another level, which strengthens the user community and ultimately stimulates website sales.

Helping Consumers Decide Among Products

The third stage of the online shopping process is decision making. To facilitate this process, an e-commerce platform allows users to compare products. Through product catalogues, users should be able to select a definite number of products and then compare them on different parameters, such as price, features and manufacturing date.

The comparison table should provide strategic information in a simplified manner. Allow users to change the products in the comparison table without the need to go to the product catalogue again. However, this is not possible for product categories with a large number of listed entries.

Buying Products Online

The shopping cart is the most vital component of any e-commerce website. It allows users to add selected products from the product catalogue section to the cart. The concept of an e-commerce shopping cart is similar to the shopping baskets we use in shopping stores. Users can add multiple products to the cart and make a payment collectively. At the payment stage, the shopping cart software allows users to modify the product list as per their convenience. The shopping cart software can be customised to specific business requirements.

Having a comprehensive payment processing system increases the probability of e-commerce activity. This is possible by forming business associations with authorised payment gateways, such as Google Checkout, PayPal and Authorise.net. They charge monthly fees and a percentage of purchase for providing payment processing services.

As online money fraud cases hit the headlines more frequently, there is a dire need to integrate enhanced security features for successful e-commerce. To this end, an e-commerce website should use SSL (Secured Socket Layer) on HTTPS protocol. This technology encrypts the data transfer between the consumer’s browser and the host server. GeoTrust and VeriSign are the most popular authorities for issuing a SSL certificate.

With the growth of mobile commerce, websites allow users to make payments through mobile phones as well.

The user should be able to provide shipping details while confirming the payment processing information. Allow for multiple addresses shipment with one order. Provide accurate information about the shipping service provider and charges. The free shipping option plays a key role in boosting online sales.

To ensure credibility, an e-commerce website should detail on its replacement and repair policy.

Support Systems

Advanced e-commerce platforms offer a range of website support technologies such as:

Data analysis: Receive information about the performance of the website, purchase per user account, total sales, inventory information and most searched/viewed products.

International interface: Integrate multi-lingual support to increase user traffic. Allow users to choose from different currencies.

Order management: This feature allows the administrator to manage purchases and shipment. It can be programmed to send purchase and shipment alerts to defined user email IDs.

Coming out of the technology cocoon, strategic marketing efforts are crucial for generating user traffic. One effective method is search engine optimisation (SEO). This requires keyword rich URLs, page titles and Meta descriptions for each product. Another method is to use affiliate marketing for distributing voucher codes. In a lean market situation, voucher codes work really well to attract consumers.

Ecommerce is of recent origin, but it works on the age old sales mantra – offer best quality service to the customer. With targeted marketing, an easy-to-use website design and qualitative customer services, it is possible to scale heights in the highly competitive online world.

Related posts:

1. Ecommerce Usability: Best Practices for High Conversion Rates
2. Converting Clicks into Pounds
3. Why Google Analytics Is Essential For Your Website

Can you afford to miss the online marketing buzz?

A website is not a McDonald’s hamburger that every visitor is tempted to purchase. It is possible to get traffic via search engine optimisation, social media networking and pay per click methods. However, the real question is how to convert those clicks into pounds?

Website conversion rate is the number of potential customers that actually perform a desired action. The resulting action is dependent on the purpose of the website. For e-commerce website, it is a purchase; for lead generation website conversion means user registration and for a content website conversion is signing up for newsletters or a forum. Also, the conversion rate varies for different types of websites.

For any online company, the conversion rate directly corresponds to cash inflow.

Usability is the Route to Prosperity

The next big thing is not essentially the new big thing. Neither Google nor Facebook were pioneers in their specific domains. Yet, Google searched better and Facebook connected better than the rest. Thus, serving an old recipe with a new and better taste also works in the online marketing business.

In the words of internationally renowned usability guru Jacob Nielsen, there is only one mantra to convert clicks to pounds. That is “easy, by being better.” In one of his articles published on the BBC website, Nielsen expressed concern over online companies neglecting the consumer usability factor. He said that online companies are in a rush to upload the maximum number of pages over the Internet. The Web2.0 hype has taken the world by storm. Companies are engaged in producing websites which are, in the words of Nielsen, “glossy but useless.”

What is Usability?

Simply put, usability refers to the consumer’s experience on visiting a website. The usability pattern is defined by the website design. The home page of a website is like your digital business card. It has to be attractive, so that it can grab the user’s attention. According to Nielsen, a user spends only 30 seconds to review a home page. When the purpose is to convert clicks into pounds, an attractive home page is just the beginning.

The website design should foster simplicity and usability and provide the most important information in a straightforward manner. A good design corresponds to easy navigation, effective intra-site search and jargon-free text. Excessive garnishing of the website using splash intros or animated videos can chase away users.

To ensure the maximum usability, one should also consider the following points in the website development phase:

• Browser-friendly design
• Cross-browser compatibility
• Contact information of the underlying company
• Clearly defined return policy for e-commerce websites
• Different payment options

Online companies should use multi-variant testing during the development phase. It is a technique to test hypotheses on complex website usability issues. Google also offers website optimizer to help companies with multi-variant testing whilst using their Adwords service.

For advice on how to improve your conversion rate, get in touch with us today.

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1. Best Practices for Conversion Rate Optimisation
2. 10 Web Design Commandments for 2008
3. Why Google Analytics Is Essential For Your Website

Online Ad Spend

Websites hosting blogs blossomed into a powerful media channel in 2009. With the availability of third party technologies, such as Skimlinks, the use of blogging websites is expected to grow in 2010. According to the 2009 Marketers’ Internet Ad Barometer prepared by the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA), online ad spending in European countries is likely to rise by about 8% in 2010.

One-Way Websites on their Deathbeds

Websites are like clothes. They are the first thing that people notice when they spot you in the crowd. With websites having the potential of being the greatest marketing asset, the focus will be on making them as interactive as possible in 2010. Websites should enable customers to give their feedback and easily connect with you via Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Content Marketing

The barrier to entry for creating your own content is at a historically low level. Thus, instead of relying on a multi-million pound marketing plan, you, the brand, can market, promote, syndicate and share by using content. While the key to successful content marketing is consistency, you also need to know your customers and their preferences.

Spending Ahead of Recovery:

Website owners have been spending ahead of the potential economic recovery, buoyed by the current and forecasted performance of online retail. They are, thus, well positioned to tackle the marketing fight.

Online Reputation Management

With companies using social media as a marketing tool, the demand for online reputation management is growing. Social media networks will talk more and more about brands, companies and their products and for successful e-commerce, website owners will need to engage in online reputation management.

Online PR

Online press releases is another growth sector that, apart from being an excellent marketing channels to distribute your company news to varied sources, also draws traffic to your site.

Growth in Multivariate Analysis M-VAP

This will be in demand for websites having high traffic but poor conversion rates, such as those actively using social media and online PR. M-VAP would help such sites in making subtle design tweaks and monitoring improvements to increase conversion rates.

Continued Declined in 30-Second Ad

In 30-second ads, marketers interrupt customers to make their sales pitch. In 2010, there will be a visible shift in creative paid content.

Email Marketing

Email marketing spending is likely to grow in 2010. However, the key to success would remain making email marketing relevant to the product or service.

Social Media

Social media is one of the fastest growing trends and will continue to remain so in 2010 and beyond.

Related posts:

1. Marketing Your Business During a Recession
2. Social Media: Top Ten Misconceptions

• PPC optimises a specific page, this enables more focused conversations.
• PPC helps to define a specific entry points to a website, thus keeping track of optimal resource sites.

Pay Per Click: Getting Value for Your Money

Flexibility is inherent to pay per click advertising. Besides, one can track the return on investment (ROI) more effectively as this advertising mechanism offers unparalleled, explicit results. However, what seals the deal, is the fact that fact that payment is made according to the amount of clicks. This makes pay per click is an irrefutable source of advertising where one gets exact value for their money.

However, since more and more companies are jumping on the PPC and SEO bandwagon to optimise their internet marketing, there is a great need to do more. So how does one stand out in a crowded room? Read on…

PPC Targeting Options: Hitting Bull’s Eye

’Target audience,’ similar to traditional marketing, is the underlying principle of internet marketing as well. The need to target an audience is inevitable for maximising returns and minimising effort and overheads. One can select from several customer targeting options, sorted by:

• Location, such as a city, region or country.
• Language.
• Demography, such as an age-group or gender.
• Time; also known as ad-scheduling; to define the time of the day when the ad must be placed.

The importance and efficacy of targeting options is abundantly clear from the reaction of respondents of the UK SEM Report 2009. Of the 400 respondents, an astonishing 43 % claimed that their ROI has increased significantly due to the precise targeting capability of pay per click strategy.

Split Testing Ads: Multiply Profits by Dividing Ads

Pay per click advertising, like any marketing platform, is vulnerable to failure. Split testing ads helps to ensure optimisation of the internet advertising campaign. This strategy enables one to create a series of diverse ads, which target the same keywords within the same timeframe. The diversity of the ads, with other parameters held constant, enables to judge what works and what doesn’t.
Negative Keywords: Who Needs Unwanted Guests!

Conventional or brick-and-mortar selling is primarily about increasing the foot traffic and thereafter converting them to the product offered. Effective PPC marketing, in opposition, is about luring high-quality consumer traffic in the first place. Quantity is almost immaterial in case of pay per click marketing but the million dollar question here is what is ’high-quality’ customer traffic?

The answer is customers who actually wish to purchase the product being offered. Often, due the reliance of PPC on keywords, un-interested non-customers visit a website by mistake. A high number of such clicks drive up the overhead cost of a business. To avoid such drag on resources, one can specify certain negative keywords, which on being typed by someone averts them from entering the website.

Internet marketing is as intricate as any other form of marketing. While a need for cleaner databases will always exist, in terms of the direct marketing capabilities of the medium, advertising online and showcasing your technological competence can be tricky without knowledge of the latest trends.

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This is the case with Wolfram Alpha, which makes its unique point of working out answers, rather than simply retrieving them from memory. Sure, even the best of creative people do dip into memory once in a while, but it’s what they do with it that counts. While the world wonders which is cooler, Google or Wolfram Alpha, the so called ‘answer’ engine has found its niche.

What Will Be The Answer To The Answer Man?

Instead of searching for pages, it works as a gigantic calculator and looks for answers to the problems that the user types into the box for it to compute. Its ability to reckon relevant and meaningful information in response to text-based queries made the world sit up and take notice of Mr Stephen Wolfram’s inference and computational answer engine.

Pretty soon, opinions were divided over exactly how useful the engine was. However, these opinions are made up of mostly mainstream users who might not exactly fit the bill when it comes to the target audience envisioned by the creator. Mr Wolfram is known for his conceptual studies in the field of cellular automata, the computer algebra system known as Mathematica and a controversial book (A New Kind Of Science). Heck, even their logo is a polyhedron called a rhombic hexecontahedron.

Relationship Engine

What Wolfram Alpha does is look at the ontological relationships between concepts or data and exhibits them in a logical presentation. In essence, it looks at the bits of meaning in a concept and related concepts around and infers a sort of definition of this information to be the definition of the concept.

Unlike Google or any search engine, this baby is good for comparisons, pinpointing data on places, dates conversions and calculating just about any math formula there is. Don’t expect this answer engine to tell you “how bicycles balance themselves” since it cannot think of an answer to the question. However impractical this might be in real life, where oodles of search results are found instantly, you have to admire this one for trying to think for itself.

It looks like it’s here to stay. Not with the same standards of viewership as its initial days, as a look at Wolfram Alpha’s visitor stats on Compete, a web traffic analytics site, indicates.

One Small Step For Search Engines

Once they manage to grow their structured database of relationships, it would be like having it all. Like domestic chores, Google’s work is never done. They could keep indexing till the cows come home and still have more to do; at least by today’s paradigms.

And in a bid to keep abreast with today’s paradigm, the company has released an Application Programming Interface (API) that can be used for injecting data into websites, cloud computing, and data based mobile applications.

Microsoft’s Bing has signed on to use Wolfram Alpha data and the first manifestation of the API will be on Apple’s i-Phones. Not bad, when it comes to looking for answers for survival.

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Note: you can download the perfect SEO layout pdf and XHTML at the end of this article

For this article we are assuming you know a little about XHTML/CSS and how to research your keywords for targeting. For this example we are going to use a fictious company called “House of Soap” who sell various types of bars of soap. We will focus purely on one specific product page.

From our research we have identified some high volume and relevant keywords that we would like to be found:

• main keyword is : pink soap
• secondary keyword is : pink bath soaps
• tertiary keyword is : organic pink bath soap

SEO and the order of importance

Before we dive into the XHTML and layout discussion it’s important to note the three most important things when dealing with onsite SEO:

• the page name/url
• the page title
• the h1 tag

The page title and h1 tag will be covered in the page breakdown, so at this point we will discuss the url structure and page name. In our case the product page is located here “http://www.house-of-soap.co.uk/bath-soaps/pink-soap/”. Note the page name ‘pink soap’ is the same name as our main keyword, but also note that because this product sits in the “bath soaps” section the page appears under this in the hierarchy. This is beneficial mainly for site organisation and usability, e.g. a user can move up to see all bath soap products by visiting “http://www.house-of-soap.co.uk/bath-soaps/”.

The perfect SEO header

Title Tag

The title tag ideally would have your main keyword as close to the start of the tag as possible. It’s also important to keep in mind that the text used in the title tag is the text used by the search engines to present in the results to the user therefore it is equally important to promote your brand. In our case we want to build the brand recognition of our company “House of Soap”, so for our product page we are using: “Pink Soap – House of Soap”.

Description Tag

As important as it is to have your keyword(s) in the description, it’s more so to keep in mind that like the title the description also appears in the search engine results and consequently is directly trying to appeal to your potential user/customer amongst a list of other results. This is your one and only opportunity to “sell the page”; a good sell can result in a higher click-through rate and ultimately more conversions.

SEO layout for the product details

Now we come to the meat of the page the actual content. It’s important to note at this stage to note that the navigation and breadcrumbs appear below the content of the page in the XHTML, yet visually they appear above the content. This is achieved using CSS and absolute positioning and allows us to position the h1 tag and content higher up the page and therefore will rightly appear as more relevant.

The Company logo

Here we are using CSS and image replacement to place the logo graphic over the the link back to the homepage. Note that this is NOT a method to cram in keywords and should purely reflect the content of the image.

The Headings tags

First up we have the h1 tag. This is the main headline of the page and carries a tremendous weight in terms of relevancy with the search engines. In our case we are using it to target our main keyword “pink soap”. The h2 is targeting our secondary keyword and the h3 is being used as caption text for our image, but also contains part of our teriorary keyword. It is important to keep the user the number one priority and not sacrifice any usability aspects for the benefit of SEO.

Content is King

The textual content of the page is the sales pitch for your product and consequently should be written entirely with your user in mind. Short, informative and well-written copy containing all the information relating to the product being sold is essential. However, an additional mention of the keyword can be a bonus as long as it’s not to the extent of sacrificing the pitch.

Naming Images for SEO

Our image is named after our main keyword “pink-soap.jpg” along with the alt tag this benefits those who use use screenreaders and other usability aids to help describe what the image is.

How to SEO your navigation

Navigational links are one of the most important on the site due to their nature of being located on each page. They are also the mechanism that allows link juice to flow through the site, therefore it is important to use targeted keywords as the navigation links, but not at the expense of being understood. For House of Soap we researched the highest search terms we are trying to get and based our site catagorisation on these.

Using breadcrumbs for SEO

The breadcrumb is not only a very useful usability tool to help customers to navigate the heirarchy of a website, it also provides an opportuniy for cross-linking to relevant sections.

Finally the footer, which we would use for things like copyright, terms of service, privacy policy, etc.

Conclusions and files

Ultimately the goal of any webpage is twofold:

1. to drive traffic to it
2. to convert those visits into actions or conversions.

Onsite SEO can help with driving more traffic to your site, however it is only a small part of the equation offsite. SEO is also incredibly important and something we will touch on in later articles, but even more so is the actual makeup of the page. The usability, the information, the pictures, the call to action and the general “sell” of the product or service is key to connecting with your users and making them comfortable or interested enough to action your request. However, the above article is a great start and should provide a web developer a handy SEO cheatsheet of how to layout a page in terms of XHTML to maximise their ranking potential.

The Perfect SEO Layout

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This tool makes it possible for site owners to not only track the number of visitors, but to also gather various kinds of information, such as sources from where the traffic is originating, the behavior and patterns of visitors and the overall time spent by a visitor on the site.

Google Analytics is a free-for-all comprehensive website analytics package, with a clean and user-friendly design interface. The extensive information provided by this utility offers the best kind of support to a webmaster when s/he needs to improve his/her website. You can even customise the tool to set the keywords you want to ignore, set organic sources, set custom campaign fields and control session and campaign timeouts. Let us delve into the features that provide Google Analytics an edge over other website visitor tracking utilities.

Google Analytics:

• Is scalable and can be used for websites of any size. Google Analytics is hosted on the same servers that power the Google search site and can deliver consistent service for small to large, high-traffic corporate sites.
• Ensures data security. The tool is unparalleled in its ability to ensure that client data remains protected from third-party intrusion.
• Provides in-depth data. In-depth data can help website owners judge how their site is performing in terms of various metrics, such as visitor traffic and time spent on the site, segregated for countries and cities.
• Provides the percentage of visitors originating from various marketing sources: This helps site administrators in identifying which marketing strategy is working best for their site. They can then make appropriate decisions in spending more on that source. For example, if you find that your site is receiving more traffic from an affiliate site rather than via search engines, you would want to invest more in expanding your affiliate network, instead of redirecting the much-needed cash to other sources.

• Verifies the extent of the achievement of conversion goals. You can verify the extent to which you are able to achieve your conversion goals. This information can help you re-adjust your offers on the basis of how the site is performing geographically and check how well your site is converting in different locales.

• Provides a comparison on traffic data between two separate time ranges. This helps a website owner or promoter understand how the site fared within a particular timeframe. This data is especially useful when you want to verify the results of promotional efforts on your website.

• Is integrated with Adwords. This means that if you are using Google Analytics to promote your website, you can view the cost and revenues associated with your Adwords campaigns and keywords. This simplifies ROI analysis.

• Offers the navigation summary feature. This feature helps administrators determine how visitors maneuver through their sites. They can see the web pages viewed by visitors after they enter the site’s home-page. If the number of visitors that visits the site’s contact page is significantly less than those reaching the home page, it is a clear indication that you need to redesign the site to entice visitors to follow the navigational path that you want them to follow.

• Provides a complete view of visitor behavior. Through the Site Overlay feature, website owners can glean information about the number of clicks each web page has received and whether the clicks led to goal achievement. This is one of the most effective tools to raise a site’s conversion rates, since it reflects how visitors are navigating through the site.

• Reflects the countries from where the site is receiving visitors. Webmasters that have geo-specific sites can use the Map Overlay feature to gain a close-up views of the city or region from which the site receives visitors. This helps webmasters tweak their sites according to the preferences of visitors.

• Tracks internal site search. The Site Search feature helps site administrators understand what visitors try to find on the site. This helps you gauge the keywords that you should use for your pay per click and organic search engine campaigns, and other targeted marketing campaigns.

• Tracks the number of banner clicks, exit clicks and RSS feed subscribers. Web administrators sometimes need to know the number of visitors that has gone ahead and clicked on a specific banner or link on their site. Administrators need this information to figure out how many visitors to their site show interest in their affiliate’s link. They might also be interested in knowing the number of people from a specific area who click on their banner advert.

• Tracks e-commerce revenues. Tracking the location from where your visitors are coming is essential. Being able to link that traffic to revenue generated from specific products / services enables you to make more informed decisions on marketing spends. With this information you will be able to trace transactions to campaigns and keywords, get loyalty and latency metrics and identify your revenue sources.

• Segments data through a mix of dimensions and metrics. With the new Advanced Segmentation feature, site administrators can filter specific dimensions (quantitative) and metrics (qualitative) data. The filtered combined data, such as e-commerce, visitors, traffic sources, content, systems and goals, can help you in making detailed analysis of the site.

• Tracks bounce rate. With the help of this specific data, you can get a complete view on the number of visitors who visited your site, but left it without going further. You can get this data for every page on your site, enabling you to restructure your site accordingly.

• Enables the setting up of automatic email reports. You can choose to set Google Analytics to automatically generate an email report containing all the information related to your site after a specific interval. You can also set the email to be sent to multiple people who want to track the results of your analytics program.

Google Analytics provides website owners a highly effective method to track visitors, analyse visitor data and benchmark strategies. This tool is what a website needs so that it always remains a step ahead of competition and generates higher revenues by using traffic-related information to attract more visitors.

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Most of the time, website owners focus on several marketing and promotional strategies in their aim to improve their conversion rates. They use methods such as pay per click advertising, live chats, affiliate marketing programs and customer recommendations to draw visitors to their site. While these methods do ensure higher traffic, they do not necessarily translate into better conversion rates. The best way to improve conversion rates is to follow visitor retention methods. Those methods needn’t involve huge investments. Keeping a few things in mind while creating your site or a few changes to your already built website will do the trick. Here are some of the methods that can help you immensely in improving the conversion rates of your website:

Removing obstacles

• Do not stress on registering or creating an account: It’s commonly observed that web surfers hesitate in registering or creating an account. If your site makes it compulsory for visitors to do so before they can place an order, it would definitely discourage potential customers of your product or service. You can shift the account creation process to the time when the customer has already placed an order. Since you would already have customer info from the order form, all you can include in the registration form is the username and password.

• Include a subheading reflecting the navigation path: The navigation path, also called breadcrumb navigation, displayed on every page within a site serves a dual purpose. While it helps visitors understand where they are in the website and how they have reached the specific page, it also helps search engines extract information on your products and target audience. A clear navigational view also helps visitors find the section that they are searching for.

• Build trust: Subscribing to services such as VeriSign or ScanAlert and displaying them prominently on the site would help in reassuring visitors that their personal information will be safe with the site.

• Enable fast loading of site: Visitors tend to navigate away from sites that take a lot of time to load. Avoiding intrusive pop-ups and large animation files can help in lowering the loading time.

Enabling easy display of information

• Display contact information on top of a page: There are several visitors who would want to make an enquiry or talk to a customer service executive before placing an order. Providing a toll-free phone number, contact timings and an email address at the top of the page would aid these prospective customers and help you win business. Most of all, the contact information promotes a sense of security in a visitor, helping improve conversion rates.

• Include a search box: The box would help potential customers search for the required products and services within the site. The ideal place to position the search box is the top-right corner of each page so that it can be easily located by visitors. Moreover, you can refine the search results by adding additional distinguishing factors. This would help visitors find the required product/service quite easily.

• Add product information: Adding product description (synopsis in case of books), customer reviews and overall product details for each item would help visitors make a selection.

• Add multifaceted navigation: Through this advanced navigation method, visitors can avoid sifting through a large number of unwanted products or services. Adding this feature to your e-commerce website would help customers sort information and directly access the products with specific attributes, such as color, size and price.

• Display “Add to Cart” and “Checkout” prominently: The importance of the “checkout” button is clear from the fact that a purchase order is not submitted to the e-commerce site until the user checks out. Make both these buttons stand out from the rest of the text on the page so that they are easy to spot. To achieve this, you can choose bold fonts and colors, such as red, blue and green. Avoid the use of “Buy Now” or “Order Now” as this may trick people, who are not tech savvy, into believing that the moment they click that button, they will be transferred to the billing and payment page.

• Display total cost of purchase: The e-commerce site should display the price of all items in the cart, shipping charges and taxes clearly as soon as possible during the checkout process. This will help visitors modify their purchases.

Adding Value

• Display comparison information: Allow visitors to compare different products and services to enable them to make an educated selection. The addition of this service will go a long way in forging strong bonds with your customers.

• Allow modification to shopping cart: One of the best value-add for e-commerce sites is to enable customers to make changes to the product quantity. Giving customers an option to delete an item after it has been added to the shopping cart also goes a long way in improving conversion rates. To simplify the entire process, the cart should also be placed where customers can view and access it easily. This feature will help you reduce abandoned carts and customer support calls, while improving conversion rates and orders.

• Simplify the checkout process: A complicated checkout process may test customer patience and could result in the loss of a crucial customer. This could also result in unfavorable word-of-mouth publicity. Thus, e-commerce sites must have as simple, intuitive and reassuring checkout process as possible.

Following these steps can help you not only to significantly increase the conversion rate of your e-commerce website, but also to improve the customer retention rate through better website usability.

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