According to Nielsen Online, UK has approximately 48.8 million users of the Internet as of June 2009 data. This represents 79.8% of the entire population. Thus, targeting this huge pool of consumers from a single website is a golden opportunity.

A Website is not a McDonald’s Hamburger

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 ecommerce 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 ecommerce 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 Soap today.

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 ecommerce, 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.

• 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.

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.

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 Zip File (193 kb)

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 ecommerce 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.

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

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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 ecommerce website would help customers sort information and directly access the products with specific attributes, such as color, size and price.

5. 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 ecommerce 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.

6. Display total cost of purchase: The ecommerce 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

1. 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.

2. Allow modification to shopping cart: One of the best value-add for ecommerce 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.

3. 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, ecommerce 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 ecommerce website, but also to improve the customer retention rate through better website usability.

The traditional way of marketing for a large number of businesses until now has been through newspaper, magazine and television advertising. However, surveys indicate that offline advertising is less cost effective than online campaigns. This has led to several companies searching for new ways to market their business, especially during this credit crunch.

The alternative

The advertising medium that is fast gaining market acceptance across the world during this time of recession is Internet marketing. According to the Advertising Association’s Statistics Yearbook, there is a continued shift in advertising spending from other media to the online medium. The data from the Statistics Yearbook reflects that the online ad spends in the UK have risen 40% in 2007. These figures are in-line with the research conducted by Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Europe across 16 countries.

Another survey conducted by online survey agency, eMarketer, reflects that online ad spending in the UK grew 27% in 2008. The growth in the online ad medium occurred despite the fact that the industries across the globe have been facing the impact of the credit crunch. With such tremendous growth in Internet ad spending, the web is expected to overtake television as the biggest advertising medium in the UK by the end of 2009, according to a report published by the IAB. Similar thoughts have been echoed by ZenithOptimedia, which predicts 28.2% growth in Internet ad spend in 2009. The reason for this continued growth in Internet marketing is its cost effectiveness, as compared to offline media.

The benefits of Internet marketing

Internet marketing scores over offline media in several ways. Through Internet marketing, businesses can:

• Advertise and promote their brand without spending extensively.
• Target consumers who are on the lookout for specific services or products.
• Measure the impact of the advertising strategy and return on investment (ROI). This helps fine tune the marketing strategy to have the maximum impact.
• Get a high response from readers, increasing ROI.
• Enable customers to view the description, preview and reviews of their products/services on the net, which can help them make quick decisions.
• Enable customers to contact businesses at the exact point they are interested or place orders without going through another medium of communication.

Top tips for marketing your website

Below are some tips that can help you market your online business effectively and draw customers to your website:

1. Find ways to strengthen your rankings in search engine results (search engine optimisation). One way to give your site a good chance of ranking high in the search engines is to optimise the content of your pages such that it is easily read by search engines and visitors alike and includes relevant keyphrases.

2. Extend your web presence by affiliating your website with other sites. This will increase the visibility of your products and services across the web. The biggest benefit of affiliate marketing is that you are able to market your business without any upfront cost.

3. Use pay per click advertising to attract visitors to your site. Paid search allows businesses that are not ranked well on search engines to quickly leverage search engine traffic.

4. Use email marketing to send out personalised, targeted messages to existing customers. Information about new products and services can easily be made available to existing and potential customers through personal emails. Do not forget to include how the service might benefit the customer.

5. Include customer reviews in your product description page. Customers trust reviews given by others in their genre more than your own marketing messages. Including customer reviews in your website helps you in building customer trust.

6. Write and publish articles and online press releases. This is one of the best marketing methods that effectively increases the number of back links to your website and publicises it.

7. Create a company blog site and use it as a means to market your business. Blogs are an effective way to interact with your visitors, which goes a long way in strengthening the company-client bond. You can also facilitate contests through these blogs to promote client interest.

8. Go social. Interact with your clients on social networking media, such as Facebook and Twitter. You can also use these media to obtain customer reviews and feedback about your products. Social networking sites are also effective ways of exchanging views on your business with your customers.

Internet marketing is not only a means of providing your business the maximum exposure, it also costs much less than all other forms of advertising. What more could you ask for in times of a recession?

While SEO is a powerful tool, it does not yield results if not used properly. So, here are ten SEO tips to direct relevant traffic to your website.

1. Add your company name, address and contact number to your website
Use a standard format to add this information across pages on your website. Search engines are increasingly recognising addresses from various websites and adding them to their databases. If you provide your contact details in the universally accepted format given below, it will be easier for search engines to identify and pick out this information from the rest of the contact.

2. Submit company information to Google Local
Google is the most widely used search engine across the world, with a more than 65% share of the market. Creating a Google Local profile will enable you to enter detailed information about your business, which can then be available to people searching for related information online.

3. Make use of an analytic program to improve your site
An analytic program allows you to track activity on your website. Knowing about the people who visit your website can help you in further optimising your site to suit their preferences. One such program is Google Analytics, which can be installed free of cost. Google Analytics provides you with crucial information regarding your visitors, including how they found your site and which pages they visited.

4. Check the title of all web pages
The titles are a pointer to the relevance of each web page to the search terms being used in a search engine. A title, such as Welcome or Home, does not show the search engine or the searcher the information contained on the web page. The result is a lower number of people willing to click on the site link and less relevance to the search terms used to seek your information.

5. Submit your business information across as many free directories as you can
Enter business information in directories such as Yahoo! and DMOZ. Do the same in any directory related to your niche and location.

6. Optimise keywords
The key to best results is the use of relevant keywords. To identify the relevant keywords, put yourself in your target reader’s shoes and ask yourself what you would type if you were looking for the business you are in. These key-phrases and keywords should become part of the content on your site.

7. Build a sitemap of your website and submit it on search engines
A sitemap is quite simply a map of your website. For websites that have yet to be found by search engines, a sitemap is the easiest way to let them know everything you have on your website.

8. Add META tags
META tags, which are used to list keywords relevant to a web page, were at one time the most important factor on which website rating was based on search engines. Even though the importance of META tags relative to keywords has declined, they still need to be included across every page on your website.

9. Validate your HTML code
The syntax of the HTML code used on your website must be validated. This would ensure the structural correctness of your website and improve the chances of a search engine reading your site correctly. During the validation, common mistakes can also be caught and rectified, which would help your on-page search engine optimisation.

10. Choose your SEO company wisely
While you consider which SEO company to choose for your business, avoid going by the recommendations written on the webpage of any SEO company. Do your own research on the industry. Beware of SEO firms that guarantee rankings and boast of having a “special relationship” or even a “priority submit” understanding with Google.

Is adspend growth limited to SEM?

It’s not merely adspend on SEM that would rise this year. Are UK companies on a spending spree? At least this is what the E-consultancy research seems to indicate. According to the research, expenditure on pay per click (PPC) search is poised to rise by 23% to reach £2.24 billion. A closer scrutiny shows, however, that although expenditure on PPC will grow by double digits, this expected growth is lower than that recorded in previous years. This may be due to a weakening economy. On the other hand, the Search Engine Marketing Buyer’s Guide published by E-consultancy reveals that spending on search engine optimisation (SEO) would surge 32% to £330 million.

What are the key trends for the current year?

Now, this does not mean that companies in the UK are being extravagant. Increased spending is definitely being bounced off the results it produces. In fact, the research has indicated that companies have increased their scrutiny of the performance of search advertisements due to economic considerations and change in consumer behavior patterns. The latter is likely to pose a challenge for search marketers. The survey by E-consultancy reflects that search marketing will become more complex as the search market matures.

E-consultancy Editor in Chief comments on the survey results
Editor in Chief Chris Lake said that there were a number of reasons for the lower growth rate. The ad industry will be impacted by economic concerns and the search market is not insulated against a cut in company budgets, Mr. Lake added. Growth in return on investment is constrained by the fact that marketers and agencies are more savvy today than they have ever been. “Growth in consumer Internet usage is flattening out but the sector is certainly more robust than other media channels that have a less measurable return on investment, and should continue to grow for years to come,” the Editor in Chief explained.