Always keep conversions in mind when optimizing. It doesn’t matter if your site is ranking number one if the user experience is horrible. Evaluate the usability of your website. Ask yourself what you want the user to do when he or she gets to your site, and make sure it’s clear what the next step is. Define what a conversion is (form fill out? direct sale?) and build your site to guide the user towards that goal.

Optimize off-site as well as on-site. Link-building makes up about 50% of SEO, so definitely be on the lookout for opportunities to place a link. Take advantage of social media as well, as more and more evidence is coming out that it affects your organic rankings.

Take advantage of free software to analyze your site. Set up goals in Google Analytics to see how people are using your site. What keywords are they using to get to the page? Where are they dropping off and exiting the site? Make sure always to look at non-paid, non-branded terms in order to most objectively see how your organic efforts are going.

See what your competitors are doing to optimize. One handy way of figuring out who your biggest online competitors are is to check Analytics for your strongest keyword. Then, search that term to see who your organic competitors are. From there, you can use Yahoo’s back-link command to see who is linking to your competitors’ sites. Once you find out who is linking to your competitors, you know where to look for new places to build your own links! You can also use your competitors’ sites to look for more keyword ideas in their meta tags.

Of course, these tips are meant for after you have done all of your on-page optimization. Be sure to optimize all SEO on-page elements: content, meta tags, and URLs, and definitely pick the keywords carefully to bring the most qualified traffic to your site. Here’s to starting 2011 with an optimized site!!

–Cynthia | @cynniebug

1) Keywords are the most important aspect of SEO and if they’re not researched properly, they can be one of your biggest problems.

A keyword is typed in by a potential client so be sure you’re using consumer vocabulary and not company jargon. Another point is that the best keywords to invest in are usually phrases, as illustrated by this graph:

Shown above, the one-word phrases are likely to have high competition from other sites and a high search frequency. The more descriptive phrases that are upwards of five words long are going to have low competition and a lower search frequency.

At Webmarketing123, we have found that the Keywords with the best ROI will be three to four words in length. These more descriptive terms will have a higher conversion rate than the single keyword searches. People who search using three to four word key phrases will generally be further along in their sales process, more informed and therefore more likely to make a purchase.

2)      Missing Keywords in content and text links.

Once you have the correct keywords, you want to make sure that they’re visible to Google spiders. Including Keywords in more places than just the written content of your site will improve your raking for those keywords. Here are a few places to include your keywords:

• Title tags
• Headings
• Paragraph titles
• Keywords in body copy
• Anchor text in links
• Image alt text

Pages can have as little as one to two keywords but should not have more than seven to ten. Too many keywords on one page will overload the user. Pages should flow nicely and make sense. You need to decide what the preferred landing page for a given search term will be. These could be called the blueprints of your site.

3)      Using content that search engines can’t read.

This is a common mistake because Google bots cannot read certain content and thus cannot give your site credit. Flash and images are not variables that go into a search engine’s algorithm.

4)      Not creating fresh content.

If Google bots don’t see any new content they’re not going to visit your site regularly. An easy way to avoid this, especially for B2B companies, is to have a blog and regularly post keyword-rich content with links back to the primary website.

…and make it easy for others to link towards your site by utilizing some of these tools:

• RSS
• Twitter
• Facebook & LinkedIn status/groups
• Networks & Media
• Digg
• Delicious
• StumbleUpon
• Flickr
• YouTube

5)       Being Activity-focused, not outcome-focused.
Set goals for keywords with high conversions. Google analytics and Webtrends are just two of the programs that you can use to determine conversion rates on your different keywords.

Be outcome-focused, not activity-focused. Focus on what matters—outcome!

Finally, here is a graph to help you keep your site SEO Friendly.

This Wednesday from 11:00 a.m. (Pacific) to 12:00 p.m. we’ll be hosting our next webinar, How to Succeed with SEO During the Holidays–click here to register!

1) Drive Qualified Traffic to your Site – Don’t scare visitors away with

Traffic to your website is great.  Qualified traffic is even better.  Qualified traffic means visitors to your site that are more likely to results in a sale, lead or other type of conversion. These visitors are usually further along in the sales cycle and know what they are looking for.  Best practices for driving qualified traffic are optimizing for long-tail keywords and also analyzing Google Analytics goal data to determine which keywords results in the highest number of conversions.

2) Utilize Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

When a user performs a search for one of your keywords, the first thing they see on your listing are your page title and your meta description.  Page titles should be optimized with your highest priority keywords for that particular page, as page titles hold a great deal of SEO weight in the eyes of search engines.  Meta descriptions should include relevant information that will make a user want to click on your search listing, possibly including a call to action. Good meta descriptions can increase clickthrough rate from the search engine results page and result in driving more leads from organic search.

3) Make Conversion Elements Stand Out

Once customers arrive at your site, is the desired course of action obvious?  If you want a user to make a purchase or fill out a lead form, make sure that there is a call to action in an obvious location. Place these conversion elements (link, button, form, etc.) in a location that users can’t miss.  According to EyeTrack III’s Eyetracking study, users first look in the top left of a page and move right and down.  However, location is only one factor to consider.  Call to action, value proposition and color can also be very important factors in not only getting a user to notice a button, but decide to click it as well.

4) Add Fresh Content

Even if your site is a lead generation site or an e-commerce site that doesn’t seem like there’s a need for regularly added content, you should always be adding as much fresh content as possible.  In order to rank well for a given set of keywords, you must write about the topics relating to these keywords.  The more often content is added, the more likely search spiders will increase the frequency at which they crawl your site. Being crawled more often can help a page rank higher for its targeted set of keywords.

5) Write Compelling Content

In addition to regularly adding content to your site, it’s important to take the time to make sure your content is compelling.  Creating fresh content for search spiders to read is important, but you should also consider your users. For longer-tail searches, often times the snippet listed on the search engine results page will display content from within the site, highlighting the search terms and where they were found on the page.  If your content is interesting and informative, people will be more likely to visit your site, and more likely to come back in the future.  This should also increase your time on site, and bounce rate, as users will have a reason to stick around.

Again, we hope these 5 tips help your SEO efforts.  Have a great Halloween!

-Alex

Search Marketing is extremely cost-effective for driving traffic to your website.  Last week’s webinar on  How to Turn Visitors into Customers, Travis Low (Director of Search Marketing) focused on how to capitalize on that volume by making your site as user-friendly and improving your conversion rate.

What needs to be defined first is: “What is a Conversion?” Simply put, a conversion is a visitor performing some type of action on a page. This can be someone who is filling out a form, signing up for a Newsletter, or registering on your site. Where conversions happen really depends on your website. They can take place on your home page or a landing page; anywhere you would set a goal or a desired use of action. For us at Webmarketing123, we like to ask to our clients a few simple questions:

1.       How does your site make money?

2.       What do you want users to do when they get there?

The initial factor you need to focus on is to make your site aesthetically pleasing with color, design and graphics. You need to design the website to get visitors to become customers.

Another great way to turn visitors into customers is to test your website. If your site is user friendly, you are more likely to gain more customers. Some usability best practices include:

• Assign Visual Priority- Size and weight should represent relative importance when it comes to the actual page. If you’re looking to show someone something that is important to you or them it should be large or heavy.
• Consider Visitor’s Eye Path- What will users notice and in what order? If you were to take 10 people out of your company and do a focus group, what would they see first on your site? Where do their eyes go? A quick and easy way to analyze how users see your website.
• Clear Call to Action- Clearly announce what you want users to do. Example: Sign up for our Email Newsletter! (Should be very prominent)
• Make Steps Clear- Identify what the user is going to do next and where they should go

In addition, a majority of companies use Google Analytics but most don’t know how to use the advanced features. Google Analytics is a great way to test your website and see how your site is converting customers. Here are a few ways to measure your site and see if it is reaching your goals:

• Funnel Visualization – Where do people exit your goal path? For example, if your goal path is to get a visitor to fill out a form, how many are going all the way to clicking the submit button?
• Reverse Goal Path- What path do visitors take to complete a goal? npAre they coming from anywhere else?
• Assign Goal Value- Which pages provide the most value? If someone is filling out a form, what is that form fill-out worth to you? Assign a type of value.
• Site Overlay- Where on the page do users click?

This is a lot of information to digest, so I’ll leave you with a few key takeaways:

• Home pages and landing pages should reflect usability best practices to emphasize conversion elements and ensure users perform desired actions.
• Google Analytics provides data that will help to determine what has the greatest effect is on conversions.
• A well-managed: Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign can widen your sales funnel while decreasing your sales cycle by bringing highly qualified leads.

-@SarahShakour

KEYWORDS are the FOCAL POINT of your SEO efforts. So naturally, identifying your highest impact keywords, and then strategically incorporating them into your site are crucial to your SEO success.

Keywords fall into two buckets: Head match and long-tail match. Head Match keywords are general searches, like “shoes” or “cookies”, whereas long-tail match keywords are more descriptive searches, like “women’s dress shoes” or “chocolate chip cookies”. Because long-tail keywords are more specific, they are better matched to the searchers needs, have less competition than generic head match keywords, and therefore can produce a high volume of impressions.

The first step in maximizing sales from: SEO is setting the right keywords. This means focusing on a short and ideal list of key phrases your sales prospects and customers use to find you.

On May 5th or 6th 2010, depending on where you live, Google changed its search results page. One of the changes included the Google Wonder Wheel, a keyword expansion tool which shows related searches to your current search inquiry. The Wonder Wheel is an incredible tool and particularly helpful with finding other options for keywords.

Using the example that Travis used during the webinar, let’s say your company is in conveyor services.

In Google, search “conveyor systems” and on the left side of your screen click on “Wonder Wheel”.

Here, you can see other keyword options, to help narrow your search. Since you are in the industrial sector, click on “Industrial Conveyor Systems”.

Boom! Now you have six other keyword options to help optimize your search. We’ll go with “belt conveyors”.

Other Key Tools and Highlights:

• Google Insights – diagnose keyword search trends & its popularity in geographical regions
• Google Analytics – helps you understand what your customers are typing in to find your website, and which keywords you need to push to optimize, or if you need to start a PPC campaign
• Make sure that your company‘s terminology is in line with your customer’s terminology—the keywords they search for should be the ones you’re optimizing for!
• Keyword selection is your foundation for optimization. Keyword selection takes 2-3 weeks, in order for the account management team, analysts, and engineering teams to understand your keyword selection base.

Choosing the right keywords are the KEY to success—wow, that was cheesy…but you get the point. See you at the next webinar!