The Six Landing Page Conversion Rate Factors

Here is an article about the first elements to check in order to improve the conversion rate:

This article is an introduction to the WiderFunnel Landing Page Influence Function for Tests™ (or LIFT™) Model, a framework WiderFunnel Marketing uses to analyze conversion pages and develop test hypotheses. We have used this tool as part of a structured process to lift each of our clients’ conversion rates by between 10% to 277%.

Reade more here.

Reminders about SEO

Since it is always good to be reminded of what to do for SEO and because the articles are good here are reminders about what you should not forget to do for your website.

Article 1: 15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website

Your website is designed, the CMS works, content has been added and the client is happy. It’s time to take the website live. Or is it? When launching a website, you can often forget a number of things in your eagerness to make it live, so it’s useful to have a checklist to look through as you make your final touches and before you announce your website to the world.

This article reviews some important and necessary checks that web-sites should be checked against before the official launch - little details are often forgotten or ignored, but - if done in time - may sum up to an overall greater user experience and avoid unnecessary costs after the official site release.

Click here to read more.

Article 2: Masters Of The Google Universe: How To Achieve Top Google Rankings

For years, it has been well known that Google’s search algorithm is driven by the number and quality of links pointing to a particular URL. And as a result, it was all the rage for some time to buy links on web pages that had a high Google PageRank (PR).

But in March of 2007, Google’s mouthpiece Matt Cutts declared that Google was going to fight back against Paid Links. Google put a shot across the bow of many online marketers, letting them know that the days of easily buying links from high PageRank pages in order to influence a website’s ranking in Google were over.

Click here to read more.

And directories do help!

I read a few times that to submit a site in directories doesn't bring anything SEO wise and that it harms more than it helps. I don't agree with that thought I do agree that you should be careful to which directory not submit your site.

Here is an article about the reasons why you should keep make use of directories:

Most website owners fail to differentiate between a directory and search engine, failure to do so has resulted in failure to harness the powers of Internet directory effectively.

Search engine uses the spiders - (an automated software program) to locate and collect data from web pages for inclusion in a search engine’s database and to follow links to find new pages on the World Wide Web. While directories depends on human editors, who in most cases examine every single new listing before they are added to their directory. Most major search engines these days use links from human edited directory to measure the quality of the site they index. That is why you should place emphasis on the type of website or directory you list to and how to do that effectively.

Click here to read more.

A Deeper Look At Robots.txt

SEO is about being found and indexed by search engines, but for some reasons there are some pages you don't want to have indexed. An easy way to control where the robots will go or where they should not go is to have a Robots.txt file.

Here is a recent article about robots.txt file:

The Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) is not exactly a complicated protocol and its uses are fairly limited, and thus it’s usually given short shrift by SEOs. Yet there’s a lot more to it than you might think. Robots.txt has been with us for over 14 years, but how many of us knew that in addition to the disallow directive there’s a noindex directive that Googlebot obeys? That noindexed pages don’t end up in the index but disallowed pages do, and the latter can show up in the search results (albeit with less information since the spiders can’t see the page content)? That disallowed pages still accumulate PageRank? That robots.txt can accept a limited form of pattern matching? That, because of that last feature, you can selectively disallow not just directories but also particular filetypes (well, file extensions to be more exact)? That a robots.txt disallowed page can’t be accessed by the spiders, so they can’t read and obey a meta robots tag contained within the page?

To read more go here.

Best performing banners.

This post is not meant for readers to click on ads.

You have your website and now you want to advertise so what are you doing? You create your adsense account and you put your banner. But wait, which size should you use? Of course you want to chose the size that will make you earn the money! Lucky enough we were told which banner is the best performing and it is:

1. 336x280 - the large rectangle
2. 300x250 - the medium or inline rectangle
3. 160x600 - the wide skyscraper

So now you can put those banners all over the place in your site and you will get rich! Unfortunately no! First of all you have to check if those banner fit to your site. Maybe you need to change the display and then your site doesn't look natural anymore. On the other hand it seems that the least performing banner is the 468x60 banner.

If you have a lot of content you can add some small add in the middle and make it look as part of your content. Popular size to do that is the 300x250 banner. It is easy to wrap the content around that banner but it should be done if you have enough content to put around. If you have less content you can try with the some smaller ones of the following size:

125x125 Button
180x150 Small rectangle
200x200 Small square

Then, once you decided on the size and where to put the ad you have to chose the colors. You can chose some discreet colors in line with the colors and font of the site. In that case you make the reader believe that the ad is part of the content in the hope that he will click.

Or you chose something that is really outstanding with bright colors so that you are yelling that this is an ad in the hope that the user will see it and click on it.

Which strategy you should chose? I don't know! Try both, make some tests and compare the results. Try with one type of ad for a periode of time that is long enough to have enough data and then try with another type of ad for the same period of time. You need to test many things and keep records of everything you changed and how it impacted your CTR (click thru rate) but don't do too many changes at a time or you will not be able to know what impact your changes had.

What an SEO report should contain.

Here is a short summury of what an SEO report should contain.

"The SEO Website Report must be the first step of any SEO project initiation. Without a thorough SEO Website Report it is not possible to determine the current Search Optimization status or future recommendations. The SEO Website Report is the base document from which SEO Strategic Planning will be developed.

The following evaluation criteria are not strictly Search Engine Optimization and include other related issues which are required to make a website successful. SEO should utilize a heuristic approach for the overall good of the website."

Read more

A way to find quality keywords for free.

Here is an article about how to find good keywords for free. The method is a bit time consuming but really worth a try. Moreover, it is free. It uses as main tool Google's keyword tool and I would suggest to be careful with that tool since it often suggests really irrelevant keywords. Better use your imagination to find keywords and then check if they are good keywords as described in the article.

Here is the article:

"For people to find your web page, you need high-quality keywords. A high-quality keyword is a keyword that many people are searching for but few other web pages are using. You need to battle past your competitors to get to page one of the search engines, so the fewer the competitors, the better. Once you get there, you want a lot of customers to find you. Here’s how you can find quality keywords."

Read more here.

Alternative search engines.

Google, Yahoo, Live (but who uses that?) you all know those search engines but there are many other search engines more or less famous and maybe not that bad? With some of them you can even earn money, receive gift vouchers or give money for some good cause every time you are searching.

iRazoo is a kind of meta search engine. It displays its own search results with user comments together with search results from Yahoo and Live but apparently not from Google. If you subscribe you can win USD5.00 vouchers to use on amazon.com and each time you search you win points which you can exchange for prizes such as Mp3 players, Cameras, Memory sticks & Video Game. Vouchers can be won by anybody, points can be exchanged only if you are located in the US, the UK, Canada or India. So this second point is a negative point to use them but even worse is that they display results from Live search but not from Google. I would suggest this search engine to people living in the mentioned countries and who usually use Yahoo.

Dogpile is a meta search engine. It combines results from Google, Yahoo, Live search, Ask and other. What makes it different? They are raising money for pets in need. Their goal is to raise USD1 million until the end of 2009. I could not find where the money is coming from or how much they donate per search but I guess they will use the paid results to raise money. Indeed, they display paid results as well as organic results but they always indicate where the results are coming from. However I would NOT AVOID clicking on paid results because if someone is ready to pay for you to click on his ad it is because he believes he has what you need.

EcoKey is The World's first Eco Friendly search engine that picks up trash while you search. It is powered by Google. Eco Key is claiming that when one million people change their homepage to TheEcoKey.com, they will be able to remove roughly 900 tons of plastic and garbage from our eco-system each year, raise awareness with over 4 million people, and saving the lives of countless birds and marine animals which die needlessly each year because of a contaminated habitat. You can also enable an "Eco Filter" so that it returns eco-friendly results for the keywords you search.

Scour this one is my favorite. It is a meta search engine. It displays search results from Google, Yahoo and Live Search. It indicates the ranking of the results in each of those search engines. Your earn points every time you search, when you leave comments and when you vote for a result. Those votes are used to rank the results. You never have more than 3 pages results. I used them for quick searches and if I don't find what I want I go back to Google. You can also give them feedbacks and they even do reply to you! You start to earn money (USD25) when you reached 6 500 points. BUT this is only for people located in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, U.S., and the U.K. 6 500 points is actually a lot but you can invite friends and then you get 25% extra points of the total points of your friend. So if you are interested in this meta search engine it would be great if you could use that link to join.

How many visitors a site has?

You are contacting a website for some business purposes like offering a partnership, or wanting to advertise on that site, etc... Of course the partnership is more interesting or advertisement will be more expensive if the site has a lot of visitors per day. So unless there is a counter on the website you cannot really know how many visitors a site has and if your contact tells you 10 000 visitors per day you can only believe him until you start to advertise and you see the impression report but then you already lost time and probably money. So how can you know if your contact gave you the right information? You cannot because those numbers belong to the owner of the site but... you can have an estimation.

Statbrain.com gives you an estimation of visitor per day. But as it is mentioned on the site it "estimates the number of visits that a website has based on offsite factors like backlinks, Alexa Rank etc. Statbrain does not have access to log files or any counter information. The number of visits that Statbrain estimates gives you an idea of the number of visits that a website has, but not the exact visitor number." Keep in mind, too that this is different from unique visitors. However, if you are told that there are 10 000 visitors per day and statbrain tells you 1000 you can guess that there is something wrong and you should make some further investigations before agreeing on a deal.

Which sites are linking to my site (or to my competitors)? Part II

I realized that I need to make an update to the previous post. Indeed, I tend to forget that Yahoo is existing, too. Of course if your site is not in Google, your site doesn't exist but... you should not forget Yahoo.

On the previous post I explained how to find sites that redirect to a specified site in Google, but Yahoo is also providing this feature and it is better and easier than with Google. I need to repeat that: "it is better and easier than with Google". I repeated it only because it is very rare that Yahoo is better so I wanted to insist on it.

So, how to do it? Simply type in the Yahoo search box:

Site:www.mysite.com

Then you click on "Inlinks" in "Show Inlinks:" you select "Except from this domain" and "to:" "Entire site".
After you have done this you can download the results into excel by clicking on "TSV" next to "Export first 1000 results to". Another good point is that you can download 1000 results at once while in Google you can download them only 100 by 100 (I think but I didn't check further).

Note that you might not find the same results in Google and Yahoo so you might want to have a look at both Google and Yahoo.

I remember when I had to find website about one specific topic. I used only Google and after a while I found all the time the same sites. Then I decided to switch to Yahoo and I was able to find good sites I never came across before on Google, but this is another topic I guess.

Which sites are linking to my site (or to my competitors)?

You might want to find out who is linking to your site and this for many reasons. To check your site popularity, to find advertisement or partnership opportunities or in case you changed your domain name to contact those sites to update the URL. You might want also to find the sites that link to your competitor and this for the same reasons!

If you search on Google how to do that, Google will say to search in Google for the following:

link:www.mysite.com

Note, there is no space in there. Try it and you will see that this is not really working. I made a few checks and very often I couldn't the link. But now if you do it as follow:

link www.mysite.com

you will find more results and even more important, most of the time you will land on the site where you have the link.

What I suggest to do then is to click on 100 under the "search" button on the right so you get 100 links on one page (instead of 10) and then you click on "CSV" next to the "100" link and this will open the save box. Doing this you can download all the 100 links in an excel file.

Real position of your PPC ads with Google and Yahoo.

You are doing advertisement in Google and Yahoo and you are targeting all English speaking countries (or you target French and French speaking countries or German or whatever...). From time to time you want to check if your ads are appearing and at what position, so if you are in an English speaking country, you go on Google.com, you type in your favorite keyword and you see your ad on position 1! Great. You are happy! You try again and see here, again position 1! You did a great job. But hold on. Last time you checked you adwords account for the same KW your average position was 3. So you check again and you find out that your account still shows "Avg Pos 3". So why did your ad appear on position 1 when you just checked? Well simply because AdWords gives you an AVERAGE! So you might be on position 1 in one country and on position 5 in another country. So how can you know? Very simple you can use the Google ad preview tool. This is a great tool because you can enter the KW of course but also the language and the country. The language considers the language settings of the user's browser and the country, well it is the country where the user is located. So when you search using this tool you can (almost) see exactly what the user in another country will see and other advantage is that it will not count any impression for this. You might have noticed that I said "almost". This is because Google takes into account habits. So, if some user never clicks on one ad but always clicks on other ads around that specific ad, Google will stop showing it. This is the only thing that the adpreview tool doesn't take into account. The disadvantage is that you need to check KW by KW and location by location. So this is a bit time consuming.

To reduce the impact of average position and if you have the time to handle it you can separate your campaign by destination. So instead of having one campaign for the USA and the UK you will have one campaign for the USA and on campaign for the UK.

So this is for Google. But what about Yahoo? Well yahoo is more complicated and I am not sure we can really rely on their statistics. I remember one case. I was targeting only one language and it was not English. My average position was 3 but whenever I checked Yahoo I was the only one buying the KW therefore my avg pos was supposed to be 1. The problem was that I was not located in a country of the targeted language so maybe I was missing something. However when I raised that issue to Yahoo they came back to me with a very unsatisfying answer. The scary part was that the people I talked to were supposed to know what they are talking about. What I mean is that they were not just any customer service agent.

So, Yahoo doesn't offer such a tool like adpreview and if you are not located in the country you are targeting you can either ask a friend (if you have one) who is there to check for you on what position your ads are showing or you can use a proxy that is located in that country. Here is a site which lists proxies by countries. Unfortunately in the case of Yahoo every impression will be counted.

Search for websites to submit your URL

You probably know that for SEO purposes you need good sites to link to your site.

The easiest sites where you will submit your URL are directories, but how to find them? And can I submit to any directory? No, you have to find good directories. Of course I would suggest to avoid offer such as "Pay $5 and we submit your site to 1 500 000 free SEO friendly directories". Sounds good but I would not do it because you cannot control to which directories your site will be submitted, therefore I do it myself and I take the time to make a good selection. It is better to be in one good directory than in 10 bad.

Now, how to find directories or any other (good) site related to your website? Here is a good article that will explain you how to find what you need. Read here.

How is a robot seeing my site?

If you want that your websites gets fully appreciated by your reader it needs first to be found by robots. You know those programs which find your site and decide to index it or not.
You probably already know that flash and JavaScript are not seen by robots so you might want to avoid to use them for important content. The problem is that you don't always control the programming of the website, therefore you want to see (or show) how robots are seing your website. Here is a nice link that will help you: lynx viewer.

AdWords Conversion Optimizer II

Here is an update of the previous article.

Apparently I was not the only one thinking this was interesting:

"Last week's installment, "Google Conversion Optimizer: Best-Kept Secret in PPC?" generated more interest and response than anything I've ever written. Seems the promise of simplifying the time-consuming, complicated chore of regulating keyword bids is especially appealing to many of you."

Here is the rest of the article.

AdWords Conversion Optimizer

Here is an interesting article about a new feature of Adwords: the Conversion Optimizer.

"I'm going to go out of sequence again and describe a new Google AdWords that will, IMHO, change PPC advertising in a fundamental way. Frankly I'm surprised that there's been so little discussion about the feature in print, forums, blogs, etc.

I'm talking about the Google AdWords Conversion Optimizer. Google quietly added this feature to every advertiser's AdWords account a few months ago. In a nutshell, it regulates keyword-level bids, promising to deliver as many conversions as possible, at or below a cost-per-conversion you specify."

According to this article this feature helps to increase conversion and to lower costs.

Read more

Multiple site PageRank check

I order to check multiple URLs PageRank I would suggest to use two sites.

Start with:

http://www.findpagerank.com/

For this site there is no limit of number of URLs that you can check at once. But for any reason it cannot find the PageRank of some URLs.

Then copy/paste the results into excel and sort by PR (right formula to extract the PR, find and replace 'has the rank:****' to have the URL cleaned).

Some URLs have no rank. This is due either to the fact that the URL has no rank, yet or because the site could not find them. Therefore you should use another site to check those URLs:

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-lookup/

This site is able to find the PR of all URLs but it is limited to only 100 URLs at a time.

Copy/special paste the results into excel and sort them by rank (copy/special paste value, and get rid of empty cells with the formula 'IF(A2="","empty cell",B2)' and sort).

If there is only 200-300 URLs to check then use only the second link, if there are more use both links.