It is said that having a good foundation is fundamental to having a strong building to last for years to come. The same goes when it comes to developing your website. Before you start plans on how to market your site, it always pays dividend to take a step back and review the website to ensure that its fundamentals are right.

Here’s three items on the list of checklist to ensure that your site is able to capture users for long term benefits. The three simple ways to dramatically improve your website are as follows:

Mental Note 1 – Get them Hooked

The internet has changed since the old days back in 2004, there are a lot of things happening on screen that distracts your users’ attention. Browsers with multiple tabs also then to fight for attention, apart from this you still have real world distractions to compete with like answering phone calls, etc. Before long your user forgets what they have been reading or the site they were visiting. I bet this happens too many of us.

Provide tools to allow visitors to bookmark your article or site easily. The best place is to have it position near the top of the article. Also note that you should only display 3 bookmark links and an option to select others so as to not let the bookmarking tool snatch attention away from the page content. You can try out tools like addthis helps websites add a simple bookmarking tool

Mental Note 2 – Show the Visitor What They Want

You manage to attract visitors to your site and they feel complied to click through to your inner pages. Your site is content rich, however they can’t find the content that they are looking for. This isn’t good as it is commonly known when you present users with too much choice they tend not to make any decisions.

So to tackle this, make sure your site layout and content structure is properly sorted out. You would need to have clear navigation menus or breadcrumbs to allow users to navigate across the entire site. Having a HTML sitemap is also an essential item as this provides visitors with a bird’s eye view of your site structure.

Mental Note 3 – Use Nice Smoothing Colours

Ever been to a site that turns you offer visually upon arrival? In the past, there were many badly made websites. This has since changed, however there are still some design mistakes made by designers or site owners that do turn off users visually.

As a rule of thumb, always use web safe colours like white background, with dark font colours. Make sure the font size is also within an acceptable height and width. I normally use 11 pixel points for most of my sites. That’s the font size that works best for me. However do ask your readers if that’s the best size for them.

Do you have another mental note on how to dramatically improve your website’s performance, why not share a tip or so here – Drop a comment or contact me

3. Don’t Make Your Visitors Have To Write An Email To Contact You

If you are inviting enquiries or contact from visitors to your website you need to provide them with a way of doing this that is as easy as possible for them. Just posting your email address on the website is not the best solution. Why? Because when they click on it they need to then create an email from scratch. Do you know how busy your visitors are? They hardly have time to read the content of your homepage – never mind create an email from scratch. The solution? You need to use a simple form. A form enables you to standardise the responses that you receive and it also makes it very simple for your visitors to get in touch with you – all they need to do is pop in their name, email address and tick a few boxes and that’s it.

Making it easy for your visitors to contact you isn’t the only reason that using a form is a great idea. Doing so means you can get some information back from each person that fills in the form. You can ask them how they discovered your website, which other websites they like to visit – you can ask them anything! Anything that is going to help you learn more about them, more about who they are and more about what will make them buy from you. You think they would tell you all this if they were creating an email from scratch? No – of course they wouldn’t! That’s why you need a form.

Related posts

• Seven Twitter Tips to Improve Your SEO (0)

If you know a thing or two about search engine optimization then you are likely aware of how important creating link worthy content is (and probably know how hard creating it can be as well). Recently our founder, Arnie Kuenn, came to the Vertical Measures team with an idea: lets do a series of video interviews with experts in our field. We’re in Phoenix, many Internet experts are here in Phoenix, why not? Within two weeks the concept, “2010 Predictions from 10 Internet Experts“, was developed, experts were contacted, the recording took place at GreenScreenFX, videos were edited, and promotion had started.

Was it successful? For us, yes: we’re an Internet marketing company and appreciate the power of a link. For a relatively small investment (time to shoot videos/promote/organize, and money it cost to film/produce/edit) we accumulated MANY backlinks from different domains (325 links according to Site Explorer). Not to mention the publicity we received from our post: Business Journal picked it up, many bloggers did as well, and we were featured in Search Engine Lands Search Cap on January 15th. In addition:

2000+ page views, 120+ retweets, 3800+ results on Google, 49 Sphinns, top 5 Google ranking for term “internet experts”, and 150+ views on Stumbleupon.

We are extremely thankful for the Internet experts who agreed to the interviews, as well as our staff for putting the time and effort into this project. You too can create your own successful link worthy content piece with the below tips for creation and promotion:

A Few Link Worthy Content Ideas

Interviews: Just as we’ve done, take an interview (or interview series) and turn it into something applicable for your business. Instead of just interviewing over the phone or via e-mail, why not video the interview or interview in a non-traditional setting, like on Twitter (as Jay Baer does: The Twitter 20)?  Ask interviewees for their predictions, tips, tools, secrets, their take on controversial topics, etc.

Whitepapers: An expert in your field? Write about it in an informative and interesting whitepaper. Give away a few of your trade secrets, and don’t be afraid to give truly valuable information!

Lists/Tips: It may sound like old news, but creating lists and top tip type posts or articles are highly linkable…if done well. Make sure your blog post or article is extremely helpful, interesting, and not just a reiteration of old news.

Promoting Link Worthy Content

Ask connections: Don’t be afraid to ask your friends, family, and professional connections to help get the word out about your link worthy content. They might just be the spark that ignites the conversation and buzz about your content.


Press Release: Distribute an online press release about your new content. Many online press release distribution sites will get the word out, links back to your website, and traffic to your site as well.

Social Media: Send out tweets, post on your Facebook fan page, submit your content to bookmarking sites like Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit, and others, and don’t forget about LinkedIn. If your link worthy content is centered around expert feedback or insider information, LinkedIn will prove essential: other professionals in your industry will want to get the insider scoop.

Creating link worthy content and promoting it, is probably the very best strategy for obtaining those highly valued “editorial” links.  If people voluntarily discuss your content and link to it, those links often provide the very best link juice for your website.  Feel free to list some other link worthy content ideas in the comments below.

Related posts

• Blogging Tips: How to write better posts (2)
• White Hat SEO Techniques: Top 5 Tips (1)
• Using MySpace as an Author Promotional Tool (0)
• Use Twitter as a best SEO Tips (3)
• Top 11 Tips for Internet Marketing – Must try (P.1) (4)

Amongst the add-ons I add to any new install of Firefox is the Web Developer Toolbar by Chris Pederick. (Find the install links at the bottom of this post.)
Obviously, this add-on is chock-full of features that are useful for web developers, but it really does make diagnosing various SEO issues much easier. This list gives the top seven tasks that I find easier when the toolbar is installed.

1. Browse Like a Robot

By turning off JavaScript and Cookies, you can browse the web as it’s seen by ‘bots (which in most cases can’t accept cookies or execute JavaScript.) This basic change can help you recognise site architecture issues pretty quickly, such as when a main navigation bar is displayed using JavaScript or when visitors who can’t accept cookies always get redirected to the front page. (Yes, I’ve seen both of these in the wild.)

2. See What the Spiders See

For a more hardcore spider-emulation experience, use the Toolbar to turn off styles and images. The sudden appearance of previously cloaked text or seeing that the ‘main heading’ is actually an H4 item and sat 75% of the way through the content might suggest why a particular page is having issues.

Although different spiders treat meta redirects in different ways, it can often be easier to diagnose some on-site issues if you disable them altogether via ‘Disable → Meta Redirects‘. To see what the site serves up to different user agents (such as mobile devices, GoogleBot, etc) you’ll want to get the author’s other successful add-on, the user-agent switcher.

3. See the Structure

Talking of page structure, you can press ‘Information → View Document Outline‘ to see the structure of a page, or simply ‘Outline → Outline Headings‘ to see the hierarchy of headings within the page.

4. Validation and Best Practices

The toolbar gives quick access to code validation tools (such as the HTML, CSS and RSS validation from WC3.) There are also options to highlight links without title attributes, or images with missing (or blank) alt attributes.

5. A Tip for Search Marketers Who do CRO as Well

Those of us with our massive screens (by the way, did you see this guy?) might not always appreciate how people view our pages. However, a quick click on the ‘resize’ button lets you see the site through the viewport of an older monitor or a net book.

I should probably let LoveFilm know that 20% of people can’t see their big green ‘Start a free trial’ button.

6. Making Web Page Screen Captures Easier

A change we’ve tried to make at Distilled recently is to include more illustrative images in our client reports. A fiddly task that comes up from time to time is creating a screen shot of a web page, but without it being obvious which links you’re already clicked on. A quick click on ‘Miscellaneous → Visited Links → Mark All Links Unvisited‘ removes the ‘visited’ styles from any links on the page.

7. Reputation Management Tip: Anonymity Made Easy

A year ago, I posted about how to hide your referrer string when browsing, as a handy way to prevent people seeing that you’re probing their site. It’s much easier to do with the Web Developer Toolbar, by simply clicking ‘Disable → Disable Referrers‘

You can read more about the Web Developer Tool Add-On, or if you’re running Firefox, simply install it now. If you’re already a convert to this add-on, do let us know in the comments of any other features you use regularly.

Related posts

• No related posts.

Whether you have one hundred successful websites or if you are working on your first, you most certainly have heard about the importance of keywords. While a website does need good design elements, easy navigation and other elements, it just simply can’t survive without keyword implementation. The words you choose will directly impact where you land in search results. Without understanding what they are, choosing the perfect ones for your particular niche and then implementing them correctly, a site can be doomed from the first second of being launched. Let’s take a detailed look at valid, free ways to find great keywords in order to have a successful website.

Keyword Tools

Keywords are what a person enters into a search bar when they wish to find something on the Internet. The websites that show up on the first page of the search results will be the websites that have used those keywords correctly in the content of their site. When you are creating a site, remember that each page is looked at individually, not as a whole. For example, if your entire website is regarding gardening, you may have one page in which the main theme is growing tomatoes and another page in which the main theme is growing corn. But, how will someone find your page about growing tomatoes? They will do this by typing in the words into the search bar that you have put onto your page. And this is where it can become very tricky if you do not choose your keywords correctly.

For the sake of example, let’s continue using the hypothetical case of having a page about tomatoes. Do you want people to find you by searching for “how to grow tomatoes” or do you want them to find you by typing in “best tomatoes for cooking”? In order to have a successful website, you will want those keywords to be rather unique. If you choose keywords in which 100,000 people per day search for, chances are that your competition will be so great that you could end up on page 45 of the search results and never be seen. On the other hand, if you choose keywords that are very rarely even typed into a search bar, no one will go to your site even if you do show up on page 1 in the results.


In most cases, the average person does not look passed the third page of search results. Therefore, having the right keywords for your website so that you can be found on pages one, two or three is vital. Landing on page one should be your ultimate goal. Let’s take a look at free ways to find great keywords so that you can get your site where it should be.

Free keyword tools will give show you how many times people, on average, typed in certain words. Most free keyword tools will not only show you the numbers for the keywords that you are wondering about, but will also produce a long list of related keywords. Therefore, if you find out that only 15 people searched for “vine ripened tomatoes” in the last month, but 3,000 did search for “most delicious tomatoes” you know will know to change your keywords. Do keep in mind that if one million people searched for “tomatoes”, you do want to go for a smaller audience, as your competition would be enormous.

Free keyword tools can be found on the Internet, usually in the same way that we are talking about, by typing in the words “free ways to find great keywords”. It can also help to write down a phrase that you are thinking of using for your keywords, and then brainstorming as many related terms that you can possibly think of. If you have access to your website’s analytics data, you can take a look at the most popular ways that people are finding your site. This feedback can then allow you to make necessary changes.

Related posts

• Using Post Slug feature to Increase your SERP (0)
• Top 11 TIPS FOR GOOGLE ADWORDS SUCCESS (3)
• Top 10 SEO Keywords Search Tools (1)
• Tips To Optimize Your Adsense Ads (3)
• The Five Most Important Things You Can Do with Google Webmaster Tools (Part 2) (0)

If you have a website, you certainly understand the great need to boost your traffic. The days of simply optimizing keywords and exchanging links is slowly ending. As the popularity of social networking sites increases, this changes the way that webmasters must think in regard to building a traffic base. The most interesting site in the world will do no one any good if it is sandboxed or buried on page 10 under your keywords. Let’s take a look at how to use Facebook to boost your web traffic.

Facebook is an extremely popular social networking site. What does this mean and how does this apply to you? Your goal as a webmaster is to increase traffic to the highest extent possible. Facebook has more than 115 million people who log in every single month. It is the biggest networking site in the world. Let’s take a look at how this can help you. Many people log into Facebook to meet up with friends, make posts about what is new in their world and to search through profiles of other members, many times finding new online friends. These 115 plus people each month can help you get traffic to your site.

Think about how to use Facebook to boost your web traffic as tapping into a huge source of potential visitors to your site. The steps of using Facebook to boost your traffic is fairly easy and we will discuss the steps that you can take with results faster than you imagined. You will first want to build a Facebook network. This will be a group of online friends, which will continually grow. If you can obtain one friend, you can have thousands and it works in the following way.

You simply need to create a profile for yourself and your website. Your profile should reflect the focus of your site. If your site is regarding gardening, make this the focus of your Facebook profile.
Now it is time to find other people who are interested in gardening. With over hundreds of millions of people, this is actually the easy part. There are countless groups and all you need to do is join groups that relate to what your site is about.

As you look at relevant groups, ask that group to add you as a friend. Try to send out twenty requests each day. If you do that, you could easily build a network of over a thousand people who are all interested in the subject of your website, within a couple of months.


Taking only perhaps a half hour per day or less, you will not want to disappear; your network needs to see that you are active. Your goal will be to do small things that create an interest in what you are doing. This is done by putting up posts. It is best if you mix these up with a bit of business and a bit of personal and fun information. For example, you can talk about the new sale that is about to start and the next day you can post a funny joke that relates to what your site is all about. The key is to make your thoughts and correlating website interesting. People will click in to read about you and this drives a percentage of them to your site. The more you post, the more traffic you gain. It really is that simple.

Related posts

• Webmasters should use: 10 Free Google SEO Tools (1)
• Using Post Slug feature to Increase your SERP (0)
• Top Searched Keywords in 2009 (0)
• Top 11 TIPS FOR GOOGLE ADWORDS SUCCESS (3)
• Top 10 SEO Keywords Search Tools (1)

Related posts

• More 50 SEO Tips you need to do (0)
• How To Become An Authoritative Website (0)
• All About Link Building (3)
• [eBook] 101 Tips to Increase Your Google Adsense Earning (0)
• You need Nothing to make money online ! (0)

Related posts

• Affiliate Marketing Tips To Help You Earn More (0)
• White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO (0)
• Using Post Slug feature to Increase your SERP (0)
• Top 10 SEO Keywords Search Tools (1)
• The Five Most Important Things You Can Do with Google Webmaster Tools (Part 2) (0)

How to Increase the Conversion Rate of Your Website

The conversion rate is the most important web metric in a commercial website. Conversions lead to sales, and sales leads to profits; this is why a good conversion rate is essential for long term business success. Yet this important web metric is often the hardest to figure out. SEO companies often ignore it, and leave it to the website owner to determine. This is not good, because SEO should not only be about increasing traffic from rankings; instead, a good SEO should also pay attention to the conversion rate.

Website owners often lack SEO and web marketing skills, and therefore find it hard to solve conversion-related problems. Even if the website has high traffic because of good rankings in organic search engines, a poor conversion rate alone can turn a good ranking/traffic success into a failure. How many SEO clients  complain of failing to achieve a reasonable ROI after an SEO campaign?

This tutorial aims to educate any website owners experiencing a problem with a low and unacceptable conversion rate. By following the techniques illustrated in this tutorial, any webmaster or web site owner can increase conversion rates without diving into highly technical details or spending thousands by hiring a consultant.

The conversion rate is defined as:

Conversion rate (measured in %) = Number of Successes / Total number of website unique visitors

The “number of successes” depends on the specific online enterprise. For an online bookstore, it may mean the number of books sold in a given month. For an e-commerce website selling movie downloads, it may mean the number of movie downloads the site experiences in the entire month.

You should define what constitutes a “success” for your website. By clearly and objectively defining a success, the conversion rate problem maybe easier to solve.


How much conversion is enough?

One of the most frequently asked questions is “How high of a conversion rate is considered OK?” The best answer is that your conversion rate should be high enough for your venture to stay profitable. It can only be 1% or 3%, or you may need a 20% conversion rate to be profitable.

Of course the higher the rate you actually achieve, the better, but a zero conversion rate is definitely not good. Think carefully about your conversion rate if you believe it is an issue, because it is often NOT the real problem. See this financial equation:

Total $ profit in month = Total sales in month – Total operating cost

Where:

Total sales in month = Total unique visitors x Conversion rate x Average dollars per sale

If you are believe that a low conversion rate causes you to have a low profit every month, it might not be the real problem. No matter how high your conversion rate, IF:

• Your total number of unique visitors is extremely low, you might not get a profitable number of conversions. You might need to review your targeted keywords, or your website may lack the content to attract long tail traffic. Consider adding content on a periodic basis.

• You are pricing your goods too low compared to what is considered profitable and competitive, you are going to have a problem making a profit. Consider looking at how your competitors price the item and decide on the most competitive pricing, not necessarily aiming for the bottom.

• You have an extremely high operating cost, it’s going to eat into your profits. Consider looking at your expenses and double checking the real value before you spend money on something for your business. Is it really a good financial decision to go for dedicated hosting at the early stage of your business? Do you really need to spend money on a monthly office rental, or can you use your home? These basic questions are easier to solve than the real website conversion rate problem because these are non-technical questions which most website owners can handle, and the financial savings can increase the overall website profit.

How to Increase the Conversion Rate of Your Website – Do a baseline measurement

When you are finally convinced that a low conversion rate is the real problem affecting the website’s profitability, do a baseline measurement before diving into the details. In this case, spend at least three months measuring the actual conversion rate before you do something to improve it.

If you have this data before you start your analysis, the process will go much more smoothly. You can use Google Analytics to measure your conversion rate.

You can also measure your conversion rate manually, provided you have the following very important data:

• Total unique visitors (coming from search engines, direct and referral traffic).

• Total sales for the month (from your online sales monitoring system).

Once you have the baseline measurement, for example a 0.5% conversion rate average for the entire three month period, you can proceed to the next step.

The content and your reputation

Ask yourself this question: am I providing my potential customers with the content they need? Even if you think you are, sadly, what you’re providing still might not be good enough. Say, for example, that you are selling widgets. Put on your customer hat and answer the following questions as honestly as possible.

1. Do you have pictures of your widgets on your site?

2. Are you providing accurate prices for your widgets?

3. Do you have a legal license to sell widgets?

4. Are you transparent to your potential visitors? This is the customer service aspect, which is very important. This means, can they contact you by mail, visit your office if you have one, ask questions and get answers immediately, or even see your face online?

5. Are you providing ACCURATE and SUBSTANTIAL information about your widgets? How much can they get for the price they pay?

6. Are you providing accurate shipping information? When can they receive it if they order it now? Do you only serve particular territories within a region, or entire countries?

7. Do you have terms and conditions pertaining to your widgets?

8. Is the font size of your widget-related content VERY clear? Some websites use a small font or an extremely large font. Either one can seem very discouraging to read.

9. Here is the most important thing: can your customers clearly see the “Buy Now” button for every product on your website?

10. Are you writing content with respect to your visitor’s point of view? It is more appropriate to say: “Why should you buy from us?” than “Why are we the number one supplier?” Stressing the “we” too much connotes self-centered service. Focus on using “you,” which your customers can highly relate to with respect to their own intention of visiting the website.

I recommend spending one day on this, reflecting deeply on the questions above. Consider brainstorming with your other team members for more possible input and most importantly, consider reviewing all customer-related inquiries you’re received.

Establish yourself and your business as trusted names in your field. Some easy ways for your site visitors and potential customers to measure this is through testimonials from other customers and the way you explain your services/products. These are all reflected in your site’s content. Register with professional associations in your niche and provide easy ways for customers to contact you.


You will notice that once the overall content has improved, you will receive more customer inquiries, and most importantly, an increase in conversion.

How to Increase the Conversion Rate of Your Website – Website technical presentation

Now that you have improved the content aspect of your website, it is time to look into other important factors that can affect your conversion rate. One factor is how your website is presented technically. Consider reflecting on the following questions below:

• How long, on average, does it take your website to load? Scientific studies have shown that you will lose one third of your website visitors if your site takes more than eight seconds to load. Consider improving your website’s loading time by cutting it as low as possible.

• Do you use intensive flash and JavaScript technology to display content? Not all users have the time to upgrade flash or even upgrade browsers. If you can display your content as technically simple as possible, then it can be accessed easily by almost all visitors, which can improve your conversion rate substantially.

• Do you have friendly website navigation? I have observe a lot of commercial websites, even recently, that do not have a link going back to the home page. Or they do not have a “contact” link clearly visible on their pages. Much worse, there are websites that do not provide a back button or even hyperlinks that will always open in a new window. It is very confusing to navigate.

• Do you have technical features that provide security? Adding SSL to check-out pages or providing features that protect users’ privacy is essential.

How to Increase the Conversion Rate of Your Website – The Conversion Funnels

A conversion funnel is the number of steps your potential customer will go through to complete the transaction or sale. For example, say you have the following conversion steps:

Step 1: Lands on the home page

Step 2: Visitor clicks “Red widget” category

Step 3: Visitor clicks “Special product widget in red widget category.”

Step 4: Visitor clicks “Buy now” button in the special product widget.

Step 5: Visitor registers by entering his/her name, address, etc. on the customer registration form.

Step 6: Visitor checks his/her email to verify the registration process.

Step 7: Visitor returns to your website to enter credit card details.

Step 8: Visitor enters shipping information.

Step 9: Visitor finally becomes a customer.

The example above is a  nine-step conversion funnel. Unfortunately, the conversion funnel is a reverse pyramid. This means that a lot of customers enter it at first, and then gradually you lose some at each step — possibly due to losing patience with the process. See the illustration below:

If you can cut down your conversion steps to as few as possible, you will save a lot of potential customers. The ideal conversion steps are as follows:

Step 1: Present your visitor directly with the “Buy now” button for your most important products/services. Put this on the most-viewed landing pages, typically the home page.

Step 2: Present terms and conditions.

Step 3: Check out.

The check out may constitute directly inputting credit card details. A three-step process is quick, increases your conversion rate, and makes your customer happy at the same time.

Related posts

• Top 11 Tips for Internet Marketing – Must try (P.1) (4)
• For Affiliate Marketers: Seven Powerful Tips (0)
• Collection Plugin Firefox for SEO (0)
• Affiliate Marketing Tips To Help You Earn More (0)
• 6 Tips To Use Googles Backlink Data (0)

I see this everyday: websites that provide great information, are updated regularly, and designed with the utmost of care but are lacking the essential: search engine optimized content! Just putting up a website and crossing your fingers that it’s done the job to get indexed by search engines, found by prospects, and shared for the world to see isn’t going to get you far. And thinking you shouldn’t have to rely on search engines to get you traffic means you aren’t willing to become truly successful. While some have found success only using social media for traffic, more have found greater success by getting found on search engines. So let’s get you ranked!

Related posts

• Using Post Slug feature to Increase your SERP (0)
• Top 10 SEO Keywords Search Tools (1)
• The Five Most Important Things You Can Do with Google Webmaster Tools (Part 2) (0)
• SEO and Quality Content (0)
• Natural Search Engine Optimization (SEO) (2)

As an internet marketing company that specializes in offsite optimization, we are often confronted with clients that are struggling with their onsite SEO. Onsite SEO, meta tags in particular, have such an impact on what we do offsite, that we now offer website audits to our clients as part of our service offerings to help them with their onsite SEO. We also include the creation of meta tags for our content development service.

Related posts

• No related posts.