Information, nowadays, is not only utilized in satisfying one’s craving for data, it has also become a good utility in marketing products. Perhaps the most effective way to capitalize its usage is through search engine optimization.

When searching for an item in the internet, users would usually go to search engine sites. These sites work by looking through out its database of web pages and returning links for search result. If you wonder how they can possibly obtain copies of numerous links and stored in their own data store room, here is how they do it:

1.Google and other search engine websites have crawlers with them to get some keywords of the website.

2.These keywords are stored in their database.

3.When a user will search a certain topic, the engine will try to sort on websites containing the keywords.

4.Search results will give the internet users the link of the website that contains the keywords.

By using keywords, your websites will be possibly visited by a number of web users around the world. The advantage about attracting traffic to your website is that more advertisement will surely find its exposure on the heavily visited site. Here, the business of search engine optimization or SEO will take place.

The most important thing a website should have is its content. It is the bread and butter of the site. Its contents can make audiences around the world get interested in what one has to offer.

It must be taken into consideration that SEO is the vehicle of the audience to the site and the site’s vehicle to the audience are the ways in which SEO will catch the website.

Here are some few steps to make an SEO friendly website:

1.Prepare for the Meta Tags

One has to be familiar with the basics of HTML to know what tag is. Meta tags are HTML tags which can be found in the source code of an HTML file or simply put it the website source code. Meta tag contains necessary information of the website which cannot be found in the interface page of the website. These are hidden tags that can only be determined by the SEO crawlers.

In this way, one has to prepare the meta tags by putting on it the information about the website, and at the same time getting to know the keywords. Knowing the keywords is like putting a webmaster in the shoes of the searchers. In this way, one can identify what keyword one has to type in the search engine.

2.Creating Website Portals with Lots of Keywords

Website portals are the entry point of every surfer to a certain website. One has to stuff the necessary keywords in the portal so that SEO’s crawler can readily attract on it.

However, extra care must also be done to avoid being blacklisted by the SEO’s. SEO crawlers, especially the most sophisticated one, can detect if there is spamming or too much keyword on the portal. Keywords should not only be substantiated with content, it must also be used wisely along the content. Otherwise, the website will totally be unknown because it is in the blacklist.

3.Consider Submitting Directories to a Search Engine Site

One way of connecting to search engines is not to wait for the crawlers to crawl on the website. Establishing direct contact to the Search Engine site can be done by submitting directories. However, the website must be prepared before submission of directories. It must get rid of dead links or other spamming agent which can be very harmful in search engine ranking of a website.

Directory submission is usually being reviewed manually by the people manning the search engine. In this way, search engines can determine if the website is indeed substantially stuffed.

4.Maintain the URL

One way of maintaining the traffic is to keep the URL. URL is very important for websites especially if one is only dependent on SEO crawlers. Having a dead URL is not only damaging to the website’s ranking, it will also lose the interest of web surfers.

Avoiding any forms of symbols and other non alphanumeric is one way of building a good URL. Symbols and non-alphanumeric characters are usually ignored by the SEO crawlers. In this way, the website will not be overlooked.

Knowing how an SEO works is an advantage for a webmaster. In this way, he is not only increasing the traffic of web surfers, he is also catching some advertisement on his website.

E Commerce Web Design enhances ecommerce usability. The online sales are possible only if the sites are easily accessible to the users. Successful web sales depend to a great extent on the ecommerce web design. The way in which different pages like home, category, product details and shopping cart are designed must be of consequence to ecommerce usability.

Home page is a guiding page that welcomes the users. It is essential to detail and elaborate the product categories, important information, purchasing and delivery option and also the company profile. The category pages are required to direct the visitors to the product they are searching for.

Various classification schemes and subtle arrangement of the products is an essential component of the ecommerce web design. The users should be provided with the opportunity to compare the products before deciding on the product they desire. It is essential to include various data like prices, brand names and the like in the category pages of the ecommerce web design.

The pages in which the product details are given should be simple and easily comprehensible. The product details should be given in a clear language, devoid of any jargons or technical usages. Photographs of the products should be included to supplement the written details. Prices of the various products should be clearly displayed.

It is best practice to display the various product options in an effective manner. Once the user has made his decision about the product he should be directed to the shopping cart. The registration and the check out procedures must be listed in a simple language. Thus a concentrated effort on all aspects of web page designing is important in enhancing ecommerce web design usability.

Common Mistakes of Landing Pages to be avoided

The following are some of the common mistakes of PPC landing pages that should be avoided.

1. Your page may be too clustered - It distracts the visitors in their search and can even divert your conversion. If the content, images or the popups of your landing page are clustered, there will be a negative affect on the conversion rate.
2. Multiple calls to action - There shouldn’t be more than one or two calls to action, else it creates confusion in the minds of the visitors.
3. Irrelevant text or description – Keep the content short, simple and on the topic. Any additional unrelated text on your landing page can dilute the message. Generate an effective call to execute on the landing page. Conversion should be made simple and easy, as there is little time with the visitor for the conversion.
4. Incorrect information damages credibility – If the facts on the landing page are incorrect, there is a possibility of loosing credibility with your customers. Ensure the information provided on the landing page is correct.
5. Don’t annoy the visitors – You shouldn’t irritate the visitors with the popups or banners that typically irritate the customers. Agitated customers don’t convert well. Acquire their attention by providing solutions for their needs that the page can serve them.

The above information explains some of the mistakes on landing pages. Ensure that you have thought through these points in order to reach your conversion goal targets.

This is the first part of the article on building good landing pages. We will create a second part of this article shortly that covers other common mistakes that reduce the effectiveness of the landing pages.

Jagger

First, let’s discuss Jagger… Just like hurricanes, Google updates have names. (A Google update is a change to the way Google determines its rankings. Google makes these changes periodically, and they’re universally feared because they can impact dramatically on a website’s ranking.) The latest update is called Jagger, and it has search engine optimizers (SEOs) all around the world in a state of panic.

Why was Jagger such a fearful update? Simple… With Jagger, Google once again outsmarted huge numbers of SEOs. You see, many/most SEOs spend their time (and their clients’ money) trying to trick Google into thinking that their websites are more relevant and important than they really are. They do this mostly by swapping links, buying cheap links, and placing links on free directories. While there’s nothing wrong with these sorts of links (i.e. they’re not considered ‘black-hat’), they don’t really show that the site is relevant or important. All they really show is that the site owner has made a deal with another site owner. In these deals, the incentive for the linking site owner is a reciprocal link, money, or increased link volume. Google much prefers it when the linking site adds the link simply to enhance the value of their content or to increase their own credibility and authority.

In other words, Google wants its search results to contain relevant, important sites, not sites that merely appear to be relevant and important. To this end, Google invests millions of dollars and employs the world’s smartest mathematicians to create algorithms which identify sites that are trying to trick them. And that’s exactly what Jagger did; and when it found those sites, it simply adjusted their ranking to more accurately reflect their true importance. (Unfortunately, it also demoted some sites which actually deserve a high ranking. It is hoped that these mistakes will be ironed out with future minor updates, but that’s a topic for another article…)

From a technical standpoint, Jagger was well described by Ken Webster in his article, Google’s Jagger Update - Dust Begins To Settle?. To summarize, Jagger:

1. Increased importance placed on IBL (Inbound Links) Relevancy?
2. Increased importance placed on OBL (Outbound Links) Relevancy?
3. Promotion of relevant Niche Directories (related to #1 & #2)?
4. More weight thrown back to PR @ top domain?
5. Increased importance on AdSense placement relevancy?
6. Possible introduction of CSS Spam filtering?
7. Overall Blog demotions?
8. New and unresolved “canonical” issues?

Some more interesting effects were reported by WG Moore in his Jagger article. Mr Moore runs a number of test sites for SEO purposes. By monitoring the links to his test sites as reported by Google, he established that:

“all reciprocal links had vanished. We think that this is because Google is down-grading or eliminating reciprocal links as a measure of popularity. This does make sense, actually. Reciprocal links are a method of falsifying popularity. Sort of a cheap method of buying a link, if you want to think of it that way… During the second week of the Jagger Update, a few of our reciprocal links did come back up. However, we also noticed that these were from places where we had highly relevant content. They came from articles where we discussed our area of expertise: Web Analytics, or from forums where we had relevant threads. So we feel that these links came back because of content, not linking.

The other group that came back up was one-way inbound text links, regardless of the originating web site. These links also had strong relevance to our web analytics business. In other words, they contained keywords and/or phrases related to our site and its business.”

In short, Jagger undid the hard work of thousands - if not millions - of people! As a result, hard-won high rankings and revenues plummeted.

Interestingly, article PR (article submission) came through Jagger seemingly unscathed. My SEO copywriting website, for example, went from no.4 to no.1 worldwide for “copywriter”, and I’ve employed article PR almost exclusively. Whether it was promoted or the sites around it were demoted, one thing is clear: article PR is one of the best ways to obtain a high ranking.

Google Analytics

The second monumental event to occur recently was Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free web-stats solution which not only reports all the regular site stats, but also integrates directly with Google AdWords giving webmasters and insight into the ROI of their pay-per-click ads. According to Google, ” Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site.”

Why is this such a landmark move? Because for the first time ever, Google will have access to your real web stats. And these stats will be far more accurate than those provided by Alexa. Furthermore, Google’s privacy statement says: ” We may also use personal information for auditing, research and analysis to operate and improve Google technologies and services.” Now let’s put two and two together:

1. Google is ‘giving’ every webmaster in the world free access to quality web-stats.
2. Millions of webmasters will accept this ‘gift’, if only because it integrates directly with their Google AdWords campaigns.
3. Google will then have full access to the actual web stats of millions of commercial websites.
4. Google will have the right to use these stats to develop new technologies.
5. What’s the next logical step? Google will use these statistics to help determine its rankings, of course!

It should come as no surprise. It’s been on the cards - and frequently discussed - for a long time. For example, Jayde Online CEO, Mel Strocen, recently published an article on this very topic, The Future of WebSite Ranking. She quite rightly asserts that:

“Google’s “democratic” vision of the Web will never be achieved by manipulating algorithm criteria based on content. It will only be achieved by factoring in what is important to people, and people will always remain the best judge of what that is. The true challenge for search engines in the future is how to incorporate web searcher input and preferences into their ranking algorithms.”

In fact, the Jayde Online network already owns and operates a search engine, ExactSeek which incorporates user popularity statistics in its rankings.

The Future of Search & SEO

To date, ExactSeek is the only search engine which uses visitor stats as criteria for its rankings. But Google isn’t far behind. We all know that Google specializes in taking a good idea and implementing and adapting it brilliantly. This is exactly what we’ll see in this case. By combining link popularity and user popularity statistics, Google will be the only major search engine to consider both what other sites think of your website and what your visitors think of your website. And because they have the most advanced algorithms for assessing link popularity, and will soon have access to the farthest reaching, most accurate web stats to assess user popularity, its competitors will be a long time catching up.

So if that’s the future of search, what’s the future of SEO? The future of SEO is undoubtedly one where:

* one-way text links from relevant pages continue to be the most valuable links
* reciprocal linking continue to decline
* the ’shotgun’ approach to link buying declines
* mass email link requests decline
* free directory submission declines
* niche directory submission increases
* article PR (article submission) increases
* article submission sites (e.g. EzineArticles, GoArticles, and ArticleBlast) play a much bigger and more important role in helping online publishers locate quality articles (due to the increasing article volume)
* user popularity is just as important as link popularity, which means:
o the quality of article PR improves in order to increase site traffic, credibility, and loyalty
o the quality of website content improves in order to convert traffic and encourage repeat visits

Clearly, the choices for SEOs will be pretty much limited to paying for links at niche sites and/or engaging in article PR. Being an SEO copywriter, I may be a little biased, but for mine, article PR is the hands-down winner in this comparison:

* It satisfies Google’s criteria for relevance and importance. Linking site owners include your article and link because, in doing so, their site becomes more useful to visitors, and their business gains credibility and authority.
* It generates hundreds of free links quickly enough to make it worth your while, but not so quickly as to raise red flags at Google (in the form of link dampening).
* Links are permanent and you don’t have to pay to keep them there.
* You get a lot of qualified referred traffic who already trust you and your expertise. This satisfies Google’s visitor popularity criteria, while at the same time bringing you a lot of extra customers.

For more information on article PR, read How to Top Google with Article PR.

Conclusion

The lesson from Jagger is, don’t try and trick Google! They’ve got more money and more brains than virtually any company in the world. It’ll only end in tears! Don’t spend time and money trying to make your site look important and relevant. Instead, spend that time and money actually making it important and relevant! Content - the real content behind the optimization - is the answer. After all, whether it’s an article or a web page, it’s the content that keeps ‘eyes on paper’, and that’s what it’s all about.

Happy optimizing!

1. Content: "Better placement comes from a better content".

   Your web page must be information and keyword rich that must accurately describes your content. In order to make your visitor attempt a purchase, you need to entail influential and compelling content.

   No doubt, there are various SEO tools and techniques but content will always remains a foremost key in the success of SEO campaign. Hence, to conclude, content matters the most to have professional search engine placement.

2. Link building: For having an effective and professional search engine optimization, building link popularity is one of the most critical aspects to be taken into a consideration. You can obtain links from other website and could link others as well from your website. Though if there is not a considerable amount of traffic, but the links from other web sites can be of a great market strategy in increasing your search engine rankings.
3. Site Optimization: Site optimization is a process of designing a web page in such a way so as to make them rank high in the search engines. When designing a web page, your keywords, title, image alt text, text and overall design, plays a very significant role in concluding where your website will be placed.
4. Directory Submission: Selection of the best, relevant directories for the website submission results in professional search engine optimization. To arrive at a particular website, many people prefer to utilize directories. And so, for this reason, directory submission must be given utmost importance. Directories give access to strong back links. Hence, makes your website all the more popular in the major search engines.
5. Pay-per-click Placement: Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising model through which advertisers place their products and services on display and the advertiser is supposed to pay the search engine per click only when the user actually clicks on the ad. Through PPC, you can generate instant traffic as well as an immediate return on investment.

   Another benefit with PPC is that you have an access to control the cost as you would like to. To be clear, you decide on the budget and settle on your bid prices for strategic keywords. With PPC, you can also include your company logo as well that will further help in strengthening your brand.

6. Search Engine Submission: To make your website known to the business community of online, submission of a website to important search engine and directory is of fundamental importance. For professional search engine optimization, you need to submit your website to all the major search engines available. Such as: Google, Yahoo and MSN.
7. Keyword Research & Analysis:

Keyword research and analysis are a cornerstone for the entire search engine marketing process. Appropriate selection of the keywords in a search engine marketing process can create a lot of difference in the campaign of search engine optimization. Your keyword research must be page specific and should focus about 2 to 5 keywords per page.

When carrying out a keyword analysis, you should evaluate the competitiveness of your keywords. Make sure that keywords are really apt for that specific page. In short, target a right keyword to make your online business boom well and flourish.

The question is where do you start with the bewildering range of ecommerce shopping carts and ecommerce solutions available? Whether you are looking for corporate website design and ecommerce, business to business ecommerce build and development, or more modest affordable e-commerce web site solutions, you still need to apply the ecommerce golden rules. A good web development company will be able to help with these questions and more. But first what do you need to know in order to set up a good ecommerce site?

The rules of successful ecommerce solutions

1. Ensure visitors can find you
2. Convert your visitors ? give them what they want
3. retain your customers ? make them into repeat visitors
4. integrate your ecommerce into your business
5. finally, find a good ecommerce consultant to put it all into practice

Ensure visitors can find you

It all revolves around marketing both online and offline. Market yourself ruthlessly. Put your URL on all your stationery and promote it at every opportunity when you have client contact. In addition, you need to make sure your website is fully optimised for search engines and you undertake a search engine promotion strategy. Search engine optimisationinvolves researching the key phrases that your customers use to find your services and including them appropriately throughout your site. It also means ensuring you do not use technology that impedes search engines when they are indexing your site. Once your site has been listed, you will do well for some phrases and poorly for more competitive ones. In order to improve your search listings you need to get links to your pages under the key phrases you wish to be found under. Again, you need to get a good consultant to organise the creation of link building strategy .

Convert your visitors

Once you have attracted visitors to your site, the next challenge is to get them to transact with you. The two principle rules here are; attract the visitors most likely to want your offerings, so less targeted traffic is better than a lot of generic traffic; and make it easy for them to engage with you, this means a site that has good usability and accessibility. Make sure the entire experience is a positive one even before they arrive at your site or before they know it exists. This starts with good site optimisation, so that when a visitor clicks on a link from a search engine the page they land on specifically meets their needs. It is compliant with all accessibility guidelines and is user friendly, meaning it is easy to use, downloads quickly, has punchy well written copy and guides visitors easily through the ecommerce process.

Retain your customers

It may be a clich? but it’s true, it’s a lot easier to make money from existing customers than to get new ones. So you need to do all you can to not only retain your customers, but to get them to recruit new ones for you. A good ecommerce solution is an ideal way of increasing customer retention as you have a lot of information about them that you can use to your advantage. You have their purchase history, their level of spend, the types of items they like. You need to use this information to arrange your site in such a way as to encourage repeat visits and increase the level of spend on any given visit. You also need to use the information in database marketing campaigns, so you can automatically segment your customers and target them with offerings appropriate to their purchase history. A good ecommerce consultant and consultancy . can help with this.

Integrate your website into your business

It doesn’t matter whether, you just sell online or whether the ecommerce aspect is just a part of your overall business, good processes lie at the heart of any business including ecommerce. An ecommerce site gives you the opportunity of integrating a lot of your systems to make you more efficient and spend less time on the administrative aspects of running the business. For example, payments should be automated and then passed directly into your accounts system. Your stock control system should be tied into any warehousing system and ideally into your tills (if you have them) via an integrated EPOS system. You also need to be able to analyse your business effectively. You need good reporting applications top be able to query your website, to determine how people find you, and how they use your site. You also need to be able to determine what sells, what makes money, what causes problems, your most profitable customers etc. A good ecommerce consultancy will not just create you a site and wave goodbye. They will first spend time looking at your business model and advising how the ecommerce aspect can support and grow your existing business.

That’s been a lot of talk about landing page these days. So, what’s a landing page? It’s the page your website visitor arrived at after clicking a link. The link could be on any page on your website or pay per click advertising or
banner ads or keyword search.

The goal of landing page is to cause your visitors to take definite action. You don’t want your visitors to leave until you get them to do what you want them to do. To click on the buy button, to sign up for an affiliate program, to download a free ebook or software, to sign up for a course, or to subscribe to your free newsletter.

The landing page is a direct marketing copy. Your visitors landed here through a link on your webpage, an ad, a keyword search, pay per click advertising, banner ads, and now you want to convert them.

Here are some tips to design a good landing page…

1.Content Relevance
Your landing page content must be relevant to what people were looking for when they applied the click through. The closer the match is the higher the chances of conversion.

2.Be Concise
Net writing is different than offline writing. Generally, when people surf the Internet they give short attention span to what they are reading. So be concise. When visitors arrive at your landing page they are already predisposed to buy, or they want to get more information of your product or service. By all means give them information but be concise. Don’t use more than three sentences to communicate a point. Think through and concise what you want to say. Use bulleted list to communicate the benefits of your product or service.

3.Get straight to the point
The landing page is a highly customized marketing copy for your product or service or affiliate product or service. Don’t distract your visitors with advertisements, links to other web pages. Don’t let your visitors wade through a whole bunch of hosh posh before they get to want they want.

4.Focus
Dedicate one landing page to only one product or service. Don’t try to promote multiple products (unless they are of the same product group)or services on one page. Create separate landing pages and campaigns if you have multiple products or services to promote. Focus on one product or one product group on each landing page.

5.Be Factual
Use facts and figures instead of generalities.

General: Prices Reduced
Factual: Prices Reduced by 20 percent

6.Clear Call to Action
Tell your visitors what you want them to do. Buy now, click here to download, fill in name and email address to subscribe or whatever. Keep all call to action text in bold.

7.Readable Text
Sure, there’s nothing much to look at a page with white background and black fonts. But it’s definitely easier to read the text than a red background with black fonts. Remember, it’s the words that sell. Your website visitors must be able to read your text with ease.

8.Navigation Links
Not at all, if you could help it. The only link you want your website visitors to click on your landing page is the call to action link.

9.Graphics and Images
Keep visual effects to a minimum unless you are running an online audio or video business, real estate business, or selling holiday destinations. Keep in mind that for direct marketing it’s the words that sell. Graphics and images serve only to enhance your text communication, not cloud it.

10.Grammatical and Spelling Errors
Check through your text and correct all grammatical and spelling errors. Otherwise it gives your website visitors a negative impression of you and the company you represent. Once visitors have a negative impression, it becomes difficult to convince them of the product or service that you are promoting. First impression counts a lot.

11.Make it personal
Make it personal to connect with your visitors. Use a lot of You
and Your in your text.

12.Make your text clear and simple to understand
Avoid colloquialism or jargons. Use terms and phrases that
people readily understood. Use short sentences. Phrase them in the active voice.

A good landing page will always sport good conversion rate as compared to a poor one. Take the time to think and rethink, work and rework your landing pages. Don’t make the mistake of just optimizing for the search engines. You need to optimize your landing pages for humans too. Ultimately, it is humans that give you the sales.

Your landing page should be built for maximum conversion. Here are few tips that can help you..

Clear offer
From very beginning your page should be clear about your offer. Whether you are selling or inviting to join your list or offering a free download. it should be clearly mentioned. This avoids confusion.

No Distraction
Landing pages are devised for capturing leads or ggeneratingsales. there is no point in keeping yournavigation in place and let yor visitor go astray. Remember! More links to click, more confused would be your reader as to where to go.

Call For Action
Whenever you add a call for action, response dramatically goes up. So “Order here”, “Click Here to order”, “Fill in the form” are some calls which when used judiciously would improve the response.

Web Design
Landing page should be constructed with sound web design concepts. You must use good fonts, format your page well and make judicious use of graphics. Your content should be spaced enough and broken in pieces so that it is easy to scan that.

Relevance
This would require creating different landing page for different ad groups. Include the search term(s) in your heading and page title. That would make you feel your reader that he has come to right place for answer to his search query.

After Effect
After your visitor converts, it is a good move to take him to another page where you can make more offers to sell or extract more information.

Your pay per click has done its job by bringing a visitor to your web site. Now it is your landing page that would take over.

Make that take over effective.

• https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
• https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox
• http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/suggestions/

If you are interested, I offer an SEO Audit that tells you very specifically and on a very granular level how your site looks to a Search Engine (SE). Much of what you discover in the SEO Audit you can correct yourself (and usually rather quickly) to appear more attractive to SE’s and improve your Page Pank (PR) and index status (showing up higher on results pages).

Click here to - ask me about getting an SEO Audit for your site!