Six SEO Secrets to Turn Visitors Into Sales

Want to increase your sales? I’m willing to bet the answer’s “yes.” After all, that’s what SEO (search engine optimization) and getting traffic is all about. But if your visitors aren’t buying once they arrive at your site, your hard work’s going down the tubes! Use these 6 SEO conversion secrets to convert your visitors into sales…

SEO Secret #1: Create a compelling listing Your site’s description in the search results is your first chance to make a good impression with prospective buyers. So make sure it grabs your visitors by the eyeballs! Rewrite your title tag and meta description tag – the parts that show up in the search engine listings. Experiment with new ways of describing who you are and what you do. Repeat until you hit on the combination that persuades the most people to click through to your website. Just make sure your main keyword phrase appears first in both tags.

SEO Secret #2: Create a powerful headline The average visitor to your site will spend just FOUR seconds deciding whether your site has what they’re looking for. A headline that intrigues, excites, or inspires will leave your visitors in no doubt… so they’ll stay long enough to see what else you have to offer. Start by stating the main benefit of what your page is offering. Will your customers learn money-saving tips, for example? Then frame your main benefit with a power statement like “How to…” or “Discover…” or “Uncover the Secret to…” (And don’t forget to include your main keyword in your headline and subheads!)

SEO Secret #3: Create keyword-specific pages Create groups of related keywords for each page or section of your website (e.g., an article, blog post, or salescopy). When people land on a page that focuses on the keyword they searched for, they’re much more likely to stick around – and buy your products! Just include a lead-in or link somewhere to your main sales page. Sometimes just a keyword-rich link is enough, especially when you’ve impressed them with your content.

SEO Secret #4: Use images and multimedia to your advantage The best images help your customers understand what your website is all about. The more directly they relate to your product and content, the more they’ll reassure your visitors they’ve come to the right place. Audio and video can also be great sales tools when used correctly… so long as your listeners are ready for them. Turn off the auto-start feature on video or audio you include on your site. If you can create an optimized page for each video or podcast, your conversions will be even better.

SEO Secret #5: Include an internal search box Adding a search box is an easy way to help your visitors find what they’re looking for. (And according to MarketingSherpa’s Ecommerce Benchmark Guide, 43% of consumers use an internal search box if it’s there.) And a search box offers a prime SEO opportunity, too! Using tools like Google Analytics, you can find out the exact words your market is typing to search for things they expect to find on your site. Use these keywords to optimize other pages of your website, and to test using pay-per-click.

SEO Secret #6: Encourage immediate sales A call to action is what’s going to get your customers to buy today. But is yours full of keywords that will reassure your visitors that their problem will be solved? There you go – six SEO secrets to help you turn your visitors into customers. Try them out and watch your sales soar!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Designing Your Website For SEO

With over 80 percent of website traffic coming from search engines, it’s no wonder I am often asked the question “How can we get a better position on the search engines?” Still, with all of the attention on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), companies are not investing enough of their marketing effort/budget on SEO. In fact, while most companies consider SEO important to their marketing success, very few are actually doing it (some studies show fewer than 40%), and those who are…not completely.

Search engine optimization (SEO) means ensuring that your web pages are accessible to search engines and structured in ways that help improve the chances they will be found and listed as close to the top of the list as possible.

How do you stack up?

This article defines the types of search tools, reviews the optimization areas that most impact your position:

Meta Tags: Page Titles, Descriptions, Keywords

When a search engine visits your website it will first look at your Page Title, Description, and Keyword Meta Tags. Before submitting your website to the search engines, pay close attention that your Meta Tags for each page are descriptive and accurately reflect that page’s content. While the list of keywords in your Meta Tags were once a key element to optimization, it is now more important to be sure each page includes your keyword, or keyword phrases, up to three times within the page content itself (or at least 3-10% page density). Also, search engines will check for keywords near the top of a web page, such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text of that page. They assume that any page relevant to the topic will mention those words right at the outset. SO, as far as the Meta Tags are considered, the most important are the Page Title and Page Description, so pay close attention to how those are treated in the code of EVERY page.

Content and Structure

First and foremost your site’s pages must contain “quality” content. Quality is defined by the degree of usefulness the content has for the expected visitors, comprehensiveness of that content, the direct relation of that page’s content to the Meta Tags in the code of that page, and the quantity of content (Websites with fewer than 100 pages are going to have difficultly ranking).

Also, don’t build your site with frames or extensive use of Flash, as generally these design options are not able to be spidered by the search engines’ robots. And while dynamically generated sites using technology such as ASP, Cold Fusion, and PERL, can have a great impact to the site’s functionality, they can cause issues for search engine placement because the pages don’t actually exist until a visitor triggers the page and a search engine spider doesn’t trigger a page when it crawls the code. The other problem is that this type of technology adds question marks into the URL and many spiders can’t read a link past the “?” in a link. There are technological ways around this, but it can be tricky. If you’re going to use dynamically generated web pages, be sure you’ve addressed these issues first.

Limit your use of graphic representation of text. Spiders can’t index images, so even though graphics help you control the “look” of the text, you will want to avoid using them when representing your keywords on that page.

Finally, the content on your site must also be accurate and updated regularly. As your home page is often the first page to be spidered, be sure to design it to be the page that is updated monthly with new information and news. Also, consider using your company name as often as possible, rather than the more casual use of “us” and “our.” Basically, follow the rule of thumb of always getting specific…not “our products”, but “our sales and marketing tools.”

Link Strategy

Multiple links from RELEVANT third-party sites to your site are very important for many of the search engines. The search engines do give you points for quality links so linking for linking sake is not the answer here. The major search engines use link analysis for search ranking, which is the process of determining the relative importance of each link pointing to your website and in some cases the context of the link. This is vastly different from earlier days, when search engines factored sheer popularity into their algorithms.

A solid link strategy is essential for top search engine placement, but takes significant time and effort to complete. The first step is to identify the potential sites you want to link from and to set up a place on your site to reciprocate. Then contact those sites and ask them to include you on their site (consider paying for this “sponsorship” and/or bartering for it). When you post links on other sites, remember that text links are important to include alongside logo links and the text of the link should be the keyword or keyword phrase(s) you are optimizing for.

Finally, be sure to cross link within your own site (use “anchor text” for each link). Many of the robots will follow links from your site to other areas of your site and index those areas. For this reason, add a site map from your home page that is a text-only link outline of your entire site. Again, the text of the link should be the keyword or keyword phrase(s) you are optimizing for.

Submission

The final step to optimization is submitting your site to the search engines and directories. You can do this yourself to the three majors-Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

The bottom line? Search engine optimization is a tedious, but necessary task. And, it can take a few months to see tangible results. Depending on the importance of search engines to your marketing strategy, you may want to consider hiring an expert.

Go-To-Market Strategies is a resource center for sales and marketing professionals and business leaders. Our tools, templates, and services help companies achieve big aspirations with limited budgets.

Advantages of Using CSS in Web Design

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets; it is a simple mechanism language that allows users for adding style to structured Web documents. Example – layout, fonts, colors, spacing and aural cues. CSS is a breakthrough in Web design as it allows web designing developers to organize the style and layout of multiple Web pages all at once and change to the new markup which makes sense and then redefine it to fit web design.

Through CSS, Web designing can be controlled by displaying the characteristics of a site from one central document. With CSS, web designing can be established by creating attractive pages with much flair. CSS Web Design provides web sites for businesses and organizations who want to use the internet to expand and develop their business. To design web pages with CSS, you need to know the standards and advantages to understand how browsers’ attribute and respond on the Web design results. CSS include a wider variety of stylistic capabilities to meet the necessities of web design developers; this grant the designer more control over site appearance.

Advantages of CSS

CSS express how to display (Inline style) HTML elements

The HTML documents can be displayed using different output styles. HTML tags were originally designed to define the content of a document. Cascading Styles sheets define how HTML elements are to be displayed. Style sheets bring genuine leading and sophisticated margination to the web designing.

CSS allows for smaller file sizes

Cascading Style Sheets save bandwidth, diminish the overall amount of code in web pages and vastly reduces the size of your files when compared to old-style markup.

External Style Sheets can save you a lot of work

CSS can save you a lot of work when designing a website. Most modern browsers now support CSS so it’s safe and easy to use.

External Style Sheets are stored in CSS files

CSS allows external style sheet to control the layout and web design of the whole site. The best way is generally to use an external CSS file; it controls many different elements throughout the entire site instead of defining the same elements again and again in all of the HTML files.

Web Designing is normally stored in Style Sheets

Web design for the entire web is a thoughtful appearance for design issues and how they differ from designing for the web page through CSS. Smaller Web site web designing companies are now able to make web design accessible to both smaller companies and individuals further mounting the growth of the web development. CSS allows web design authors to move much of that information to a separate style sheet resulting in significantly simpler HTML language.

CSS allows you greater control of page structure

The main ability of CSS is to control the page structure without needing to use presentational markup. Using CSS you can hide content from certain browsers in certain situations and multiple style definitions will cascade into one. It explains to create two and three column float based layouts and horizontally center a design on a page.

Cascade Style sheets also offer much more flexibility in terms of the presentation effects it provides. Such as margin, color, border, background and much more. CSS develop strategies for maximizing forward and backwards browser compatibility. There are plenty of exposure of web design and testing tools that can aid in the creation of attractive, standards-abiding documents.