Background: Earlier this week I had a pretty lengthy conversation with my friend Ryan Critchett about conversion optimization and how he could improve his conversion rates from his Google AdWords campaign. That prompted this post from him on conversion optimization (on which I’ve posted a very lengthy comment), which then prompted me to share this more detailed post on what you can do to help compel prospects to convert.

Hopefully if you’re reading this, you’ve already working hard to improve your site’s organic search engine rankings by regularly producing and updating high quality, well-structured web content. If that’s the case, good for you. You are setting yourself and your business up for scalable web success by doing things the right way from the start. Now that you have put time and work into organizing, managing and optimizing your site’s content, you may be wondering, where does the business part of all this come in? It’s not only a fair question, it’s a good one. While right now, your website is likely just one tool in your arsenal of lead generation, I’d be willing to bet money that over the next few years, you’ll see the percentage of leads your website generates grow more than any other. So, how do you optimize your website’s lead generation opportunities for increased conversions?

1. Remove All Barriers to Conversion, Make it Easy

The more steps involved in prospect conversion, the lower your conversion rate. Don’t make prospects think. There are other instances in which you will want to do nothing but make people think, but conversion time is not one of them. Remove as many clicks as possible from the process. Don’t bog prospects down with a manuscript on what your business does. Give them a quick summary of what they’re getting and an easy way to get it, preferably, all on the same page.

2. Require As Little Information As Is Needed, Make it Quick

Again, you want to make this whole conversion process easy. If all you need is a prospect’s email address to follow-up, then only request that he or she provides you with name and email. There are plenty of solutions out there that will allow you to conditionally present more and more form fields to prospects as they continue to come back to your site. If you’re a business looking for a solution that offers this functionality, check out Pardot’s Prospect Insight, it’s a phenomenal tool. Whether or not you invest in a tool to present fields conditionally as prospects come back, initially the fewer the fields, the better.

3. Keep the End in Sight

Preferably, all of your form’s fields AND the submit button, should be visible above the fold of the monitor. Test your landing page on different resolution settings, so you’re not just making it above the fold for your monstrosity of a 32″ monitor, most people don’t have those. If they don’t see the end of the form in sight, they will automatically and subconciously assume it is a more involved process than it is. Shorter and visible without scrolling = better.

4. Make What They’re Getting Clear

The prospect should be keenly aware of what they’re getting before you ask them to convert. Think about it like this, if I tell you I have something behind the proverbial “Door #1” and want you to give me $5000 to see what it is and obtain it, you’d probably think I was crazy. Chances are, if I present this opportunity to 1,000 people, only 1 or 2 people, one who is stubborn and willing to take chances, and one who is likely just an idiot, are going to take the risk. The same is true when people have to consider sharing their personal information with your business. They need to know what they’re getting in return. Many of them have been conditioned to fear giving out their info because of brands who have taken it in the past and used it to send an offensive volume of pitchy emails. For this reason, I also recommend including a highly visible link to your privacy policy and/or the page on your website that details exactly what you’ll be using prospect contact information for. While the relationships between brands and consumers are anything but tit-for-tat these days, the first time you ask someone to give you their information, give them a clear incentive to do so and let them know exactly what they’re getting in return, both now, and in the future. Without this, you will be sure to only draw the .1-.2% of risk takers and village idiots.

5. Test, Test & Test Some More

Every prospect is unique. Every business is unique. Every offer is unique. While general conversion optimization rules like the ones above apply to most scenarios, your business may cater to a market that thinks and behaves differently. For example, a business that offers a product or service that’s procured via a long sales cycle and is a longer term commitment for prospects from a psychological standpoint, may see better conversion rates by including more content on landing pages. Use A/B testing to determine what works for you. Play with changing landing page layouts, form position and page copy/messaging to see what works best. Don’t assume you think like your prospects do.

In my next post, I’ll discuss what you can do post-conversion to keep prospects engaged with your brand and coming back. I’m interested in your ideas and tips for conversion optimization. What other steps do you recommend businesses take to improve conversion rates?

Whether you call them backlinks, inbound links, in-links, linkbacks or something else, anyone familiar with SEO knows that links from a site other than your own, to your own, are a good thing. While the extent to which a link will impact your search rankings depends on the quality and authority of the site from which the link comes, it’s always a good idea to keep tabs on how the volume of inbound links to your site is growing. Inbound links are generally considered to be an indication of quality content. In other words, if your content is useful to readers, it will be organically shared and linked to throughout the Web.

Below are 5 tools to check out to help you keep track of your site’s inbound links.

Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo Site Explorer is one of the few things Yahoo still does arguably well enough to continue using. It’s a completely free tool, and you can get a pretty comprehensive listing of links to your pages. The results can be filtered to exclude links from your own domain, or to show just inbound links to a specific page, rather than all pages of your site. The first 1,000 results can be exported for you to play with.

Backlink Watch

Backlink Watch is another free tool. It’s a good one for cross-analyzing backlink output results from other tools, but tends to be not as comprehensive as some of the other inbound link checking tools in this list. But, it’s free, so you get what you pay for. One cool thing about Backlink Watch is that with a decent amount of accuracy, it also displays the anchor text associated with your inbound/backlinks. It’s definitely worth checking out.

Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer has both a basic (free) and pro (paid) version. The tool is a strong one, and even if you only use the basic version, it’s a great way to get an idea of inbound link volume. You can also see the number of root domains linking to your site with the free version, and do some other cool things like compare link metrics.

Majestic SEO

Like Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO has both a free offering and subscription services. All that is required to use the free backlink checking tool is that you fill out a simple registration form. But as a free user, the data you have access to is limited. Under the “Top Backlinks” tab, for example, you’ll only be shown the top 5 backlinks to your site as a free member. As a paid member, Majestic SEO has tons to offer.

Advanced Link Manager

Made by the same people who make Advanced Web Ranking, Advanced Link Manager allows you to report on the evolution in volume of your inbound links. Advanced Link Manager also has an area where you can view inbound links by site and check out the anchor text of your backlinks, which is great insight to have. [Tip: If you're trying to rank for a particular keyword or keyword phrase and you see an inbound link from a site run or managed by a friend or someone you know, reach out to them and ask them if they'd be willing to tweak the anchor text of the link to your site. 9 times out of 10, it's no big deal and they'll be happy to do it].

What tools and resources do you use to measure the volume or impact of your inbound links? Share your tips or questions in the comments below!

We’ve recently seen a huge shift in the way search engine results are served up. Not only do we now see relevant social resources related to our search in-line with natural results, but we see which of our friends and connections have interacted around those topics as well. This indicates a huge paradigm shift for search in general, requiring social become not a tack-on to current tactics, but an integrate-in. Where we previously considered Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and Klout scores as innately separate from organic search results, with the evolution of social search and what I like to refer to as the social search “arms race,” the factors we must consider when implementing an SEO strategy have also changed.

Below, I’ve listed some key metrics to track when making social part of your search, content, and SEO strategy. Note, that these indicators/measurements on their own won’t necessarily directly impact your SEO efforts, but without monitoring and improving them, you CANNOT successfully incorporate social into your search engine optimization strategy.

Facebook KPIs:

• Interactions Per Post – a clear indication of user engagement. Fans do nothing for you if you haven’t taken steps to “activate” your fan base. Word of mouth advertising doesn’t happen in person as often now as it happens on the Web. If you’re posting quality content and engaging your audience, you should see your average interactions per post rising pretty steadily, leading both to fan loyalty and increased traffic to the resources you share with them.

Note – interactions per post was a metric calculated by Facebook prior to rolling out recent updates. You now must export insight data and take your total number of interactions divided by your total number of posts during the same time period to calculate this metric.

• Like Sources – See how people are finding your page. If your numbers for stream, messages, and user profile are low, work on boosting those numbers. Those are a direct measure of the willingness with which your current fans are sharing your content and promoting your brand.
• Unlikes - After exporting your insight data, take a look at the days during which users most frequently “unliked” your page. Try to find commonalities between posts and behavior from those days and be mindful of how to reduce the number of unlikes in the future.

Twitter KPIs:

• Average Interactions Per Tweet - If your follower count and daily tweet volume is high, this can be a mountain of a metric to calculate. But if you’re just getting started in the social space, it shouldn’t be too difficult. Try taking one month to set a baseline for determining how many people are sharing and interacting around your contact. Look to improve that number over the course of several months. In doing so, you’ll get the hang of what type of content and what messaging is most resonating with your target audience.
• Lists:Followers  Ratio - If you’re followed by 2,000 people but listed only twice, chances are either your message is unfocused, your content isn’t valuable, or your follower niche isn’t properly targeted. When you create a follower base with a focus on quality and relevant content, your list:follower ratio should increase. Aim for a ratio of at least 5%. Meaning, if you’re followed by 2,000 people, you should aim to be listed by 100 different lists.
• Unique Retweeters – You can use a tool like Klout Score (Klout.com) to keep track of the number of unique people who have Retweeted your content. The more value to your content and the farther your social reach spreads, this number should continue to grow, not plateau.

This list gives you three good measurements to start with for both Facebook and Twitter. As we move forward in documenting the social search arms race and steps you need to take to improve your social SEO strategy, we’ll begin to incorporate more sophisticated measurements, including sentiment, keyword clouds, and more.

Please don’t hesitate to leave questions or recommendations for more social KPIs to keep track of.

I’ve covered anchor text in many previous posts, but this topic is one that’s important enough to examine further. Most people working in SEO are keenly aware of the importance of inbound links. Not only do strong inbound links help boost PageRank, but if placed properly with keyword rich anchor text, they also significantly impact Search Engine Page Results (SERPs). Furthermore, prioritizing keyword rich anchor text in your internal linking strategy will supplement your SEO strategy and result in further benefit. Let me elaborate.

Search engines like Google using spiders that crawl the web. Below we’re going to cover two examples of links (that would be crawled by spiders) placed from site A to site B and evaluate the respective benefit of each.

Site A: Respected technology blog

Site B: Salesforce.com (CRM system provider)

In this example, we’ll assume that the PageRank between each site is the same, so in regards to PageRank, the inbound link will only serve to solidify the PageRank of Site B, the receiving site.

If Site A, the technology blog linked to Salesforce’s website with something like this:

For more information about CRM solutions, check out the links below:

* www.sugarcrm.com
* www.zoho.com
* www.salesforce.com
* www.avidian.com

This does little for the receiving site, salesforce.com. Even if we overlook the fact that the link does not use anchor text, we also have to consider the fact that the link is far enough away from the relevant keywords to even be associated with them. In essence, what this says to a search engine spider AT BEST is, ‘salesforce.com has something to do with CRM systems.’ At worst, it tells spiders nothing more than the technology blog is providing salesforce.com as a resource given the other content of the page. Hopefully, in this case, the page content would be fairly saturated with references to CRM solutions.

Even better, however, would be providing the link with anchor text. If Site A’s content looked like this:

‘We recommend thoroughly researching CRM systems before purchase.’

This type of link is invaluable when it comes to SEO. If a spider were to crawl this link it immediately recognizes that Site A is saying it considers salesforce.com to be a CRM system or a resource on CRM systems. When people search for “CRM systems,” having this inbound link will boost salesforce.com’s search engine ranking for this term.

When it comes to inbound links, quantity is great but quality is better. If you can get inbound links with keyword rich anchor text, your search engine results for those particular keywords will start to climb. Keep this in mind when distributing a press release over the wire, for example. If you’re placing links to your website all over the web via press release distribution, make sure the links to your website in the press release are optimized with keyword anchor text.

In an upcoming post, we’ll discuss anchor text as part of your internal linking strategy.

Having worked in search engine optimization (SEO) for large and small companies both on a freelance basis and as part of an organization, I get asked a lot of different questions about SEO. Common to almost every interaction I’ve had around search engine optimization is a question something along the lines of, “We want to accomplish SEO in the next 3 months, how do we do it?”

It should go without saying that not every conversation goes exactly this way or is always a 3 month time line. What’s important here is to understand that no organization just “does” SEO. On the contrary to some marketing tactics such as pay-per-click campaigns or banner ads, SEO is a long term commitment. It is a gradual process that takes time and frequent work and evaluation.

The amount of time it takes to achieve significant search engine results page (SERP) improvement is dependent upon the beginning status of the site, the terms for which you’re optimizing, the effectiveness of the optimization strategy, and the amount of effort put into the the search engine optimization tactics.

Attention to detail such as improving usability through a strong internal linking strategy and use of effective metadata everywhere possible is a critical component in achieving ideal results. In an upcoming post I’ll discuss in more detail the recommended level of detail and optimization frequency for achieving the best results.

One of my favorite parts of doing search engine optimization work is tracking the results. Suprisingly, this is a key step in the process that many people seem to forget about. What’s the point of dedicating time to SEO and your web content if you’re not going to measure its return?

Individuals and small businesses are often unaware of the drastic change they can see in their search engine results page (SERP) performance by taking on some basic SEO tactics and tracking efforts in-house. Frequently, agencies trick their consumers into believing that SEO can only really be done by “professionals” who have spent years cultivating their trade. This is NOT true!

There is simply a  lack of education on ways to track SEO performance and improvements without spending thousands of dollars to get help from an agency or the latest SaaS application.  Over the course of my next several blog posts, I will outline steps anyone can take to develop a basic SEO Dashboard to track their website’s performance, all using Google Docs and Google Analytics. Please keep in mind, that as your operation becomes more sophisticated, so too will your SEO strategy.

While you wait for the first post in our series on in constructing your SEO Google Docs Dashboard, please begin thinking about the 15 or so core terms for which you’d like to see your business or personal website ranking better in SERPs. We will use these terms to create your Google Docs Dashboard in our next post. Also, if you don’t already have a Gmail account, please create one so you will be able to use Google Docs.

I’ve been asked a lot recently by people writing web content where they should most focus their on page SEO and keyword efforts. While it’s important that your core keywords appear throughout your site content and pages, keywords specific to each page should certainly be placed in a few key places. Below, I’ve outlined the most important places in which your keywords should appear on page.

1. Page URL – when infusing URLs with keywords, make sure the words are separated by hyphens. Try to place your keywords in the most upfront location in your URL possible. For example, if your website is www.CompanyABC.com and you offer multiple products, one of which being SEO services, you would want your URL to look something like: www.CompanyABC.com/products/search-engine-optimization. (As a side note – having your keywords in your site’s domain name doesn’t hurt either).
2. Page Title – The core keywords for each page should without question be placed in your page title. Using the example above, the page title could be something like “Search Engine Optimization Services”.
3. First 100 words of body content – make sure that the same keywords you are using in your search-engine friendly URLs and page titles are also placed in the first 100 words of body content. The closer to the start of the first paragraph, the better.
4. Keywords in headers – whether H1, H2, or H3 tags (and so on), including keywords in your page headers is always helpful. Just make sure that your keyword density does not exceed 5% of total page content.

This is a very basic list but a good place to start for web content writers. Please feel free to provide additional ideas and thoughts for on page keyword placement in the comments below.

People often forget to consider how and in what order they are serving up content when dealing with SEO. A logical site hierarchy and a thoughtful folder/sub-folder structure for site content is critical. Use of a strong sitemap, fairly shallow website depth, thoughtful keyword driven folder names, and a good linking strategy (including use of menus and context navigation) will drastically improve SEO and PageRank results. Let’s discuss each of these pieces in a bit more depth.

Sitemaps - Even if your website is one with thousands of pages, making a well-organized sitemap available from each page of your site ensures that every page on your website will be within just a few clicks away. This also means that these pages will be only a few crawling steps away for search engine spiders. In general, it is a best practice to make every page on your site reachable within just a few clicks.

Website Depth - When you run a search for the pages indexed on the Apple.com site by Google you can see there are over 7,000,000 results listed. Even with this immensely large number of pages, Apple does a great job of making every page available within just a few clicks of the mouse. In Apple’s sitemap, there nine available top-level headings under the About heading. However, once you arrive at Apple’s About section, you can see that it is not necessary to drill down further on the page to access anyone of these headings. Furthermore, each subheading under these top-level headings are available within just one additional click (all listed at the bottom of the page). The faster a user can get to each page, the easier it is for search engines to do the same.

Folder Names - For sites that use a content structure that matches their hierarchical folder directory structure ( i.e. – www.companyxyz.com/about/management rather than www.companyxyz.com/management), using keyword driven folder naming conventions is key. This allows for easy navigation of content in hierarchy driven sites. Furthermore, it affords a more keyword infused URL while allowing users to easily identify the location of the content they’re viewing. As a naming convention best practice, when multiple keywords are in any portion of your URL, use hyphens to separate these words rather than underscores.

Linking Strategy - The organization of your site and use of menus such as breadcrumbs will provide a strong internal linking structure. By providing a link to every top level section of your site from the homepage (via a top navigation menu, for example), not only do you pass along PageRank from your homepage to pages beneath it in the hierarchy, but you also provide automatic internal links that help users navigate your site with ease. For pages a bit deeper in your hierarchy, using breadcrumbs that display a backwards path from the current page to the homepage will accomplish this same effect. Wherever possible, use menus to improve site usability and navigation; doing so will automatically afford you some great internal link juice.

These are just a few things to consider when evaluating your site structure and how your organization is serving up its content. We recommend researching each of these pieces in more depth to consider what strategy is best for your organization. Remember, every SEO step you take should benefit your end-user. When you keep your users in mind, your SEO rewards will always follow close behind.

There is a lot of confusion about duplicate content and whether it is considered an SEO no-no. There are occassions where duplicate content is frowned upon; however, there are also situations in which duplicate content is appropriate and in which sites will not be penalized for offering the same content in multiple formats. Below we’ve outlined a few common situations in which duplicate content may come into question, and what you can do about it.

• Print versions – if you offer multiple formats of the same web page, such as PDFs or .txt outputs, you can guide search engines to crawl the preferred version of the page. Use your site’s robots.txt file to disallow crawling of these alternate formats.
• Multilingual content - If yours is a multilingual website, or one that presents the same content in a variety of languages, rest assured that the same content presented in different languages is not considered duplicate content. Check out their Webmaster Central Blog post that details this.
• Syndicating your own content - if syndicating your own web content, duplicate content is not an issue. However, we recommend including an absolute link back to your site as the original source of the content. If you syndicate content at the same time as it’s being published, other websites may pick up on the article (and be crawled) before Google crawls your own site. With the link back to your own site in the syndicated version, you can rest assured it will be credited to your own site.
• Syndication by external sites – once again, the best practice here is to include absolute link backs to your website as the source of the content. Google will try to identify the original source of content by checking items like which version was published first, etc. However, sometimes even Google makes mistakes. By including an absolute link back to your site you can make sure Google will have an easy time identifying you as the original source.
• Duplicate content within your site - sometimes it’s necessary to have the same block of content appearing in multiple places. To ensure the preferred version of a page is being crawled and served up, include the link to the preferred page in your sitemap file.

In most cases, duplicate content will not result in a penalty. Search engines such as Google have gotten very good at analyzing content and determining its purpose and source. As we always advise, the general best practice is to provide content and resources that help the end user of your site. If you keep this in mind, you will always include only the content, links, etc. that are necessary to guide your users in the right direction; and for this, you will be rewarded.