Landing Page Optimization - Marketing Experiments Conversion Formula and Course

April 18, 2007

MEC(Marketing Experiments Conversion) Labs has identified five essential elements to website conversion, which are brought together in the MEC Conversion Formula.

In their seven session on-demand course their experts will share the MEC Conversion Formula that they have developed over the past five years conducting tests with partners such as The New York Times, Reuters, and Insurance.com.

The next course will focus on eCommerce based websites and will begin May 24th, and will encompass the following:

How to develop a value proposition to motivate your page visitors
How to reduce friction and motivate page visitors to move forward and take action
How to increase page relevance and reduce visitor anxiety
How to design landing pages to hold and engage the attention of your readers
How to test and track metrics and analyze results to make further improvements
The process and taxonomy of testing

Click here to learn more details, and how the course works.

Featured Article: How to Build Landing Pages that Convert — Driving traffic from PPC (pay-per-click) or email campaigns to your home page is a mistake. You must deliver on the promise in your lead ad copy if you hope to convert traffic. Dumping people on a home page and forcing them to navigate their way to what they want is a strategy for failure. Click here to read full article.

Written by James Opiko · Filed Under Marketing, Web-Dev-Design | Leave a Comment

What The Google’s Algorithm Is Looking For When Determining Site Rankings

April 8, 2007

According to Jason Lee Miller of WebProNews: “Fishkin and SEOMoz have been refining this list since 2005, whittling it down from over 200 important factors.”

This year’s guide received input, through voting and commenting, of search aficionados from Danny Sullivan to Jill Whalen to Eric Ward, all names you should recognize if you’ve been following this trade for any length of time.

Jason Lee Miller — Talks about these issues in his article titled: Advice from SEO All Stars

References:

$Google\'s PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings$ $Getting The Search Engine Ranking Your Website Deserves:: META Tags Yield To Google\'s PageRank As Search Engine Standard$

Written by James Opiko · Filed Under Marketing, Search Engines, Web-Dev-Design | Leave a Comment

How To Drive Traffic “Away” From Your Website

April 7, 2007

1. Give Web-visitors Too Many Options and Choices

2. Give Web Visitors Too Much Information To Process

3. Give Web Visitors Too Much Non-relevant Content

4. Give Web Visitors Too Many Irritating Distractions

5. Give Web Visitors Too Many Red Flags

6. Give Web Visitors Too Many Decisions To Make

7. Give Web Visitors Too Many Stumbling Blocks

8. Give Web Visitors Too Many Forms To Fill-in

9. Give Web Visitors Incomprehensible Page Layouts

10. Give Web Visitors Too Many Confusing Instructions

11. Give Web Visitors Too Many Reason To Click-out

Jerry Bader explains how any combination of the reasons mentioned above will contribute to driving traffic away from your site, in his article titled: 11 Ways To Drive Traffic Away From Your Website

References:

Written by James Opiko · Filed Under Marketing, Web-Dev-Design | Leave a Comment

How To Use A “Server-Side 301 Redirect” To Get Credit For All Your Inbound Links

March 30, 2007

Many search engines rank web pages based on the number and “authority” of “inbound links” pointing to the web page in question.

In Google’s PageRank System, for example, a link from page A to page B is a vote, by page A, for page B.

Beacuse of rampant abuse by “Link Spammers,” Google’s PageRank Algorithm is in “Perpetual Tweak” — in this instance, just having thousands of links pointing to your website may not be good enough — A vote from an authority site carries more weight than from a lesser site, for example a link from the front page of www.bbc.com to the front page of www.afroarticles.com will count more than one thousand links from several www.IamAnewLowTrafficSite.com or www.IamAsiteWithNoTopicalSimilaritiesWithAfroArticles.com, so to speak.

Apart from being a high traffic “heavyweight” site, bbc.com is essentially an “article” site like afroarticles.com — hence the importance of relevant inbound links.

The notion of one link, one vote is no longer valid.

That said, “reciprocal linking” is not dead — it has just metamorphosed into “relevant reciprocal linking,” in order to thwart link-spammers. Note: We have tons of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) articles in our database to help guide you on this issue: Go Read Them!

On How To Get Credit For All Your Inbound Links, Ross Dunn writes:

Does your website have an alter ego? Strangely enough, the following addresses are considered separate websites by the search engines:

http://www.yourdomain.com (the “www” version)
http://yourdomain.com (the “non-www” version)

Though visitors see the same content, in the search engine world this situation poses a serious issue relating to link popularity. If the “www” version of your website has 300 inbound links and the “non-www” version has 300 inbound links, then each version is getting credit for only 300 links rather than the total 600.

Here are some immediate steps you can take to minimize the problem: Go Read The Rest of The Article!

References: