Website Optimisation Techniques

As well as link building and on-page optimisation, there are some other very important SEO factors which can help your website index and rank in search engine listings. The following techniques are grouped into the category named ‘website optimisation’ and should not be overlooked when preparing an SEO campaign.

Domain Age and Expiration Date

Google and other search engines include many factors within their ranking system. One of these factors is trust rank. Owning a domain that has history improves the trust rank as does registering the domain for a long period of time.

Website History

Again trust rank comes into play here. If your website has been archived in the search engine results for a long period then it will help improve rankings and indexing of webpages created in comparison with a fairly new website with no history.

Structured Navigation

When creating a website, it is important to provide a well structured navigation, not just for users but also to allow search engine bots to follow links and index webpages within your website. Structuring your navigation correctly can help all you webpages be indexed and should help the flow of Google’s PageRank spread through out the website.

Valid HTML

As with structured navigation, the importance of valid HTML to search engine bots is to allow all webpages within your website to be indexed within the search engine listings. Validating your HTML will ensure that the bots do not hit any ‘brick walls’ within the code that prevent them from reading the rest of the webpage.

Contextual Linking

To further help the indexing of your webpages and to even out the flow of Google’s PageRank, it is useful to include links within the content text of your webpages. Wikipedia is a perfect example of how this should be done.

URL Structure Including keywords in your website’s URLs will help you rank for those terms. If your website uses dynamic URLs created through variables then think about rewriting them. Separate keywords using a minus character (eg. search-phrase.html) and try and keep the important keywords as close to the beginning of the URL as possible.

Regional Targeting

If you wish to target a certain region then there are a few steps you can take to help this process. Firstly you can choose a relevant domain such as a .co.uk (UK) or .de (Germany) rather than a generic .com domain. Then look at your hosting IP location, search engines can access this information and will use it to decide your target audience. Finally, Google Webmaster Tools allows you to set a geographic target which is useful if you have a .com domain.

Site Maps

Search engine bots look for site maps when they visit your website. Providing a standard HTML site map will help improve the indexing of your webpages and allow bots to find webpages that they might otherwise have missed. You can now also provide and submit an XML site map which all the major search engines have took on as a standard. Use your robots.txt to tell bots where to find your XML site map and also submit it to Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer.

Domain Name

If you are purchasing a domain name for a new website then think about including your main targeted keywords within that domain name. For example if you are building an online store that sells low price Cricket bats in India and you buy the domain cheapcricketbats.co.in then you are definitely going to have a lot more of a chance for quickly ranking well for the search term ‘cheap cricket bats’ in India search engines than you would with a more generic domain name. You would also do well for long tail search terms such as ‘cheap cricket bats in India’ and have more chance of ranking for ‘cricket bats’ in the long term.

How to Test Greater Conversions and Internet Success

Testing your website pages, especially landing pages, squeeze pages and sales pages is one of the most profitable things you can do to tweak your pages and gain higher conversions. On top of that, you can learn more about copywriting though split tests and other means of testing your web pages than any other way

Back in the days of mail order marketing, testing sales letters and catalogs gathered more real information about new concepts and ideas than through most other methods of research at that time. In these days of the internet, the bell even rings louder.

You can test whole concepts of your pages to find out what emotional triggers and core desires your market truly respond to. Simply test two or three versions of your sales page that each focus on a separate theme or slant on the product or service. The page that pulls the most conversions will give you the answers you are looking for.

In this day of fierce online competition, testing is something you should, no MUST do to gain the highest conversions from your website and pages. If you’re not actively testing your pages, your competition will soon pass you by.

What Exactly Should You Be Testing?

The simple answer is: Everything! Everything on your pages and in your sales message is a contributing factor to your conversion rate. This includes your headline, opening paragraphs, body copy, your offer, post scripts, background color, font, font colors, images and every imaginable component of your page in between.

Volumes of information have been written about what to test and how to test your web pages. This work is extensive, so when you begin to test, I suggest you concentrate your first efforts on the three areas that have been shown to have the most impact on your sales page, the headline, the first three (or four) opening paragraphs, and your offer.

In this article, I will focus on Headlines as they are the critical element of your page.

Testing Headlines

Headline changes can have the most impact on your conversion rate and response of these three components. 75 – 80% of your visitors will never read past the headline. It doesn’t matter how wonderful you have written your sales page, if the headline doesn’t work correctly and do its job of getting people to read on, your page will be a failure.

In order for your headline to be effective, you have to discover the biggest core desires within your market to feed. The best headline test are based around the different core desires and motivating reasons why people would be interested in your product or service.

Testing different headlines around different concepts will tell you which one is more appealing to your market audience. Once you have the key concepts and desires tested and you have discovered which one works best, you then go to work tweaking your headline in more alluring and persuasive ways.

Split testing is generally used to test headlines. In the beginning, you will probably want to use simple A/B split testing but if you are dealing with high volume traffic and high price sales, you may want to consider speeding up the process with multi-variate testing. You can find out more about these tests by going to: What Is Split Testing?.

What Type of Headline Format Do You Test?

There are some classic headline formats that have been shown to be effective over time that you can begin with. There’s the “If/Then” headline, “Amazing Secrets of …” headline, the “Who Else Wants to …” headline, and of course the classic “How to …” headline.

Test as many headlines as you can think up for your web page. In fact, you should never stop testing different headlines on your page. A simple 10% increase in your conversions could result in hundreds to tens of thousands of dollar or more. Testing your headlines could bring an increase of 50%, 100%, or even 200% or more in the response your web page brings.

The next time that you feel that your landing page, sales page or squeeze page should be converting better, think about testing the component of your page to increase the effectiveness and response that it should be eliciting

Source: Entireweb Newsletter