What they all have in common is the goal of getting more of your visitors to take the action you want them to take on your site. We call this action a conversion. For an E-Commerce site, a conversion is usually a purchase. But a conversion can also be things like:

• signing up for a newsletter
• signing up for a free trial offer
• completing a lead form
• downloading an e-book
• even ‘Liking’ a Facebook Fan Page

 Many times, the phrases website optimization is confused with SEO optimization for a website. These are two very different things. SEO website optimization is all about implementing meta tags, H1 header tags, writing keyword rich content, and apply canonical tags to individual pages.  Website optimization as it relates to conversion testing focuses on the implicit subconscious conversation that a visitor has with your webpage when he is visiting your site.

The experts at Marketing Experiments use the word conversation because people don’t buy from websites. “People buy from people”. In order to engage a visitor and lead him down a path to take action, you must engage in a conversation with them. By providing them value, incentive and a clear call to action, this conversation leads the visitor to overcome his anxiety about trusting you, and the friction of having to fill out a form or give his credit card. There is trust that is established in this conversation and that is the key to highly converting web page.

We optimize thought sequences and conversations, not web pages!

These thought sequences are represented in the following heuristic developed by Marketing Experiments.

Below are the specific elements that affect the conversion rate on any given page. You’ll notice that these items are NOT simply website related changes like changing the color of a button, location of an image, or reduction of the number of input fields on a form. The most critical aspects of a landing page deal with the psychology of the visitor like we discussed above. The conversion factors are:

• Motivation of the visitor
• The clarity of your value proposition
• Incentive offered to the visitor to complete the task
• Friction that the visitor faces when trying to complete the action
• Anxiety the user feels about the trustworthiness of your site, company, products, policies, and so on.

The goal is to maximize the Conversions by clearly expressing your value proposition and providing enough incentive to offset the friction of filling out the form and the to offset the anxiety and concern the user has about buying from you.

Once you create your optimized landing page, the easiest way to test it is to setup an A/B Test. It basically compares two pages head to head and determines the winner of the two versions. The great thing about optimization testing is that you are not limited to only testing web pages. Some of the low hanging fruit is in your email communications with your customers and prospective customers. Simply by running an A/B Test on the subject line of an email can show how a better subject can dramatically increase the open rate of one email vs. another.

You can learn more about website optimization on our site and feel free to contact us to talk with a conversion testing expert.

What do we think?

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As businesses started creating Fan Pages on Facebook, they quickly learned that they can create a Fan Gate page as a welcome page that forces the visitor to Like the page before they can get access to special deals and other information on their Fan Page. Most Fan Gate pages or ‘Like Gate’ pages didn’t ever stopo a user from going to the Wall or another tab for that Page. But it gave the impression that users had to click the Like button to access the other sections of the Page.

Unfortunately, with the latest Timeline update to all Pages, this capability has been removed.

It is not clear whether this is a bug with the new timeline or whether its been done on purpose. From Facebook’s perspective, it makes sense to allow visitors to dive directly into the content and interaction of the Wall. They probably realized that companies were using the Fan Gate Page as a way to cheaply get more Likes for their pages, even before the visitors had a chance to make up their own minds whether or not the content on that Page was worth Liking.

The good news is that businesses can still use a Fan Gate page to force people to Like their Page, but they must direct the user to that page via URL. This means the user has to click on a link from somewhere to go directly to that ‘tab’ of the Fan Page. As an example, if you’re running a contest, you can include a link to that specific ‘tab’ within an email, a hyperlink on the website, a clickable banner image, or any other clickable element.

How Do You Figure Out the URL for the Individual Facebook Tabs?

It’s pretty simple to figure out the URL to direct someone to an internal ‘tab’ within your Fan Page.

1. While on your Fan Page, click on the tab that has your Fan Gate on it.
2. The URL will look something like this: http://www.facebook.com/pages/seo4anyone/104898396220544?sk=app_190322544333196
3. You can see that there is a parameter attached to the end of your Fan Page URL that indicates the application ID that is managing the Fan Gate.

How Do I Create a Facebook Fan Gate Page?

Some of you might be asking, how do I get my hands on one of these Fan Gate applications? Is it easy to setup or do I need to be a web programmer? The good news is that there are many free applications on Facebook that allow you to easily setup a Fan Gate without any HTML or programming knowledge. The one I use is called Static HTML by Thunderpenny. Simply type that into the Facebook search box and you will see an app show up in the list that has a gray star as its icon. Once you install the app, you’ll have a simple configuration page like the one below. It allows you to show one version of content to Non-Fans and different content to fans. This is great for promotion codes, Discounts, contest pages, exclusive offers and more.

This blog post summarizes the White paper created by HubSpot. The article also includes some SEO related questions and answers. Many people are asking if Pinterest is the next link building platform. Right now, the answer is NO. Read below for more information.

Understanding Pinterest

• The main goal of Pinterest — to focus on the concept of a person’s lifestyle and encouraging users to share their tastes and interests with others and discover those of like-minded people. In other words, by promoting the lifestyle its products promote.
• Surprisingly enough, user access to Pinterest still operates under an invitation-only basis. That being said, you can request an invitation, and Pinterest doesn’t exactly seem to be very stingy about granting requests. Visit www.Pinterest.com, click “Request an Invite,” and enter your email address to be notified when you have access to create your account. Or you can ask a friend who already has a Pinterest account to invite you, a much quicker way to gain access than waiting for Pinterest to grant your request.
• Pinterest is designed to curate and share things you love. If there is a photo or project you’re proud of, pin away! However, try not to use Pinterest purely as a tool for self-promotion
• When using the “Pin It” button on the pages of your website, every single one of your pins will include a link back to the source. That is why HubSpot’s blog has accumulated more than 640 links from Pinterest in just two weeks.
• The site now connects with Facebook, according to a recent Open Graph announcement, enabling users to automatically post new pins to their Facebook feed for others to see. This means more eyes from other channels get access to your pictures.
• Pinterest functions a little differently than the typical” follower world” we know in Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. For example, on Pinterest, there are two ‘follower options’ a user can take when someone likes a piece of content he or she found. A person can follow a specific board by a Pinterest user or a user’s account.

Tips and Tricks for Using Pinterest

• Be sure to register your account with the same email address you use for your business’ Twitter account so you can easily share your new pins through your Twitter account, too. Once you receive an invitation to sign up for Pinterest, you’ll want to sign up through the Twitter option, not the Facebook option. This will enable you to tie your Pinterest account to your business’ Twitter account, not your personal Facebook profile. Currently, Pinterest doesn’t offer a connection to Facebook business pages.
• For running contests, you can also re-pin the top boards to your own Pinterest page and ask followers to vote on the boards to select the winner. This is exactly what High Point Market did in its October Pinterest campaign to promote High Point Market Week, during which it recruited fashion home trendsetters to showcase their favorite products and trends
• Whenever possible, include links back to your website and landing pages in your pins to drive traffic back to your website Pinners aren’t only limited to pinning images;they can pin videos, too! Create a pinboard of some of the interesting videos your business produces interspersed with relevant images. Just don’t forget to include a callto- action within the video itself. Tell your viewers what you want them to do next to further engage with your company
• Just like Twitter and Google+, Pinterest supports the usage of hashtags. Users can use hashtags to tag their pins and make their content more search-friendly. Promoting a new campaign of some sort? Create a pinboard around it, and tag it with a hashtag you’re also using on Twitter and Google+ to leverage an integrated, cross-channel campaign. Club Monaco leverages its Pinterest account for this very purpose, using the #cultureclub hashtag and pinboard to promote a section of its website called Culture Club.
• The brands that have been most successful aren’t just enabling users to “pin” their content; rather, they’re getting in on the pinning themselves.
• The trick to succeeding on Pinterest isn’t necessarily about showing off your products or services directly. It’s about finding creative ways to show how those products and services fit into the lifestyles of your target audience.
• When following a board you only will be notified (via your stream) when a user pins a new piece of content to that board. When following a user, you will be notified every time a user pins content to any of his or her boards. Due to these differences a Pinterest user’s board might have more followers than the user herself! So how can you create a strategy to increase followers at both the account and board level?
• The fastest way to jump start your Pinterest presence is by promoting it through other platforms. Add the Pinterest follow button to your website. Promote your presence on Pinterest through your other social networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Twitter. Consider launching a Pinterest contest and write a blog post to promote it.
• Create resourceful boards based on a few core keywords that you already use in your SEO strategy. Committing to create the best board on a topic means being ready to promote other users’ pins to enhance your collection.
• Engage with Other’s Pins .Start following users you think would want to follow you back. Like and comment on their pins. When someone sees you interacting with his or her content, they might check out your account and choose to follow you.
• By enabling other users to contribute their own pins to your pinboards, you open up a great opportunity to involve fans and customers in your marketing. Pick out a few of your top evangelists or customers, and create a board dedicated to their pins
• Ask the customer to pin images that showcase the lifestyle they enjoy because of your brand. This is a great way to leverage customer testimonials in a unique and visual way. Clothing retailer ModCloth uses this tactic in its “Guest Pinner Gallery.”
• AARP ’s Pinterest account features a pinboard called “Quotes to Live By,” which is a great example of a business using Pinterest to promote the lifestyle of its brand.

Caveats and Things to be Aware of with Pinterest

• You cannot use Pinterest for SEO purposes. The site adds no-follow links and cannot be used to directly impact your SEO strategy.
• You still cannot connect Pinterest to your Facebook business page.
• If your website is using an affiliate program, you should take note, because that is how Pinterest is making its dough: by taking a cut of your sales from pinned traffic.
• They partnered with a firm called SkimLinks, which automatically scans through every link posted on the site to see if it goes to a retail site with an affiliate program. If it finds that kind of link, it secretly adds an affiliate code that ensures Pinterest will make some cash from sales that derive from that link.

How to Get Your Business Started Using Pinterest

To learn more about Pinterest and how to get your business on the Pinterest bandwagon, check out our social media page. Pinterest should be used as part of your overall social media marketing plan. But as with all new technologies, don’t abuse the tool or try to game the system. In the long run it will hurt your brand and credibility.

Have you been noticing in your analytic reports a website called Pinterest that is referring more and more visitors to your website? Gone are the days where YouTube, LinkedIn, and MySpace drive the most traffic to your site. There is a new player in the social media sharing world.

So who or what is Pinterest?

As described in the infographic above, Pinterest is a virtual bulletin board that lets users to share links or images they find interesting or inspiring. Once shared, these images become ‘pins’ that can placed on a user’s thematic pin board on the Pinterest.com website. Like other social sharing sites, once an item is pinned, it can be shared with others in the community.

But the real power of Pinterest is when you add the Pin button to your website. The visitors can pin your images on their boards and share them with their community. Now that Pinterest has integration tools for Facebook and Twitter, your images can now be spread out over the web at viral speed.

Currently, Pinterest is a huge hit with E-tail stores and retailers. This is obvious as an E-tail store has many products and product images on their websites. So its’ easy for a user to pin a watch on their board and have their friends and followers see that and then visit the watch retailer’s website and maybe buy it.

How fast is Pinterest growing?

Across the web, Pinterest accounted for 3.6% of referral traffic, while Twitter just barely had more referrals, accounting for 3.61% of referral traffic. To show the popularity and growth of Pinterest, in July 2011, Pinterest accounted for only 0.17% of referral traffic. That is some amazing growth! To contrast even more, Facebook is the king of referrals, accounting for more than one-quarter (26.4%) of traffic, 4.3% of which comes from Facebook Mobile. After Pinterest, Facebook is experiencing the most referral growth, gaining almost one percentage point in December.

YouTube also saw more referral traffic in January than December, rising from 0.98% to 1.05%. The source of this data, Shareaholic suggests The Sh*t Girls Say meme may explain this increase in referrals from YouTube.

Interestingly enough, even with Google’s huge push for the Google+ network and the integration of Google+ into Google products, the social network lost some referral traffic in January, falling from 0.24% of referrals to 0.22%. Google — encompassing search, news, images and Gmail — also saw its referral traffic decline from 3.69% to 3.62% in the past month.

How to get involved now!!?

He who hesitates… loses out. If you manage an E-commerce retail store, you have to add the Pin button to your pages. For an overall strategy for your social media marketing plans, seo4anyone can help with a holistic approach to social media marketing, paid advertising, and organic search engine marketing.

Thanks to the infographic below, we can take a look at the different ranking signals that Google uses to determine your ranking position in their search results.

Keyword Research

The first section of the graphic talks about the effect of long tail keywords vs head keywords. You can see the relationship between the volume of searches, the competition and the and commentary about the higher conversion rates for longer tail keywords.

This makes sense when you step back and think of an example. If you are looking to buy a new watch, and you know you want a men’s watch by Invicta. Then the likelihood of you getting an e-commmerce website that sells Invicta watches for men is very high. To the contrary, if you typed in ‘watches’, then the likelihood of you finding an online retailer who sells Invicta watches is much less. So users like yourself want to get the best results from your searches, and hence will type in longer keyword phrases to guarantee that.

A website’s architecture and link structure is very important!

The graphic shows how pages should be linked in a hierarchical structure, very similar to what you would find in a bread crumb trail on a website. The thing to note here is the more clicks it takes to get to the page, the less importance it is given. So keep that structure tight and link to the top priority inner pages of the website directly from the home page.

On-Page Optimization

The graphic gives you a nice list of technical items that must be optimized for the page to rank well. The top priority ones to worry the most about are:

1. Page Title – Make sure your keywords are in the page title
2. Page Headings in H1 and H2 tags – Reiterate your primary keywords in these headings
3. Body Text – You must include keywords within the content of the page.
4. URLs – If possible, your URLs should have the keywords most associated with that page

Link Building – This is for all the marbles!

In the old days, a website developer would tell his clients, “I built your website perfectly SEO optimized. You’ll rank #1 on Google in no time.” If someone told you this in the past 10 years, they are a liar or are just uneducated about SEO.

The question to ask yourself is… if 2 websites perfectly optimize their pages for the same keywords, which will rank higher? The answer is whichever website has more ‘votes’ or inbound links pointing to it. Google feels that if other web sites are willing to place a link on their site to yours, then you must have great content on your site. So each inbound link is a vote for your site. In the end, the site with the most quality inbound links gets ranked the highest.

What are some of the best ways to get these links? Well you can create blog posts, comment on other industry related blog posts, take part in forums, discussion boards, write press releases, and so on. But each link you create must use the targeted keyword as the anchor link when linking back to your site. For example, if you want to get ranked for the phrase “ranking #1 on Google”, then see the bad and good examples below:
Never use this format: For more information on ranking #1 on Google, click here.
It should be: Visit our website for more information on ranking #1 on Google.

SEO Tactics – Tools and Strategies

This part of the infographic gives some good ideas of where to spend your time and energy with SEO. Some tactics are a waste of time, while other tactics are very effective. Notice that social media is part of viral content and is very high value. We will talk more about that next.

Social Media and Social Bookmarking Sites

This is where the worlds of Facebook and Twitter have changed the search engine ranking game. As you can see from the graphic, it’s all about sharing great content! In this example, you can see that someone wrote a great blog post on Blogger and without any effort on their part, other blogs, social bookmarking sites, then Twitter and Facebook all spread links to that blog post. This is the power of viral marketing and social media. Not only does this drive direct traffic to your content, but also is a major component of Google’s search engine ranking formula.

To get more information on SEO and how social media can help you drive more traffic to your website, click around on our site and contact us to discuss.

So what are the 3 basic steps in SEO?

1. Keyword research – What are the phrases people search for when trying to find your product or service?
2. On-site optimization- The search engines need to discovery your links to your internal pages and you must add the keywords in the code and the content of each page.
3. Off-site Optimization – This is basically a popularity contest. Which other popular and related websites have links from their site to yours. In Google’s eyes, this must mean that you have great content on your pages if other websites are willing to link to you. And by the way, social media links from Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ Pages count too!

Clearly you need to get your website ranked in the top 10 positions on Google. The graphic above shows that Google now has approximately 73% market share over Bing and Yahoo. If you look closely, there is a huge disparity between being ranked #1 vs even #3. 42% of people click on the #1 spot and only 9% of people will click on the #3 spot. That’s kind of scary if you’re selling a uniform product that has no great unique value proposition vs your competitors.

To learn more about the basics of search engine optimization or other internet marketing services and social media management surf over to the main section of our website through the links provided.

As a result of this update, 35% of searches were impacted. This was clarified the next day on the blog with the following statement:

“To clarify, when we say this algorithm impacted 35% of searches, we mean at least one result on the page was affected, as opposed to when we’ve said noticeably impacted in the past, which means changes that are significant enough that an average user would notice. Using that same scale, this change noticeably impacts 6 – 10% of searches, depending on the language and domain you’re searching on.”

So what does this mean to all of us?

Well it means different things depending on what type of website you operate. If you operate a blog or community website, there is probably no impact on you, as your content is being updated on a regular basis by your bloggers or by your member community. However if you are an E-Commerce website it’s a totally different story.

E-Commerce websites usually have very limited fresh content on their home pages and top searched category pages. It is common to see user-generated product reviews, but that is down deep in the site on the product pages themselves. Google wants to see fresh content on the top level pages such as the home page and the category pages.

What can be done?

In order to do this, there are a few solutions:

• Make sure your site has a blog that is being updated daily
• Integrate the top 10 most recent blog excerpts into a News or Trends section on the bottom of the home page
• Allow users to make comments on the category level pages by using the Facebook Comments plugin. In order to get SEO value from this you have to follow the steps provided in my previous post, How to Add Facebook Comments to your Site and Receive SEO Value for the Content
• You can also include automated news aggregation to your pages. This allows you pull in timely and relevant content to your pages based off the specific keywords on those pages.
• For the inner category pages of the site, you can also pull in blog posts related directly to that product category. This can be done based on the Post’s Tags, Categories, or full text search for keywords.

What Sites benefited and what sites were the biggest losers after the update?

Websites that won are ones focused on time sensitive news stories, broadcast websites, and top brand websites with very high click through rates.

The websites that lost are not as easily grouped as the winners. Here is a small group of them:

Resources to keep updated

In order to keep up to date on these types of updates, I recommend the following online sources:

• The Official Google Webmasters Blog
• Search Metrics
• Matt Cutts blog

Let me hear about how the Google freshness update affected your rankings.

Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to this question. Let me walk you through a logical thought process of how to try to get this figure, but then ruin the day by showing how its about as accurate as a summer day’s weather forecast in Miami, Florida.

So let’s get started with this logical set of steps:

• Which keyword do you want to estimate traffic for? In 0ur case let’s use silk trees
• Then we can visit our trusted friend, the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.
• When we enter silk trees into the box and hit Search, we are so pleased to see that there are 22,200 searches per month in the USA for our keyword.

• We then have to figure out how many clicks the #1 ranking website will get if they are #1 on Google for silk trees.
• Using the 2006 AOL data dump report as well as some eye tracking studies, you think that if you’re in the #1 spot, you will get approximately 42% of the clicks. NOTE: click image to see full size.

• So with some simple math, you would think that you can take 22,200 searches per month X 42% CTR and expect to receive 9,324 visitors each month!
• If we apply an industry conversion rate of 2% and let’s just say an average order value of $100, then that would mean sales of $18,648 per month! Life is good!!
• But in the real world out in the wild, the numbers don’t quite add up

Some problems with estimating search traffic based on the Google Keyword Tool

There have been many in-depth articles about this topic, so I will summarize the main points here. Basically, it’s a combination of factors ranging from selecting the correct keyword match type to the question of whether most users know that the first 3 results are the paid advertising, PPC ads.

Let’s discuss the Adwords keyword tool for a second. Putting conspiracy theory aside for a minute, the first thing to keep in mind is that the tool’s job is to show how many potential clicks you can get when you do PPC advertising or Adsense. Therefore, its showing the potential ad placement locations that live not only on Google.com but also on member search sites, content networks, YouTube and so on. Since we are only talking about organic SEO rankings, we have to reduce the numbers from the advertising network down to some more realistic fraction.
1/3 seems to be about right in our experience.

The second thing to note is that the match type is set to ‘Broad Match‘ as its default setting. This means that search phrases may include mus-spellings, synonyms, and word variants. So it’s not just the search volume for silk trees that is included in this number. Most industry experts advise to use the Exact Match phrase type to better estimate real world visitors for a particular keyword. In our case with silk trees, it reduces the monthly searches down from 22,200 to only 1,600 per month.

Now we have a more realistic starting point based on data. We take our 1,600 searches per month and divide by 3. That gives us 533 searches per month. We multiply that times our 42% CTR for being #1 on Google and we get 213 visitors. That is actually pretty close to real world results we are getting for this client.

Can you really trust the 42% CTR for ranking #1?

Unfortunately, the answer is not really. Google has been constantly raising the bar on what types of results show up on the SERPs, so the basic question now becomes, “what is the #1 spot in the organic SEO listings?” Think about it, there can be things like:

• Google image search results
• Google Product results
• Local results for Google Places
• YouTube videos
• Google News stories
• Twitter streams for time sensitive searches

Add to that the fact that many people don’t realize that the top 3 links are paid PPC ads. Depending on your monitors color settings, that light yellow color is almost invisible. But in reality, many people just don’t know those are paid ads.

So it’s very possible you are #1 on organic SEO on Google, but you’re only getting a smaller fraction of the clicks because so many people think you’re the 4th spot under those top 3 ads. I’d love to hear some real data on that subject, as I could not find any studies proving that fact.

Where do we go from here? Can we estimate traffic and ROI or not?

There is nothing more aggravating than trying to make financial estimates based off data that has very little confidence associated to it. Should you buy a new domain that has your top searched keyword phrase as its name? What is it worth if you can get it to #1 on Google? Should you focus on short or long tail keywords in your industry? What should your marketing budget be for a positive ROI on your SEO investment? These are all questions that are so difficult to answer in today’s changing word that Google has given us.

Join the discussion below and let us hear what you think.