Many SEO’s think that it is necessary to sacrifice usability and basic good business practices for the purpose of achieving search engine ranking. This is a grievous mistake that is not only not necessary but downright foolish. Here are some simple tips you can use to increase your conversion rates and search rankings at the same time.

1. Don’t sacrifice usability for SEO
Sure on-page optimization matters. But a site that ranks well and doesn’t capture customers/visitors is like an umbrella on a sunny day.

2. Call to action
Give your visitors something to do. Adding buttons and links that tell your customers what they need to do and when they need to do it is a great way to engage visitors. Other techniques in this genre are creating time sensitive offers.

3. Design
This is by far the most basic and least utilized aspect of conversion in the SEO world. Humans have a certain way they read things, so cater to that. Create a good, clean and easy to use design and your visitors are sure to stay.

4. Social Proof
Validate yourself by creating proof that other visitors think your product or service is worth investigating. Things like best sellers, customer reviews or recommended items can help you accomplish this.

5. Be available
Customer always want to be able to contact you. If creates trust because you are out in the open and exposed but it also it can give visitors an opportunity to tell you how to improve your operations.

6. Be legitimate
Many sites fail to recognize the importance of security seals, encrypted shopping carts and so on. Having something as simple as an SSL certificate or a “Hacker Safe” certificate can greatly increase visitors trust in you as being a legitimate site.

7. Analytics
Sure SEO’s use analytics to track SERP success but what about improving obvious holes and problems with the site? Tracking bounce rates, exit pages and abandoned shopping carts can help you identify why and where your visitors are leaving your site.
*FYI bounce rates affect your search engine rankings

8. Give freely
The basic theory of capitalism is to create value which in turns brings you prosperity. Give your visitors something that is genuinely valuable and they will continue to visit your site. Promotions, give aways, free resources and tools are great ways to get and keep online visitors. They can create some great backlinks in the process.

9. Keep your visitors in the loop
Make sure to send out newsletters and personal emails whenever possible but try to avoid spamming. Mass e-mails are impersonal and in some cases may damage your reputation more then it helps it. Newsletters are a great way to keep visitors informed and aware of whats going on with your site.

10. Visitors are good for business
Any way you can attract visitors (aside from devious reasons) can help your site. Sure non targeted traffic will not increase your sales however when you use the tips above you will be increasing conversions and attracting traffic. This traffic is key to showing search engines that your site is popular and worthy of a front page ranking.

The process of evaluating risk in any venture, decision, or daily activity is primarily based on our own individual experience. That experience teaches us to either move forward because we have a comfort factor with the expected outcome or to run the other way because the risk is undefined and therefore represents danger to us.

My own team of Technicians, SEO Specialists, Copywriters, Web Designers, Bloggers and Database guys have their own personal definition of risk and because they are for the most part young. They have never paid for a wedding, funded college for a child, dealt with a debilitating medical issue or cover payroll every other Friday.

In the search marketing business there is a responsibility for all participants to better understand that what they do each day “represents risk to any CEO or CFO” mostly because these senior managers don’t get the SEO process, don’t understand the Social Media Marketing world and certainly have no concept of the dynamics, preparation or complexity of building an effective web strategy. Even though that strategy, if well conceived, will likely change their business forever; in ways that they have no concept of at the early decision making stage. They therefore are naturally skeptical until the concept sinks in or is proven on an income statement.

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Duplicate Content Issues

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Your same content in a different language does not equate to duplicate contentDetect search engines and strip out session ID’s and other things like click tracking IDs for them. (not a shady form of cloaking)Block possible session IDs with wildcards in robots.txtUse same parameter order in dynamic URLs or it causes duplicate content301’s take approximately 6-12 months for full effect in some search engines

PHP and Perl

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Hackers can hack a live session if the session URL gets indexed

Landing Page Optimization

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Landing page testing: test about 3-7 elements of an ad. Out of 100 ads only test about 8.PPC ads: URLs to subpages usually perform better than TLDsSegment different landing pages for different audiences: paid/organic/affiliate visitorsDon’t always give them exactly what they want on the landing page or they won’t be enticed to go further. (more…)

Recently, Utah Web Services had the opportunity to represent themselves at the Search Marketing Expo - Local Mobile (LoMo) conference on October 1st and 2nd in Denver, Colorado. The conference was divided into two tracks each day. The tracks we attended were the Local and Mobile Search tracks.

The first day was kicked off by a Keynote Address by Michael T. Jones, the Chief Technologist of Google Earth and Google Maps. Michael’s premise was the power of mobile phones using Google’s services such as Google GPS and Google Maps and local search assistance with personalized SMS. The nice thing about SMS search is that you can search if you don’t want to or can’t make a phone call to search. Which brings up Google’s 411 service. GOOG-411 is an awesome way to locate local locations and service providers from your phone. (more…)

Conversion is often overlooked in the world of SEO. Professionals spend more time worrying about placement than what to

do with that placement. Many times people forgot about what the true purpose of SEO is; to make money. Let’s face it business pay to get their websites ranked because it increases traffic and in theory conversion rates.

What good is strong consistent traffic without converting it to sales? The answer is none. Except in the rare occasion where someone desires traffic or readership and they perform SEO for this reason, most SEO is done in the name of greater bottom lines. If you work in SEO you need to understanding conversion metrics and how to use them to advance you and your clients’ goals.

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Thanks to the internet, information has increased exponentially. As the amount of general information on the internet increases so will the amount of personal information. Where is the balance between the publics’ right to have information and the publics’ right to have privacy? The larger problem is that people do not understand the many complexities of internet operations and web companies inner workings, which leads them to a false sense of security. People actually believe their information is safe, untouchable in a world of cyber space. Sadly this is not the case and our internet privacy is in greater jeopardy than is ever has been before. Search engine optimization specialists are on the forefront of this frontier, making their opinions on the matter some of the most important.

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There is currently a burgeoning market in the United States. It’s the Utah SEO market. Right now there are many SEO companies springing up in Utah and the ones that were already there are competing for limited space. Some say that its Utah’s high rate of college graduates and computer educated citizens, others say it’s just the fact that Utah’s economy is growing and catching up to other states. Either way one thing is clear, Utah’s SEO market is growing and competition is becoming more prevalent. Let’s explore a few different factors on what separates these seemingly similar companies.

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Everyone needs tools; they assist in our jobs making life easier and more efficient. No matter what your specialty there are tools for you. An SEO specialist relies on tools to bring him the valuable data he needs to do a good job. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of must have tools for any SEO practitioner.

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WOW, that’s an amazing website it’s so detailed and has so many high tech functions. So you’ve made it this far, you’ve created a great looking and fancy website, congratulations. However there may be a few things you’ve missed. In today’s world of internet business there is a new industry blooming and it’s called SEO (search engine optimization). Then what exactly is SEO and why is it important. Basically SEO is the practice of making your website easy to find in a search engine. It’s important because search engines are one of the main ways people find you. Even if you have physical advertising directing people to your web site, Utah SEO is essential to business survival. (more…)