It’s alright being able to pull traffic to your site which, as SEO Consultants we are all great at (obviously!), but that isn’t the whole story of a successful SEO campaign.

You can pull in hundreds of visitors to your site but it doesn’t mean that many (if any) actually get in touch or pick up the phone and make an enquiry or sale. This is where conversion strategies come in.

The idea is that you make (often) subtle changes to your site to make sure that you give everything the potential client needs to be able to make an enquiry and also instil trust in the buyer to increase the chances of them actually getting in touch or placing an order.

I wanted to run through a few tips to help you website convert better and ensure that people know where and how to get the information that you need.

Make sure your contact details are prominent and easily available.

Common practice would be to have your telephone number within the header across your whole site and full contact details within the footer of the site so this information is accessible on every page. Having full address details also instils trust, knowing that if anything goes wrong with their order they have a physical address to write to, instilling trust in the potential customer.

Make sure your menu is user friendly.

There is nothing worse than having a website that is difficult to navigate and having a good main menu system is key to helping the user find exactly what they are after. Link to the most important pages of your site with this menu, ordering them in order of the priority you’d give each pages when reading left to right. Always make sure it’s easy to get to your home page and contact/order page.

Link to pages within your text.

This is a typical SEO technique that we employ but also works really well as a conversion strategy, particularly for longer pages. Linking to pages within your content with the right anchor text is likely to help visitors navigate deeper into your site, stick around longer and can help entice them to pages you want them to see such as offer pages or similar sales pages.

Include a photo of yourself or someone that is happy to be a ‘face’ for your business.

Again, this comes down to trust. If someone is willing to put their face on their website it helps visitors feel that the website is genuine and that someone is personally identifiable and on hand to deal with any enquiries or problems.

From a user’s point of view, a site that doesn’t have a photo or similar device to help make the site a more ‘personal’ experience could be potentially ‘anybody’ and I’m sure you’ve heard the horror stories over the last few years with the ticket sales websites.

Include accepted payment methods on every page.

If a user knows exactly how they can pay from the outset they are more inclined to place an order, knowing that they won’t get to the end of the checkout process and find out that their card isn’t accepted and are more likely to process their order. If you process payments via your website you should also have a secure ‘padlock’ logo, which comes from a valid SSL certificate, to show users that their payment details will be encrypted during their transaction.

A good number of these points come down to trust. When the internet is a place where trust is such an issue (I’m sure you’ve heard some of the horror stories involving ticket sales websites) you need to do everything you can to help instil the trust back in the user and the authenticity of your website and encourage potential customers to get in touch or place an order online for the online marketing campaign to be a real success.

Before Google emerged, Yahoo was once the world’s leading search engine, it’s founding members even discussed a merger with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. It even managed to deflect a massive $44bn takeover attempt by Microsoft.

Yahoo has put itself up for sale, after its chief executive, Carol Bartz was dismissed.

Yahoo is reported to have hired a team of headhunters to find suitable replacements to take over the position of Chief Executive, having temporarily appointed the deputy, Tim Morse. The mood is said to be unsettled as Yahoo enters a serious challenge to it’s survival.

Yahoo is severely overshadowed by two giants already in the form of Google and Facebook, who are absorbing the advertising revenue that yahoo used to rely on. This doesn’t look set to improve any time soon as many companies are slashing their advertising budget due to the economic client. In fact, revenues fell under Carol Bartz although profits did increase.

The Yahoo peak was observed between 2004 and 2006. We can tell much from this as Facebook was founded in 2004 and Google only became a public company in 2004. Once these two competitors became established, Yahoo went into steady decline.

Despite all the developments and competition, Yahoo still reaches a massive audience. Not only with the mail, news, chat and other features, it still represents a sizeable portion of searches. Yes, it is behind only Google, and well behind Google at that, but these searches should not be discounted.

In terms of SEO, we will wait with eager anticipation to see if this search engine can manage to win the battle and reverse the path of decline. This is nearly an impossible task to achieve as Rupert Murdoch found when MySpace was overhauled by Facebook.

Adding to a post from earlier this year on 404 Error Pages For Usability and SEO, which looks at how to create a 404 page that is both user friendly and search engine friendly, I thought I’d look at the responses the server gives when viewing the 404 page.

Many 404 pages give a ’200 Found’ response, which is the same response that any other page that should be indexed gives. This isn’t quite what we’re after with the 404 page. First of all, it probably shouldn’t be indexed.

Some sites are set up so that no matter which non-existent page you visit the 404 page is displayed on the URL visited. For example, http://www.domain.co.uk/non-existent-page.html, http://www.domain.co.uk/not-a-page.html and http://www.domain.co.uk/i-dont-exist-either.html all display the exact same 404 page at any of the URLs visited, without redirecting.

If this page also returns a ’200 Found’ header response then each of these pages could potentially be indexed and could also cause issues with the search engines finding an infinite amount of duplicate content on your site.

So, what’s the alternative? Make sure that your 404 page actually returns a ’404 Not Found’ header response. If your site is running on a PHP server simply add the following to the very top of your 404 page source code, before any output is sent.

<?php
header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
?>


For example;

<?php
header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
?>
<html>
<head>
<title>Title Tag</title>
<meta name="descript...


Remember, if you are not using the .php file extension, you will need to edit your .htaccess file to allow it to parse PHP within your HTML files, which I’ll go through in another post.

You can find more information on the technicalities at http://php.net/manual/en/function.header.php

Finally, you can check your page header response at http://web-sniffer.net/, http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers or download the Live HTTP Headers Firefox plugin.

Since my colleagues have written some things about Google+ since its release, I would like to continue the theme and mention something that I had read in the last couple of days.

Despite Google’s new feature Google+ entering the realm of social networking at the end of June, it quickly became widely viewed as the ‘New Facebook’. I thought I would look at some of the acclaimed differences and the response made by Facebook, which does still have lead over this seemingly legitimate competitor.

(Circles) – This improved privacy and sharing control feature has now been mimicked by Facebook. You can  see these new option in a drop down menu when editing your profile.

(Hangouts) – An online chat feature with live video chat options. Facebook has recently announced a partnership with Skype in an effort to offer video chat.

(Huddle) – A feature allowing you to text groups or individuals in Google+ mobile. When you receive a message, Google+ will send a push notification to your phone. Facebook has recently purchased a mobile group messaging service which indicates that they intend to release a similar feature themselves in the near future.

In terms of SEO, we know that Facebook shares, likes and Twitter tweets from high authority twitter accounts are integrated into most websites now. We also know that the Google +1 equivalent is a positive ranking factor. These social signals are easier for Google to measure because they own it.

Facebook still has the lead because certain features do not have a Google+ equivalent yet such as ‘Pages’. Initially Google+ did not have any game feature, recently however, one has been added. I feel sure that Google+ is not far behind and will catch up soon. What we can learn from these comparisons though, is that a new social networking product needs to offer something new or better than a long standing competitor. The competitor then needs to be able to expand, match or even better in response to this to maintain its share in the market.

With Social Media playing such a large part in online marketing, it would be sensible to keep up to speed with these developments and what products are becoming available to us.

Hence the reason I have jumped on the bandwagon and written my own blog post on Google+. My G+ profile still has a long way to go to catch up with Facebook, but it exists ready nevertheless.

Working in SEO, my aim is to establish a long term relationship with a client and help the business to develop. It is not just about performance of keywords but is based on research, keeping up with moving trends in the industry and establishing the business well within the given market. What happens if we notice something that needs attention? Examples of this could be, the website needs updating, new keywords have been identified that could potentially drive more traffic to the site.

Although it is not necessary on a regular basis, there are times when we need to be able to plant the seed of an idea to a client. In this sense we need to be able to ‘sell’ this idea to them. Not all consultants in SEO with have the attributes of an experienced sales professional but it is very useful to know the process ready for those occasions when an idea presents itself. We can then make the up-sale without having to refer it to another person. This gives the client continuity and inspires their confidence in you when they see that you are actually working to get their business to succeed.

Tha AIDA process is the original training acronym to remember from the times when selling a product first became recognised as a profession.

A – Attention

I – Interest

D – Desire

A – Action

In terms of the client we are trying to sell to, we simply need to sound enthusiastic and confident in the idea we are presenting. To pique their interest, we need to provide a metric for measuring potential gains and what could potentially be achieved. This of course, needs to reflect the desires of the client which, as always, will be for the business to grow and make more money.

The process that we need to follow would reflect something similar to the following

Prepare – If we want to consider selling a new keyword, we need to do the research to back it up. We need search volumes, trends and any other metric that demonstrates it will bring traffic.

Introduce – We need to speak with or meet with the client to introduce the idea to them approaching them in a way to instil confidence.

Question – Identify the needs by asking when and how. This then allows us to present our idea as the solution

Present – This is our opportunity to explain and demonstrate the idea with the research we have done

Objections – We also need to have done some preparation for this and try to pre-empt any questions or concerns the client might have.

Close – We need to close in a professional, confident and assumptive manner. Phrases such as ‘Shall I go ahead with that for you?’ ‘Please email back to confirm you would like to go ahead with this’. Never use things like ‘You can always cancel if you change your mind’.

Follow-up – Paperwork or electronic confirmation of work being undertaken, assigned and completed. It is always nice to keep the client informed of the process. It also increases the integrity of the company you represent if you follow-up courteously. If there are any problems, they can then be resolved as soon as they arise rather than further down the pipe-line.