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Things to Slow Down Your SEO Progress

On May 9, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

If you have been an internet marketing specialist for some time now you will know that there is a great deal of constant learning required to get the job done right. You have to be willing to learn almost every day because the search game is consistently changing. Reading daily industry sources and blogs will [...]

If you have been an internet marketing specialist for some time now you will know that there is a great deal of constant learning required to get the job done right. You have to be willing to learn almost every day because the search game is consistently changing. Reading daily industry sources and blogs will be vital for any online success.


Let’s take a look at some ways SEO efforts are cut short and slow down overall progress:

1. Lack of Knowledge:
As an internet marketer I am reading blogs almost every single day. Keep yourself up to date with all the newest methods of marketing and online exposure is important. Applying new marketing efforts online is the only way you are going to either stay in front of your competition or beat them in the search marketing game.

2. Old-fashioned Techniques:
If you are still relying on techniques done from 2005 you’re not going to last very long in the search industry. Things have changed quite a bit and they continue to change drastically year after year. The search engines have evolved and it is even more important to utilize all the newest trends and techniques to market a website in today’s business space.

3. Messing Up Step 1:
Website optimization should be the very first marketing effort any website should be doing before they venture out and start marketing their business online. This doesn’t mean just optimizing it for certain keywords. This means optimizing it for the right keywords along with changing or tweaking any conversion metrics on the website. If your conversion metrics are not in place then what do you think is going to happen to your visitors when they land on your website? Not much.

As an internet marketer you have to always be sharpening your skills when it comes to SEO. Search engine marketing requires varying up the approach and customizing things for every client. Keeping your skills sharp and up to date is a must to make the serious marketing impacts that many people are looking for. As soon as you step back and feel like you don’t have to learn anything anymore is when things start to slow down and really become sour on your online visibility. Your websites and your client’s website will begin to feel the effects of this slow down so it is important to keep your knowledge tight and your techniques even tighter.

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Website Performance: What To Know and What You Can Do

On January 6, 2010, In SEO, Web Design Tips, by Christian Heilmann

  

Website performance is a hugely important topic, so much so that the big companies of the Web are obsessed with it. For the Googles, Yahoos, Amazons and eBays, slow websites mean fewer users and less happy users and thus lost revenue and reputation. In your case, annoying a few users wouldn’t be much of a problem, but if millions of people are using your product, you’d better be snappy in delivering it. For years, Hollywood movies showed us how fast the Internet was: time to make that a reality.

Screenshot

Even if you don’t have millions of users (yet), consider one very important thing: people are consuming the Web nowadays less with fat connections and massive computers and more with mobile phones over slow wireless and 3G connections, but they still expect the same performance. Waiting for a slow website to load on a mobile phone is doubly annoying because the user is usually already in a hurry and is paying by the byte or second. It’s 1997 all over again.

Performance is an expert’s game… to an extent. You can do innumerable things to make a website perform well, and much of it requires in-depth knowledge and boring testing and research. I am sure a potential market exists for website performance optimization, much like there is one now for search engine optimization. Interestingly, Google recently announced that it will factor performance into its search rankings, so this is already happening. That said, you can do a lot of things without having to pay someone to point out the obvious.

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Website performance is a hugely important topic, so much so that the big companies of the Web are obsessed with it. For the Googles, Yahoos, Amazons and eBays, slow websites mean fewer users and less happy users and thus lost revenue and reputation.

In your case, annoying a few users wouldn’t be much of a problem, but if millions of people are using your product, you’d better be snappy in delivering it. For years, Hollywood movies showed us how fast the Internet was: time to make that a reality.

Even if you don’t have millions of users (yet), consider one very important thing: people are consuming the Web nowadays less with fat connections and massive computers and more with mobile phones over slow wireless and 3G connections, but they still expect the same performance. Waiting for a slow website to load on a mobile phone is doubly annoying because the user is usually already in a hurry and is paying by the byte or second. It’s 1997 all over again.

src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/optimization.gif" width="489" height="330" alt="Optimization in Website Performance: What To Know and What You Can Do" />

Performance is an expert’s game… to an extent. You can do innumerable things to make a website perform well, and much of it requires in-depth knowledge and boring testing and researceh. I am sure a potential market exists for website performance optimization, much like there is one now for search engine optimization. Interestingly, Google recently announced that href="http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/11/14/google-to-use-page-load-speed-as-a-search-result-ranking-factor/">it will factor performance into its search rankings, so this is already happening. That said, you can do a lot of things without having to pay someone to point out the obvious.

Know Your Performance Blockers

Performance can be measured in various ways. One way is technical: seeing how fast a page loads and how many bytes are transferred. Another is perceived performance, which ties into usability testing. This can only be measured by testing with users and seeing how satisfied they are with the speed of your interface (e.g. do they start clicking on your JavaScript carousel before it is ready?).

The good news (and hard truth) about performance is that 80 to 90% of poor performance happens in the front end. Once the browser gets the HTML, the server is done and the back-end developer can do nothing more. The browser then starts doing things to our HTML, and we are at its mercy. This means that to achieve peak performance, we have to optimize our JavaScript, images, CSS and HTML, as well as the back end.

So here are the things that slow down your page the most.

External Resources (Images, Scripts, Style Sheets)

Every time you load something from another server, the following happens:

  1. The browser opens up the Internet’s address book and looks up the number associated with the name of the server that’s holding the things you want (i.e. its href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System">DNS entry).
  2. It then negotiates a delivery.
  3. It receives the delivery (waiting for all the bytes to come in).
  4. It tries to understand what was sent through and displays it.

Every request is costly and slows down the loading of the page. This is also caused by browsers loading things in chunks (usually four at a time) rather than all at the same time. This is akin to ordering a product from a website, choosing the cheapest delivery option and not being at home between 9:00 am and 5:00 pm. If you include several JavaScript libraries because you like a certain widget in each, then you’ll double, triple or even quadruple the time that your page takes to load and display.

Scripts

JavaScript makes our websites awesome and fun to use, but it can also make for an annoying experience.

The first thing to know about scripts that you include in a document is that they are not HTML or CSS; the browser has to call in an expert to do something with them. Here is what happens:

  1. Whenever the browser encounters a <script> block in the document, it calls up the JavaScript engine, sits back and has a coffee.
  2. The script engine then looks at the content in the script block (which may have been delivered earlier), sighs, complains about the poor code, scratches its head and then does what the script tells it to do.
  3. Once the script engine is done, it reports back to the browser, which puts down its coffee, says good-bye to the script engine and looks at the rest of the document (which might have been changed, because the script may have altered the HTML).

The moral of the story is to use as few script blocks as possible and to put them as far down the document as possible. You could also use clever and lazy JavaScript, but more on that later.

Images

Here is where things get interesting. Optimizing images has always been the bane of every visual designer. We build our beautiful images in Illustrator, Photoshop or Fireworks and then have to save them as JPG, GIF or PNG, which changes the colors and deteriorates the quality; and if we use PNG, then IE6 arrives as the party-pooper, not letting us take advantage of PNG’s cool features.

Optimizing your images is absolutely necessary because most of the time they are the biggest files on page. I’ve seen people jump through hoops to cut their JavaScript down from 50 KB to 12 KB and then happily use a 300 KB logo or “hero shot” in the same document. Performance needs you!

Finding the right balance between visual loss and file size can be daunting, but be grateful for the Web preview tool, because we didn’t always have it. I recall using Photoshop 4 and then Photoshop with the Ulead SmartSaver, for example.

The interesting thing about images, though, is that after you have optimized them you can still save many more bytes by stripping unnecessary data from the files and running the files through tools that further compress the images but are non-lossy. The bad news is that many of them are out there, and you’ll need different ones for different image formats. The good news is that tools exist that do all that work for you, and we will come back to this later. For more advanced optimizaition techniques feel free to take a closer look at the Smashing Magazine’s articles href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/01/clever-jpeg-optimization-techniques/">Clever JPEG Optimization Techniques, href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/25/png-optimization-guide-more-clever-techniques/">PNG Optimization Guide and href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/15/clever-png-optimization-techniques/">Clever PNG Optimization Techniques.

Simple Tools You Can Use Now To Improve Performance

All of those companies that obsess about page performance offer tools that allow you to check your own website automatically and make it easy to work around problems.

Test Your Performance

The first thing to do is find out how your website can be optimized. Here are three great tools (among others that crop up all the time) to use and combine.

Yahoo’s YSlow

href="http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/">YSlow is a Firebug add-on from Yahoo that allows you to automatically check your website for performance issues. The results are ranked like American school grades, with A being the best and F being the worst. The grades are cross-linked to href="http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/">best practice documentation on the Yahoo performance pages. You can test several settings: “classic YSlow,” which is targeted to Yahoo-sized websites, “YSlow 2″ and “small site or blog.” Results are listed clearly and let you click through to learn.

class="showcase"> href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/codepo8/4198617150/sizes/o/"> src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/image1-new.jpg" width="550" height="600" alt="Image1-new in Website Performance: What To Know and What You Can Do" />

In the components view, YSlow lists all of the issues it has found on your website and how serious they are:

class="showcase"> href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/codepo8/4197863687/sizes/o/"> src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/image2new.jpg" width="550" height="600" alt="Image2new in Website Performance: What To Know and What You Can Do" />

The statistics view in YSlow gives you all information in pie charts:

class="showcase"> href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/codepo8/4198630210/sizes/o/"> src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/image3.gif" width="474" height="307" alt="Image3 in Website Performance: What To Know and What You Can Do" />

The tools section in YSlow offers a lot of goodies:

  • href="http://www.jslint.com/">JSLint /> Checks the quality and security of your JavaScripts by running them through JSLint.
  • All JS /> Shows all JavaScript code in a document.
  • All JS Beautified /> Shows all JavaScript code in a document in an easy-to-read format
  • All JS Minified /> Shows all JavaScript code in a document in a minified format (i.e. no comments or white space)
  • All CSS /> Show all CSS code in a document
  • All Smush.it /> Automatically compresses all of your images (more on this later).
  • Printable View /> Creates a printable document of all of YSlow’s results (great for showing to a client after you’ve optimized the page!)
class="showcase"> href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/codepo8/4197872303/sizes/o/"> src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/image4.gif" width="500" height="316" alt="Image4 in Website Performance: What To Know and What You Can Do" />

Google’s Page Speed

Like YSlow, href="http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/">Page Speed by Google is also an add-on for Firebug. Its main difference is that it does a lot of the optimization for you and provides the modified code and images immediately.

class="showcase"> href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/codepo8/4198657574/sizes/o/"> src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/4198657574_5865ccbda5.jpg" alt="4198657574 5865ccbda5 in Website Performance: What To Know and What You Can Do" />

Page Speed’s other extra is that it monitors the overall activity of your page, allowing you to see when a document loads other resources after it has been loaded and to see what happens when a user rolls over elements or opens tabs and menus that load content via AJAX.

class="showcase"> href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/codepo8/4198689498/sizes/o/"> src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/4198689498_2e2acd4ccf.jpg" alt="4198689498 2e2acd4ccf in Website Performance: What To Know and What You Can Do" />

Be careful with this feature, though: it hammers your browser quite hard.

AOL’s WebPageTest

Rather late to the game, href="http://www.webpagetest.org/">AOL’s WebPageTest is an application with some very neat features. (It is also available as a desktop application, in case you want to check Intranets or websites that require authentication.)

WebPageTest allows you to run tests using either IE8 or IE7 from a server in the US or the UK, and it allows you to set all kinds of parameters, such as speed and what to check for:

class="showcase"> href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/codepo8/4198701698/sizes/o/"> src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/4198701698_900086ced1.jpg" alt="4198701698 900086ced1 in Website Performance: What To Know and What You Can Do" />

Once you have defined your parameters and the testing is completed, you will get in-depth advice on what you can do to optimize. You’ll get:

  • A summary,
  • Detailed results,
  • A performance review,
  • An optimization report,
  • The content breakdown,
  • The domain breakdown,
  • A screenshot.
class="showcase"> href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/codepo8/4198726620/sizes/l/"> src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/4198726620_9a32df8ff4.jpg" alt="4198726620 9a32df8ff4 in Website Performance: What To Know and What You Can Do" />

One very cool feature of WebPageTest is the visual recording you get of how long it takes for page elements to show up on screen for users. The following screenshot compares the results of this blog, Ajaxian and Nettuts+:

class="showcase"> href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/codepo8/4198697096/sizes/o/"> src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/4198697096_7eff3706bf.jpg" alt="4198697096 7eff3706bf in Website Performance: What To Know and What You Can Do" />

You can even create a video of the rendering, which is another very cool thing to show clients.

Once you get the test results, it is time to fix any problems.

Use Image Sprites

href="http://www.alistapart.com/articles/sprites/">Image Sprites were first discussed in an article published by Dave Shea and based on the work of href="http://wellstyled.com/css-nopreload-rollovers.html">Petr Stanicek. They have been covered href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/04/27/the-mystery-of-css-sprites-techniques-tools-and-tutorials/">extensively here before, but understanding their full benefit is important before you start using them:

  • All of your images will be available as soon as the main image has loaded (no flickering on roll-overs or other annoyances).
  • One HTTP request is made, instead of dozens (or hundreds, in some cases).
  • Images have a much higher chance of staying cached on the user’s machine because they are contained in a single file.

Shea’s article points out a lot of cool resources for creating CSS Sprites but misses one that was released not long ago. href="http://spriteme.org/">Sprite Me was produced by Google (under the supervision of Steve Souders) and allows you to create Sprites automatically from any website, even via a bookmarklet. It analyzes the images on a page and offers you various options before generating the Sprite and CSS for you.

Here’s href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNfRL-TwzZY#t=27m21s">a video of Steve showing Sprite Me in action:

href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNfRL-TwzZY#t=27m21s"> src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/4196848773_9d6e3b8da5.jpg" alt="4196848773 9d6e3b8da5 in Website Performance: What To Know and What You Can Do" />

Optimize Your Images

You know now that Page Speed can automatically optimize your images. Another way to do this is with Yahoo’s Smush It, which is a set of image optimization tools that analyze your images, create the smallest possible versions and sends you a ZIP file of them all.

You can use href="http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/">Smush.it directly in the browser or automatically from YSlow. The website tells you how many bytes you can save by optimizing your images. This is yet another cool thing to show potential clients when pitching for a job.

class="showcase"> href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/codepo8/4197963651/sizes/o/"> src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/4197963651_f99567a8f0.jpg" alt="4197963651 F99567a8f0 in Website Performance: What To Know and What You Can Do" />

class="showcase"> href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/codepo8/4197968099/sizes/o/"> src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/4197968099_720bc44915.jpg" alt="4197968099 720bc44915 in Website Performance: What To Know and What You Can Do" />

Collate Scripts and Load Scripts on Demand

As noted, try not to spread your <script> nodes all over the document, because the browser stops whenever it encounters one. Instead, insert them as far down in the document as possible.

You could even collate your scripts automatically in one single include using back-end scripts. Edward Eliot href="http://www.ejeliot.com/blog/72">wrote one of these in PHP a while ago. It lets you create a single JavaScript include for all of your scripts and one for your CSS files, and it even versions them for you.

JavaScript can be added dynamically to the page after the page has loaded. This technique is called “lazy loading,” and several tools are available to do it. Jan Jarfalk has one to href="http://www.unwrongest.com/projects/lazy/">lazy load jQuery plug-ins.

Some JavaScript libraries let you import only what you really need, instead of bringing in the whole singing-and-dancing library. YUI, for example, has a href="http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/3/configurator/">configurator that allows you to pick and choose what you need from the library and either gives you a single URL where you can get the different scripts or creates a JavaScript that loads them on demand:

class="showcase"> href="http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/3/configurator/"> src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/4196935915_39584ab3e9.jpg" alt="4196935915 39584ab3e9 in Website Performance: What To Know and What You Can Do" />

Notice that a tab tells you what the overall size of the library will be.

The main trick in lazy loading is to dynamically create script nodes with JavaScript after the page has loaded and only when they are needed. I href="http://24ways.org/2007/keeping-javascript-dependencies-at-bay">wrote about that two years ago on 24ways, and it has been a best practice for displaying badges and widgets for a long time now.

Use Network Distributed Hosting

If you use a library or CSS provided by a library, make sure to use the hosted versions of the files. In the case of YUI, this is done for you if you use the configurator. And you can pick from Yahoo or Google’s network.

For other libraries, there is a href="http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/">Google code repository of AJAX libraries. This is useful for a few reasons:

  • Visitors to your website will get the JavaScript and CSS from the server that is as geographically close to them as possible and won’t have to wait for your server to send the information from around the globe.
  • There is a high probability that these servers are faster than yours.
  • Visitors who have visited other websites that use the same includes will already have them on their computers and won’t need to load them again.
  • You save on bandwidth and can easily upgrade the library by changing the version number of the include.

While you probably wouldn’t be able to afford distributed hosting for your own files, href="http://www.coralcdn.org/">Coral makes an interesting offer to distribute your data onto a network of servers for an affordable $50 a month.

Watch Some Videos

If you want to see how some of this work, check out the following videos, especially Nicole Sullivan’s, which shows some very cool CSS tricks:

  • href="http://developer.yahoo.net/blogs/theater/archives/2009/04/yslow_update_screencast.html">Using YSLow 2.0
  • href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-9pCfyYPdQ">Using Google Page Speed
  • href="http://yuiblog.com/blog/2008/12/23/video-sullivan/">Nicole Sullivan tells you not to blame the rounded corners but to design for fast websites
  • href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNfRL-TwzZY#t=27m21s">Steve Souders showing Sprite Me
  • href="http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2008/12/23/video-crockford-performance/">Douglas Crockford on AJAX performance.

Follow The Leaders

To learn more about website performance, here are some resources and people to follow. (Be warned: some of the content is technically tough.)

  • href="http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/">The Yahoo Developer Network Performance Section /> Home of YSLow and probably the first official performance research website.
  • href="http://www.perfplanet.com/">Performance Planet /> A collation of all performance blogs and posts in one RSS feed.
  • href="http://www.stevesouders.com/">Steve Souders ( href="http://www.twitter.com/souders">@souders) /> Ex-maintainer of the performance section of Yahoo, now at Google. Author of the biggest performance books. And organizer of the Velocity conference.
  • href="http://stubbornella.org/content/">Nicole Sullivan ( href="http://www.twitter.com/stubbornella">@stubbornella) /> Ex-team member of the performance group at Yahoo and co-creator of Smush.it. Also CSS performance goddess with great tips for designers. Currently working on making Facebook perform better.
  • href="http://phpied.com/">Stoyan Stefanov ( href="http://www.twitter.com/stoyanstefanov">@stoyanstefanov) /> Coder of Smush.it and member of the performance team at Yahoo. Created his own href="http://www.phpied.com/performance-advent-calendar-2009/">advent calendar of performance tips this year, and runs Performance Planet, as mentioned above.
  • href="http://website-performance.org/">Ed Eliot and Stuart Colville /> Builders of the href="http://spritegen.website-performance.org/">CSS Sprite Generator.
  • href="http://www.jakearchibald.com/">Jake Archibald ( href="http://www.twitter.com/jaffathecake">@jaffathecake) /> Lead developer of the BBC’s Glow library. Delivered a href="http://www.jakearchibald.com/jsperformance/">great talk on performance at this year’s Full Frontal conference.
  • href="http://bluesmoon.info/">Phillip Tellis ( href="http://twitter.com/bluesmoon">@bluesmoon) /> Performance junkie at Yahoo.
  • And me, their fanboy and person asking for features: href="http://wait-till-i.com/">Chris Heilmann ( href="http://www.twitter.com/codepo8">@codepo8).

(al)

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© Christian Heilmann for href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com">Smashing Magazine, 2010. | href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/06/page-performance-what-to-know-and-what-you-can-do/">Permalink | href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/06/page-performance-what-to-know-and-what-you-can-do/#comments">90 comments | title="Bookmark in del.icio.us" href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/06/page-performance-what-to-know-and-what-you-can-do/&title=Website%20Performance:%20What%20To%20Know%20and%20What%20You%20Can%20Do">Add to del.icio.us | title="Bookmark in Digg" href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/06/page-performance-what-to-know-and-what-you-can-do/">Digg this | title="Stumble on StumbleUpon" href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/06/page-performance-what-to-know-and-what-you-can-do/">Stumble on StumbleUpon! | title="Tweet us!" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=@tweetmeme%20@smashingmag%20Reading%20'Website%20Performance:%20What%20To%20Know%20and%20What%20You%20Can%20Do'%20http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/06/page-performance-what-to-know-and-what-you-can-do/">Tweet it! | title="Bookmark in Reddit" href="http://reddit.com/submit?url=http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/06/page-performance-what-to-know-and-what-you-can-do/">Submit to Reddit | href="http://forum.smashingmagazine.com/">Forum Smashing Magazine
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SEO Followed By Website Optimization – Beat Your Competition

On October 18, 2009, In SEO, by Ravi

As search marketers, most SEO professionals are focused on the optimization aspects (both on page and off page) that will help a site achieve top rankings in the SERPs of the major search engines. The complexity of achieving top rankings increases by the day with the algorithms focusing more and more on factors that cannot [...]

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As search marketers, most SEO professionals are focused on the optimization aspects (both on page and off page) that will help a site achieve top rankings in the SERPs of the major search engines. The complexity of achieving top rankings increases by the day with the algorithms focusing more and more on factors that cannot be manipulated by a site owner/webmaster.

In this scenario, it is imperative that a site owner with a fairly new site maximizes her chances of retaining as many visitors to her site as possible by giving them an opportunity to communicate with her site through a comment on her blog, leaving feedback or collecting the visitor’s email address.

This will allow her to sell products/services on the backend through email marketing. This is where website optimization techniques coupled with solid SEO strategy can pay huge dividends in the long run.

Website optimization basically deals with improving a visitor’s experience on your website and increasing the conversion of casual visitors into customers.

Internet marketers have long realised the power of squeeze pages through which they collect email addresses and then sell products/services through email marketing repeatedly. They also know the concept of “The money is in the list” as each email subscriber is a very valuable proposition.

Many a time, sites ranking well on the SERPs can be attributed to the diligent efforts of a search engine optimisation professional. But rankings are not an end in themselves. They are just the means to the end. Better visibility helps a site gain more visitors. But the crucial aspect lies in converting the visitors into customers. Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is an important aspect of SEO that is hogging the limelight in the present.

It would be worth the effort for SEO professionals to atleast propose to site owners the effectiveness of retaining visitors and/or upsell/downsell products and services once the site has attained good visibility on the SERPs. Let us consider a few techniques that can be employed in the light of what is being discussed.

1) Undiluted Focus:
If you are selling a product or service, you can be in a situation where you are selling many distinct products or services. This will result in specific money pages (inner pages) which highlight the particular product or service in question.

The page that describes the benefits of the product or service should focus completely on just that and should not diverge to talk about a related product or service.

Remember that prospective buyers will buy benefits and not features of a product or service. So it is important to highlight the benefits clearly on the money page.

2) Strident Call To Action:
With the singular focus described above, the visitor is subjected to a single call to action that specifically sells that particular product or service described.

As a site owner, it is your responsibility to ensure that the visitor is asked to take action. If you sell blue widgets, have a big bold button that says Buy this blue widget now. If there is no clear call to action, there is a good chance that visitors will not take action.

3) In the case of visitor trying to move out of the sales funnel:
In the above example where you sell blue widgets on your site, there are many reasons why a visitor is unable to buy a product. The price point can be a major factor as the visitor feels it is too expensive. You cannot predict this until you find out.

This is where the application of a popular internet marketing technique can help you gain a deep insight into the makeup of a typical customer in your niche. If the visitor clicks the Back button or tries to close the tab or tries to type in a new web address in the URL box, then she is definitely not interested in buying your blue widget.

If you use a script that can sense this action, it can popup a special one time offer for the same blue widget at a discounted price. As a business owner, you are cutting your profit by a margin that you can afford. This causes the visitor to rethink and induces her to buy the product at a discounted rate. You are gaining a sale where there was none in the first place.

An increased incidence of the one time offer sales indicates that your produt price is more expensive for most visitors. You have to bite the bullet and reduce the price to attract more sales.

4) Information seekers:
Not all visitors are in a buying frame of mind when they visit your site. There are many seeking information on the blue widget that you sell. For users in reasearch mode, you must have a Resources page on your site which explains all the features of your product.

You can have a review of your product and your competitor’s product and show the superior/useful features your product offers compared to that of your competitor. You can also compare the pricing models. If you have a truly superior product in your niche, then you can certainly justify its higher sale price.

5) Optimizing your site for buyers keywords:
I would like to insert here the idea of optimizing your site for buyers keywords. During keyword research, you are prone to come across keyword phrases that specifically are commercially action oriented in intent. Some examples in our case can be “buy blue widget” or “blue widget software download” (without the quotes).

These clearly show the number of searchers who have done their research and review of the product you sell and are ready to buy. It is ideal to have pages on your site optimized for such buyers.

6) Collecting visitor email address:
You can also incentivize your visitor to submit her name and email address by offering an ebook download that explains the nuances of what to look for when buying a blue widget. For information seekers who have no idea of your niche and/or product, this is a goldmine of information. They would certainly subscribe to your mailing list to get their hands on this great resource.

Now that you have their email address (you have to make it double opt-in subscription process), you have obtained customers for a lifetime (unless they decide to unsubscribe) to whom you can sell products/services in the backend. These offers can be tailor made for just your email subscribers and should not appear on your main website.

7) Collecting Feedback:
At every possible stage of the sales cycle, encourage your visitors to submit their feedback either through a feedback form on the site or through a blog comment if you have an active blog on your site.

The feedback can be about the quality of your product or service offered, shipping and handling concerns etc. It would be ideal to have a 6 to 12 hour turnaround time to respond to queries/complaints.

Feedback is valuable to a business owner to streamline her sales funnel and address issues that she may not have imagined existed in the first place.

8. Use of Website Optimizer:
I have described at length the process of using Google’s Website Optimizer. You can use this as a standalone tool or from within your Adwords account.

Please note that when you sign up for a Website Optimizer account, Google will automatically setup an Analytics account (if you already do not have one) for use with your experiments to collect your experimental data.

Laxity due to Free Traffic:
Though this is not part of the methods actually used to improve conversion rate on a site, many a time, even owners of websites well entrenched at the top of the Google SERPs can be lax as they are getting free traffic from the major search engines.

If a site owner is driving traffic to her site using PPC, she feels the pinch as she is paying for each visitor. This is also the case with CPA (Cost per acquisition) marketing where marketers pay for each visitor to visit their landing page on which they make an offer in the form of a signup to a service for example. They get paid only if the visitor signs up.

It is common for such marketers to employ these techniques mentioned above to gain the maximum ROI for the $ paid to get their visitors into their site.

It is important to realise the value of each visitor to your website. As a website owner, you have to endevour to improve the visitor experience in every possible way and get them to communicate to you their delightful and/or woeful experiences on your site. This will ensure the success of your online business and put you head and shoulders ahead of your competition.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search marketing consultancy that offers both organic search and ppc marketing to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

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Writing Press Releases for Search Engine Optimization

On May 5, 2008, In Press Release Syndication, SEO, by Small Business SEO

Press releases have some unique characteristics that can contribute to an increase in search engine positioning for your site. They are similar in many ways to pages that use search engine copywriting techniques. They have a narrow focus, include copy that deals with one specific topic, incorporate the use of key phrases and use keyword-rich [...]

Press releases have some unique characteristics that can contribute to an increase in search engine positioning for your site. They are similar in many ways to pages that use search engine copywriting techniques. They have a narrow focus, include copy that deals with one specific topic, incorporate the use of key phrases and use keyword-rich headlines.
Usually, people either do not like or do not have the time to read poorly written content. Therefore, when you are writing an optimised press release, it is essential that you write with concise language, correct grammar and credibility. Besides increasing readership, you will make the search engines very happy, which is exactly what you are looking for! (more…)

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