Having landing problems with your website? Try these 11 Power tips on Landing Page Optimization

Look at the picture on the left. Is this what happens to your visitors, when they land-up on your page from a Search Engine or your PPC ad? Landing page of your website is where you persuade visitors to perform a pre-defined action on your website. You may also take it as persuasive on-page copywriting, to make a visitor do what you want him to do. I find it ironical to see people wasting their landing page space by offering the visitors ample reasons to quit, rather than making them perform the ultimate action on your website. You should always look to concentrate to make every piece of your Real Estate count, while enabling your site to deliver optimum ROI. Concentrate on writing, pushing and benefit rich headlines which clearly state the visitor - ‘What’s in it for me?’ Consider the following power tips for landing page optimization, they can increase the conversion rate of your website many folds.

1. Eliminate irrelevant navigations, sign-in boxes, and other reasons for the visitor to quit from your landing page.
2. Add your best testimonial or a testimonial from your most renowned client. Don’t forget to match the testimonial to the benefits. If your client allow, you can increase the impact of the testimonial by featuring a small, nicely taken picture of him/her along with the testimonial, this will make the testimonial look more natural and trustworthy
3. Consider multiple column format to increase the flexibility to add more features without distracting the visitors from the main call to action.
4. Use window pop-ups to provide important information like ‘privacy policy’, ’satisfaction guaranteed’ etc to the client on the same screen without making them leave the landing page.
5. When it comes to writing the copy of the page, the content should never sound like - “what I/we give you”, but it should be say more about “what you get?”.
6. Use graphics intelligently to add as many call to actions as you can in different formats without showing your ‘desperateness to sell’ to your visitor.
7. Don’t give your visitors too much options. Only feature your best two or three offers on the landing page so that you don’t end up confusing them. To accomplish this, you need to perfectly understand your target segment (about what they exactly want?).
8. If your target is to make a client fill up a form, you’d be surprised to see how much, adding a prominent link - ‘we value your privacy’ can increase the conversion rate of your website.
9. If you are offering a guarantee, make it as prominent as you can with the help of relevant text and graphics.
10. In the offer, tell people precisely, how much they save in dollars (and not in percentage).
11. Internet Marketing is mostly about impulse buying. So you should look to convert the visitor’s interest that brought him to the landing page into an impulse and then to convert that impulse instantly into the desired action.

Thumb rule to maximize your conversion rate is to test, test & test (A/B testing precisely). I highly recommend you to refer to this Google guide which will actually help you to test your landing page and also increase your ad’s CTR at the same time. Wishing your website visitors, a very safe landing next time!

Snippet on Domain Canonicalization

Canonicalization - www vs. non-www, redirects, duplicate urls, 302 “hijacking,” etc.

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, many people would consider the below urls as
same:

* www.welcome.com
* welcome.com/
* www.welcome.com/index.html
* welcome.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

Q: So how do I make sure that Google picks the url that I want?
A: One thing that helps is to pick the url that you want and use that url consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to http://welcome.com/ and the other half go to http://www.welcome.com/ . Instead, pick the url you prefer and always use that format for your internal links.

Q: Is there anything else I can do?
A: Yes. Suppose you want your default url to be http://www.welcome.com/ . You can make your webserver so that if someone requests http://welcome.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.welcome.com/ . That helps Google know which url you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect can be an especially good idea if your site changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.).

Q: If I want to get rid of domain.com but keep www.domain.com, should I use the url removal tool to remove domain.com?
A: No, definitely don’t do this. If you remove one of the www vs. non-www hostnames, it can end up removing your whole domain for six months. Definitely don’t do this. If you did use
the url removal tool to remove your entire domain when you actually only wanted to remove the www or non-www version of your domain, do a reinclusion request and mention that you removed your entire domain by accident using the url removal tool and that you’d like it reincluded.

Q: So when you say www vs. non-www, you’re talking about a type of canonicalization. Are there other ways that urls get canonicalized?
A: Yes, there can be a lot, but most people never notice (or need to notice) them. Search engines can do things like keeping or removing trailing slashes, trying to convert urls with uppercase to lower case, or removing session IDs from bulletin board or other software (many bulletin board software packages will work fine if you omit the session ID).

Q: Let’s talk about the inurl: operator. Why does everyone think that if inurl:mydomain.com shows results that aren’t from mydomain.com, it must be hijacked?
A: Many months ago, if you saw someresult.com/search2.php?url=mydomain.com, that would sometimes have content from mydomain. That could happen when the someresult.com url was a 302 redirect to mydomain.com and we decided to show a result from someresult.com. Since then, we’ve changed our heuristics to make showing the source url for 302 redirects much more rare. We are moving to a framework for handling redirects in which we will almost always show the destination url. Yahoo handles 302 redirects by usually showing the destination url, and we are in the middle of transitioning to a similar set of heuristics. Note that Yahoo reserves the right to have exceptions on redirect handling, and Google does too.
Based on our analysis, we will show the source url for a 302 redirect less than half a percent of the time (basically, when we have strong reason to think the source url is correct).

Q: What are supplemental results?
A: Supplemental results usually only show up in the search index after the normal results. They are a way for Google to extend their search database while also preventing questionable pages from getting massive exposure.

Q: Okay, how about supplemental results. Do supplemental results cause a penalty in Google?
A: Nope.

Q: How to get out of Google Supplemental results?
A: If you were recently thrown into then the problem may be Google. You may just want to give it a wait, but also check to make sure you are not making errors like www vs non www, content management errors delivering the same content at multiple URLs (doing things like rotating product URLs), or too much duplicate content for other reasons (you may also want to check that nobody outside your domain is showing up in Google when you search for Site Saturation - site:mysite.com and you can also look for duplicate content with www.copyscape.com).

Share of Online Searches by Engine, January 2008

Managing Comments In Blogging

One of the most exciting features of blogging tools are the comments. This highly interactive feature allows users to comment upon article posts and link to your posts and comment ON and recommend them. These are known as trackbacks and pingbacks. We’ll also discuss how to moderate and manage comments and how to deal with the annoying trend in “COMMENT SPAM“, when unwanted comments are posted to your blog.

• Trackbacks
• Pingbacks
• Verifying Pingbacks and Trackbacks
• Comment Moderation
• Comment Spam

Trackbacks

In a nutshell Trackback - is a method of person A saying to person B, “This is something you may be interested in.” To do that, person A sends a TrackBack ping to person B.

A better explanation is this:
• Person A writes something on their blog.
• Person B wants to comment on Person A’s blog, but wants her own readers to see what she had to say, and be able to comment on her own blog
• Person B posts on her own blog and sends a trackback to Person A’s blog
• Person A’s blog receives the trackback, and displays it as a comment to the original post. This comment contains a link to Person B’s post

The idea here is that more people are introduced to the conversation (both Person A’s and Person B’s readers can follow links to the other’s post), and that there is a level of authenticity to the trackback comments because they originated from another weblog. Unfortunately, there is no actual verification performed on the incoming trackback, and indeed they can even be faked.

Most trackbacks send to Person A only a small portion (called an “excerpt”) of what Person B had to say. This is meant to act as a “teaser”, letting Person A (and his readers) see some of what Person B had to say, and encouraging them all to click over to Person B’s site to read the rest (and possibly comment).

Person B’s trackback to Person A’s blog generally gets posted along with all the comments. This means that Person A can edit the contents of the trackback on his own server, which means that the whole idea of “authenticity” isn’t really solved. (Note: Person A can only edit the contents of the trackback on his own site. He cannot edit the post on Person B’s site that sent the trackback.)

Pingbacks

Pingbacks were designed to solve some of the problems that people saw with trackbacks.

For example, Yvonne writes an interesting article on her Web log. Kathleen reads Yvonne’s article and comments about it, linking back to Yvonne’s original post. Using pingback, Kathleen’s software can automatically notify Yvonne that her post has been linked to, and Yvonne’s software can then include this information on her site.

There are three significant differences between pingbacks and trackbacks, though.
1. Pingbacks and trackbacks use drastically different communication technologies (XML-RPC and HTTP POST, respectively).
2. Pingbacks support auto-discovery where the software automatically finds out the links in a post, and automatically tries to pingback those URLs, while trackbacks must be done manually by entering the trackback URL that the trackback should be sent to.
3. Pingbacks do not send any content.

The best way to think about pingbacks is as remote comments:
• Person A posts something on his blog.
• Person B posts on her own blog, linking to Person A’s post. This automatically sends a pingback to Person A when both have pingback enabled blogs.
• Person A’s blog receives the pingback, then automatically goes to Person B’s post to confirm that the pingback did, in fact, originate there.

The pingback is generally displayed on Person A’s blog as simply a link to Person B’s post. In this way, all editorial control over posts rests exclusively with the individual authors (unlike the trackback excerpt, which can be edited by the trackback recipient). The automatic verification process introduces a level of authenticity, making it harder to fake a pingback.

Some feel that trackbacks are superior because readers of Person A’s blog can at least see some of what Person B has to say, and then decide if they want to read more (and therefore click over to Person B’s blog). Others feel that pingbacks are superior because they create a verifiable connection between posts.

Verifying Pingbacks and Trackbacks
Comments on blogs are often criticized as lacking authority, since anyone can post anything using any name they like: there’s no verification process to ensure that the person is who they claim to be. Trackbacks and Pingbacks both aim to provide some verification to blog commenting.

Comment Moderation
Comment Moderation is a feature which allows the website owner and author to monitor and control the comments on the different article posts, and can help in tackling comment spam. It lets you moderate comments, & you can delete unwanted comments, approve cool comments and make other decisions about the comments.

Comment Spam
Comment Spam refers to useless comments (or trackbacks, or pingbacks) to posts on a blog. These are often irrelevant to the context value of the post. They can contain one or more links to other websites or domains. Spammers use Comment Spam as a medium to get higher page rank for their domains in Google, so that they can sell those domains at a higher price sometime in future or to obtain a high ranking in search results for an existing website.
Spammers are relentless; because there can be substantial money involved, they work hard at their “job.” They even build automated tools (robots) to rapidly submit their spam to the same or multiple weblogs. Many webloggers, especially beginners, sometimes feel overwhelmed by Comment Spam.

There are solutions, though, to avoiding Comment Spam. WordPress includes many tools for combating Comment Spam. With a little up front effort, Comment Spam can be manageable, and certainly no reason to give up weblogging.

Microsites - For Leads, Traffic, Branding & Customer Retention

Microsites are focused, high impact sites useful for advertising an event, launching a campaign or in promoting a brand. Cluster of pages which are meant to function as an auxiliary supplement to a primary website. If you are looking for a new way to acquire customers, a microsite is a solution. Typically 5 to 10 web pages - your product or service is featured, along with key features, description, your offer and a call to action. In many ways, it’s an electronic version of direct mail - except there’s no throwing this promotion away!With a lead-generating microsite like these, the goal is to acquire leads the way that third-party lead providers like Dealix and Cars.com get theirs. They create generic sites that give customers the ability to get a price quote from their member dealer in the area.

Advantages of Microsites:

* Actionable results - Microsites drive action. Lead generation, information requests or orders can be generated with a microsite.
* Continuous promotion - As content is still the king on web. Once you create online content, it takes on a life of its own. Sure it needs to be updated, but now you have a promotion that can generate a continuous stream of new business.
* Customized - A chance to promote your business with your own personalized design, choice.
* Optimized for Conversion
* Customer Focused
* Normally built around - One Campaign, One Brand or One Product Line.

Disadvantage of Microsite:

Sometime not able to generate Leads for which it is built - but still it helps in bringing Traffic, Branding & Customer Retention which is also very essential.

Keys to Success

* Telling your story quickly and succinctly. Many users arrive at a web site and look at one page. If the content is not relevant, they’re gone.
* Continuous improvements - Like exercise, an ongoing effort to maintain and improve your site is the best way to succeed
* Effective promotion - If you don’t promote it, you might as well not build it. Cost-effectively promoting your microsite can drive powerful results.

Thus we can say:

“A good microsite can be your most passionate sales rep, working 24 hours a day.”

RSS Feeds - Let Us Learn the Facts

What is RSS? To begin with, it’s one of those things everyone says is easy to understand. However it is not so.

The easiest way to explain it is to make you understand a live example. We are not trying to explain everything on the subject, but this should help get you started.

Let’s sign you up for the Excess Voice RSS Feed

If you want to read the Excess Voice newsletter every two weeks you can either read it in your email inbox, or read it in your web browser.

You already know how it works when you subscribe to a newsletter via email. You sign up, hope the spam filters don’t block some or all issues, and then read the newsletter in your email program.

With RSS, instead of subscribing via email, you subscribe via a web page.

Let’s walk through the subscription process

If you have a Yahoo! account, or even if you don’t have one you can go to My Yahoo! and click the Add Content page. On the right side of the ‘Find Content’ area you will see a link, Add RSS by URL. Follow that link and, to add the Excess Voice RSS feed, simply paste this url in the field option, http://www.excessvoice.com/excessfeed.xml (Don’t click on this link. Cut and paste it.).

Now click the Add button and you’re done.

If you don’t use Yahoo!, register at Bloglines.com and follow the same process. Bloglines is a free service preferred by many users.

What happens now?

Now, whenever you go to My Yahoo! or Bloglines, you will see when the Excess Voice feed has been updated. In Yahoo it tells you how many hours or days ago the search rss feeds was updated. In Bloglines the feed name will appear in bold, and a number displayed after the name tells you how many items the feed has been updated since you last checked. (Bloglines is one such service.)

What you see…

When you check the Excess Voice feeds, you will see that with each feed, you don’t get the complete content…you don’t see the whole newsletter, the complete article or the whole review. You see the title and the first ten lines of the content. If you want to read the whole article, for example, click on the link and then it will navigate to the page on the Excess Voice site.

Online Paid Advertisements - Know the Facts before You Take the Leap

Online Paid Advertisements

Online paid advertisements are advertisements placed by online advertising networks on webmasters WebPages with permission of the webmasters, so that the viewers of the website may click on the adverts and the webmasters get paid for ads when any visitor clicks over the advertisement. This is fiscally highly profitable for the webmaster - who owns the website. There are many programs that offer this kind of novel income opportunity. The webmasters get paid for ads that have been clicked by visitors to his site.

Types of Online paid advertisements

Online paid advertisements come in different formats and shapes, starting from banner ads. Other formats include pop-up ads, pop-under ads, text ads, and news letter ads. Each online paid advertising format is unique by itself, i.e., every ad format has its special purpose. Looking to each format in detail will give a clearer picture.

Banner Ads

Banners ads, as the name implies is a banner that has ads within it. There are different types of paid banner advertising. Some of the standard formats are horizontal banner - leader board (480×60) and vertical banner - skyscraper (120×600). Other formats include half banner (234×60), button (125×125), wide skyscraper (160×600), square (250×250), large (336×280) and small rectangle (180×150). The webmaster can choose to display between image ads and text-only ads on his/her webpages. If he/she likes to display image ads, then it will cover the entire banner. But if one would like to display text-only ads, you may have from a minimum of one text ad to four or five text ads within the banner. Banner ads are also displayed in paid email advertising.

Pop-up Ads

Using Pop-up ads is a very conventional form of online paid advertising. Whenever a webpage loads, a pop-up also emerges. Before a visitor can see the webpage he has to view the pop-up -provided by the online advertising network. The online paid advertising networks such as Adsense, and Adbrite -, provide small HTML codes that can be into host webpages.

Pop-under Ads

Pop-under ads are ads that are displayed when an user visits a website, but unlike pop-ups these ads tend to stay minimized so that the visitor does not get annoyed. On closing the active window, then pop-under ads will be displayed. This type of advertising is gearing up pace in the online advertising market, as it is quite non-intrusive and doesn’t irritate the visitor or internet user. Many online advertising networks are currently offering pop-under ads and the webmasters are paid reasonably well when compared to pop-ups.

Competitor Analysis and Marketing - Where are Your Competitors?

Before the internet, there were a series of tools designed for comparing yourself to your competition. A competitive market analysis was a must for any company that wished to maintain themselves in the market.

As in the field of battle, if you don’t know what your enemy is doing, then you are lost. Information is the weapon of our modern era. And the only way to have it in the world of business is with a competitive business analysis.

What Is An Online Competitor Analysis?

A traditional competitor analysis is a tool where a series of factors are pre-established. That way, you only need to fill in the required data or information and you will obtain a result of the analysis.
In the case of an online competitor analysis, it’s almost the same thing, but adapted to the world of the internet. You will be able to measure the pros and cons of your competition. That way you can design and implement a strategy for attacking them and gaining their share of the market.

Purpose of an Online Competitor Analysis

The main importance of an online competitor analysis is that it is able to determine what are the strengths and weaknesses of your competition. That way you will be able to attack it in those points where it won’t be able to react quickly enough. And, knowing its strengths, you can benchmark (compare) them with yours.

Another factor to be taken in account is how effective is the website of your competitor. Designing an adequate webpage isn’t an easy task. It requires a good balance between content, images, colors, animation and sizes. Nobody wants a webpage full of text with no images. And no one wants a webpage where you can only see photos of the company but no information on their products.

Additionally, it’s good to know how often your competition updates its content. Why? Because it tells you how much they care. An updated site with detailed content means that your competition places great emphasis on and invests resources in maintaining an online presence. But, if the website is outdated, or if the content doesn’t have much to offer to the potential customers, then it means that they don’t have a real interest in the online market. Either that or they are incompetent. Either way, no serious business should be done outside the internet, not if they want to maintain their position.

Ten Effective Uses of E-mail Lists

E-mail is revolutionizing the art and science of direct marketing by bringing marketers new opportunities and challenges.

Try these attention-getting ideas to make the most of your e-mail marketing:

1. Sponsor a contest. Give away prizes in order to entice prospects. The gift doesn’t have to be large or expensive, although trips and cash tend to draw the most attention.

2. Publish an online newsletter. Develop a newsletter about your business or a related topic that will interest the people with whom you want to do business.

3. Publicize special promotions or events. If you are promoting a new product, hold an open house or participate in a trade show or cobranded campaign. Use your mailing list to publicize it.

 4. Drive traffic to your Web site. E-mail, direct mail, and advertising all have a stimulating effect on your company’s Web site. Use your mailing lists to get the word out.

5. Make new product or personnel announcements and press releases. Got a hot new service? Product upgrade? Did you hire a new sales manager? Moving to a new location or changing your phone number? Mailing lists are the perfect way to distribute this type of information. Give your customers advance notice of what’s coming, and let the trade press know what’s happening.

6. Offer discounts. Everybody loves a bargain, and you can use your mailing list to alert customers and prospects to your latest deals. When the discount is offered exclusively to the mailing list, you communicate the feeling that your customers receive special privileges.

7. Solicit surveys. Mailing lists are an easy way to solicit participants for a survey and to communicate survey results. Send out the questions. Tally up the responses. Report back the results. Readers appreciate having their voices heard.

8. Care for customers. Stay in touch with clients, cheaply and quickly. Thank them for their business. Ask their opinions about your service, your products, your Web site. “What can we be doing better to ___________?” You may not like everything you hear, but creating a dialogue builds loyalty and trust.

9. Encourage participation in government, civic, and community projects. Publicize issues and meetings, and solicit public support at hearings before commissions and boards, city councils, and industry associations.

10. Tell a joke. The Internet is famous as a joke-sharing medium. Get a jump on the competition by sharing good, clean jokes with your clients. It may not make a sale today, but a good joke can help your name stick in a buyer’s mind.

The Secret “10%” of SEO Knowledge and How Information Spreads in the Search World

Things in the 10% might include:

* The names and emails of private link brokers and link sellers whose networks are still passing value.
* IP lists of the search engines’ cloak-detection bots and methods of identifying potential human quality raters.
* Ways around penalties, bans, or other search issues.
* Email access to the right people at search engines, blogs, social media sites, & large web properties.
* Access to email or online lists of effective social media voting groups.
* Methods for scalably grabbing large amounts of competitive intelligence data from the engines or other sources.
* Data on traffic, referrals, and other competitive intelligence information for big brands, sites, and verticals.
* CTRs, CPCs, CPMs, ad payouts, & conversion rates for specific keywords and phrases.
* Lots and lots of other super secret stuff.