Learning how to be a search engine optimiser is not a particularly straightforward process. There’s no college education you can follow to become a SEO. There are precious few courses you can follow, and most of these aren’t worth the money.

So what is the best way to learn SEO and become a specialist in the field? Well, you could buy some books and dig in to them. A recently published tome called The Art of SEO is pretty solid, as is the SEO an Hour a Day book.

But these books will only give you the basics. Since many SEO problems and challenges are specific to certain (types of) websites, these books will give you a starting point but no more than that.

Reading blogs, articles, and white papers about SEO is also encouraged, though with one caveat: don’t get carried away by reports on the latest hypes and “must-do’s” in SEO. These are nearly always blown out of proportion and when chasing the latest hypes its easy to lose track of the core essence of SEO.

SEO can of course be learned by simply doing it. Learn what works for other websites, then unleash it on your own sites. The problem with this is that sometimes this can backfire and you end up harming your sites more than helping them. Still, learning through experience is absolutely essential.

So, what else is there to help you learn SEO and become a true specialist? Well, in my opinion there is no substitute for a good community. A community where you can ask questions about your specific SEO challenges and get helpful, straightforward answers. A community that shares its specialised knowledge freely and widely and isn’t afraid to spill the occasional ‘secret’ that can really prove to be the difference between a good site and a great site.

Such a community exists, and I happen to be a member of it: the SEO Training Dojo.

The Dojo boasts an impressive range of tools and resources that are useful for everyone, from newbie SEOs coming to grips with the complexities of the craft to experienced SEO gurus that have seen and done it all.

Some examples of what the SEO Dojo contains:
- Knowledge Exchange forums
- Free SEO tools
- Discounts for paid SEO tools
- Weekly chat sessions
- SEO Beginners guide
- Ranking Factors guide
- Link Builders handbook
- and much much more…

I’m very pleased to be able to offer a discount for my readers who want to join the SEO Training Dojo – use the “barryrocks” discount code when you sign up and you get 25% off any subscription plan!

This discount code is only valid for the first 25 who make use of it, so it pays to act quick! I promise you it will be worth it – the very first chat session I attended earned my whole annual subscription fee back with the incredible amount of insight and tips that I gained from it.

So if you’re serious about becoming a true search engine optimisation specialist, the SEO Training Dojo is the place to hang out.

Learning SEO is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

A term often busied by web developers and also SEO agencies is W3C compliance. I’ve written about the benefits of W3C compliant code before, but my perspective has changed a bit over time and I feel it’s important to point out that full W3C compliance is not a definitive requirement for an effective website.

W3C compliance basically means that the HTML and CSS code that a website is built with is fully compliant with the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C for short).

The W3C is an international standards organization, founded by the inventor of the web. They develop the standards on which the world wide web is run.

You’d think that making sure your website’s code complies fully with these standards is pretty important. And it is, up to a certain point.

You can easily find out if your website’s code is W3C compliant – simply submit your website URL to the W3C Validator tool and you’ll get an overview of all the ‘errors’ in your code. And you’ll almost certainly get a lot of ‘errors’. It’s very unlikely your website’s code complies to all of the W3C’s standards.

I say ‘errors’ because often they’re not really errors. The W3C standards are extremely strict, with no room for interpretation. So every little niggle in your code, every small deviation from the W3C’s strict standards, will generate an error in this validation tool.

W3C compliance for browsers

But most web browsers are flexible pieces of software that are built to deal with a wide range of different sorts of HTML and CSS code, and will probably render your website perfectly regardless of how many errors the validation tool shows.

Often web developers have to use shortcuts and non-compliant code to make something work in a particular way on a website, and while this results in validation errors it doesn’t hinder a website’s functionality at all. Quite the contrary, sometimes you have to break the rules of the W3C to get something to work exactly how you want it in every web browser.

W3C compliance for SEO

There is also the misconception that search engine crawlers require a website’s code to be 100% W3C compliant, or else they will rank your site lower in the SERPs. A lot of SEO agencies recommend you make every webpage on your site fully W3C compliant.

This is often a costly endeavour, and quite unnecessary. Search engine crawlers, like browsers, are sturdy and flexible pieces of software that can index almost any type of code, regardless of the errors it contains.

For proper crawling and indexation a search engine will need to be able to distinguish the different elements of a webpage – style, navigation, and content – and will need to be able to interpret the meaning of the content, which it does through analysing the content itself and the mark-up code that is used to style the content.

Clean, compliant HTML and CSS code help in this process. Compliant code makes it easier for search engine crawlers to identify what the content on a webpage is, and what that content means.

But 100% compliance, meaning zero errors in the W3C validation tool, is not only often hard to achieve (especially if your website has advanced functionality) but is unnecessary as well. The code just needs to be sufficiently well-structured and tidy enough for search engines to be able to distinguish style, navigation, and content.

So bad code is OK?

No, bad code is not OK. It’s still a good idea to strive towards compliant code. A website with hundreds of W3C validation errors is not a good thing. It’s likely that these errors cause the site to display differently in some web browsers (or worse, not work at all) and can cause all sorts of trouble for both users and search engines.

But if your website’s code only shows a couple of handfuls of non-critical errors, especially if they’re only small warnings, there really is little need to fix them.

For on-site optimisation your time and resources are better spent on making sure your website’s title tags, content, and other factors are fully optimised.

W3C compliance – is it a requirement? is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

About nine months ago I was facing a sizeable site migration project at my employer at the time, and I was tasked with mapping out the best way of handling this migration to minimise the impact on our search engine rankings.

I wrote a post summarising my research into the SEO aspects of a site migration, and I feel the time has come to look back at the migration and the lessons we learned from it.

The site migration was a two-step process – we updated the design and we added new sections with fresh content. We decided to follow the recommendations outlined in my site migration blog post pretty much to the letter:

Content: We phased in the new content one batch of pages at a time. We put a couple of new pages live, linked to them from the homepage, and waited for them to be indexed & cached. Then we put the next batch of new pages online.

Design: The design changes were implemented gradually as well. The old and new designs weren’t radically different, it was more a tweaked & modernised version of the old design, so we felt it would be fine to have the old and new designs co-exist on the site for a while.

We first did a Google Website Optimiser A/B test to make sure the new design yielded at the very least a similar conversion rate. When this was confirmed, we migrated pages to the new design one at a time. The URLs all remained the same so we didn’t have to do any 301-redirects.

We used the Duplicate Content tool to ensure the HTML code and content of our key pages with high SERP rankings matched at least 90% in the old and new designs, so we wouldn’t get hit with a ranking penalty when we put the new version up.

When a page was updated with the new design, we waited for it to be indexed & cached in Google and checked how its SERP rankings were affected.

The end result was a site with a fresh design and new sections added, with minimal impact on SERP rankings. We did see some fluctuations in rankings but these fell well within the normal daily and weekly ranking variations.

We also noted that the new content started ranking fairly soon for relevant keywords, despite no direct links coming in to those pages. This is most likely due to the incoming link value generated across the rest of the site, spilling over to the new content.

It was a long and labour-intensive process, and in hindsight I’m not sure it would have impacted the rankings massively if we just switched the site over in one go. But as organic search generates a significant portion of the sites traffic and revenue, it was definitely better to be safe.

Site Migration SEO Concerns – The Results is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

The steady rise of spam (which is now said to make up over 90% of all emails) has resulted in less emphasis on email as an instrument of online marketing. But well-managed email marketing campaigns are still, and will continue to be, an important instrument in your online marketing toolbox with a great ROI.

Email allows you to engage with your website visitors in two-way conversations, enabling you to connect with your customers. Email marketing is a great way to enhance customer retention as well as cross-sell and up-sell your products and services.

But you can’t just start harvesting email addresses and spam them at your whim. You need to develop a solid email marketing strategy based on your customers’ needs and requirements.

In this article I will outline the basics of email marketing to help you get started.

1. BUILD YOUR LIST

The most important aspect of your email marketing is the list of email addresses your messages are sent to. A good way to build your list is to have a sign-up form on your website that allows visitors to subscribe to your emails. You can also harvest emails from your online order process and contact forms, as long as you give users a clear way to opt-out – or better still, opt them out by default and make opt-in optional.

There are varying levels of legislation for each country regarding opting your users in on your email lists, so be sure to do some research and find out what the requirements are where you’re based. It’s usually best to err on the safe side, as not only will this ensure your emails won’t be marked as spam, your users will appreciate it and you’ll have a greater level of engagement with your subscribers.

2. WRITE YOUR MESSAGE

A good email starts with a great subject line. Users are bombarded with dozens, if not hundreds, of emails a day, and the first thing they see when your emails arrive is the subject line. This is the most important aspect of your email that determines whether or not a user will open the email and read it.

Tips for good subject lines:

• Clarify the benefit: users have crowded inboxes so your email’s subject line needs to communicate a clear benefit. What will a subscriber get out of it if he opens and reads your email?
• Personalise: use the recipient’s name in the subject line, as this helps your email stand out and helps make a connection with the recipient.
• Ask a provocative question: Questions make recipients wonder and often encourage them to open your email. An example would be “Are you at risk of overpaying on your insurance?”.
• Avoid spam words: words like ‘cheap’, ‘free’, ‘instant’, and dozens more are often interpreted as signs of spam.
• Be mindful of character limitations: many email clients cut the subject line off at some point, either due to the user’s screen resolution or the program’s layout. Understand what part of the subject is seen by most of your recipients.
• Test, test, test: try out different subject lines with different formats and benefits, and never stop experimenting.

Next is the actual content of the email. Needless to say this needs to match the subject line. If you make a promise in the subject that you don’t keep in the content, chances are most readers will either delete your message straight away, unsubscribe from your list, or report your email as spam. Too many spam reports and your email will never reach another inbox ever again, instead being redirected to your recipients’ junk mail folders and thus oblivion.

It’s generally a good idea to write email content following the same guidelines as for website content: strong headlines, structured content, and clear calls-to-action.

This means starting with a strong headline that describes the content accurately and challenges users to read it. Then you need to divide your content into short paragraphs that are easy to read – large blocks of text are unattractive and discourage readers. It’s also a good idea to emphasize key phrases in your text with bold and italics so that readers that quickly scan through it still catch the general idea.

And finally you need to finish with a clear call-to-action. What do you want readers to do with what you’ve just told them? If you want them to visit your website and buy a product, tell them! If you want them to forward your email to their contacts, encourage them! Use buttons in combination with text links and get users to interact with your email.

3. FORMAT YOUR EMAIL

A good subject line and strong content aren’t enough to get the most out of your emails. Your message needs to look good too. A plain text email will look boring no matter how good the content is. Nearly all email programs support HTML emails, which means you can write email messages the same way as you build web pages.

However, there is one big difference: there are huge limitations on the HTML code you can use in emails. Every email program, from Outlook to Hotmail, from Gmail to Thunderbird, handles HTML differently. On top of that many advanced features used in webpages, such as CSS and JavaScript, won’t work at all in most email programs.

This means you need to keep the HTML code as simple and straightforward as you can. A good rule of thumb is to avoid using any CSS and scripting languages, and stick to plain simple HTML code using tables to build your email’s layout.

If you don’t have sufficient knowledge of HTML, there are literally thousands of email templates available for download online which you can use and adapt for your own emails. Of course you can also avoid the whole HTML hassle and just use plain text emails, as long as you understand that your emails will look unexciting and may not be as effective.

4. USE EMAIL MARKETING SOFTWARE

So you’ve built a list of subscribers, written a good email and formatted it in an attractive layout, and you’re ready to send it out. You can use your own email address for this and manually send it – this is adequate for small lists. (Just make sure to use BCC so your readers don’t see the whole mailing list!)

But if you want to get serious with email marketing, the best approach is to use professional email marketing software. Good email marketing software does most of the hard work for you: managing your subscriber lists, building good HTML emails, and reporting on the success of your email campaigns.

There are hundreds of options available, usually in the form of online services, and for all different business sizes. So you don’t need to have a big budget to make use of good email marketing software.

A good place to start is AWeber, a very popular online email marketing service provider that offers cheap rates for lists under 500 subscribers and has over a hundred ready-made HTML templates to choose from. (Disclosure: I am an AWeber affiliate and get paid a small commission for every sign-up through this website.)

5. MEASURE AND IMPROVE

Once you’ve sent out your first email campaign it’s important to analyse how it performed. Did you achieve what you hoped for? If not, why? Was the open rate low? You may need to work on better subject lines. Were there few clicks from the email to your website? Maybe you need better content or stronger calls-to-action, or maybe the HTML layout wasn’t right.

With email marketing, as with your website, you’re never done testing and improving. There’s always a way to get more out of your marketing campaigns and increase user engagement. Never get complacent, but strive to continually improve your email marketing.

6. ENGAGE IN CONVERSATIONS

Email started out as a two-way communication medium. Despite the rise of unsolicited bulk email, that core essence of email hasn’t changed. Don’t just send out your campaigns and turn a deaf ear to what your subscribers say, but engage with them.

A good way to do this is to make sure that the reply-to address of your email campaigns is a valid email address. Yes, you may get a lot of mail delivery errors and out of office replies, but you will find that many users will reply to your email marketing campaign in various ways. This is not a bad thing – quite the contrary, it means that they took the time and effort to respond to your message.

Engage with your readers in conversations, whether they’re complaining about your email or complimenting you. Not only can you get valuable feedback on your email marketing, you will also build customer loyalty this way as well as enhance your online reputation.

Another method is to put polls, surveys, and contests in your emails. This increases user interaction with your emails and will allow you to gather valuable information from your customers.

TO SUMMARIZE

Email marketing is a powerful instrument that can bring strong value to your online marketing efforts. A well-run email campaign will ensure your customers keep coming back to your website. A badly run campaign however can have a detrimental effect on your reputation and might hurt your long-term prospects. So put the effort in and you’ll find the rewards will exceed your expectations.

Connect With Your Website Visitors Through Email Marketing is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

Google has announced that their Search Engine Optimization Starter’s Guide has been translated into 40 languages. You can now read Google’s own SEO recommendations in your native language.

Go to the official Google Webmaster Blog to download the SEO Starter’s Guide in your own language.

SEO Starter’s Guide Now Available in 40 Languages is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

So you’re thinking of redoing your existing website, or perhaps you don’t have a site yet and want to set one up. One of the first questions that you’ll face is whether to build and maintain your website in-house, or to hire an external agency to do it for you. What approach works best depends on many factors.

Do It Yourself

Building a website yourself by hand is a pretty daunting task. You need a solid grasp of HTML, CSS and possibly JavaScript and other languages. Additionally you need to be familiar with the basic concepts of web design if you want your site to look at least vaguely professional.

If you have the time and appropriate skills, building a website by hand is the cheapest and most flexible option. All you need is a good web host and off you go. Most of us however won’t have the necessary skills to build a functional and decent-looking website.

Do It Yourself, Advantages:

• Cheap
• Total control over your site
• The sky’s the limit

Do It Yourself, Disadvantages:

• Solid HTML and CSS skills are absolutely necessary
• It’ll consume a lot of your time

Web Publishing / Content Management Systems

With the abundance of user-friendly web publishing software available online these days it’s a tempting choice to use one of these and build a website yourself. Systems like WordPress, Squarespace and Wix make it look easy to design and build your own website in a matter of minutes. (Many webhosting companies also offer easy-to-use web content management systems, but these often turn out to be very basic systems that won’t get you very far.)

The uncomfortable truth however is that everyone can build a website with these tools, but building a good website takes a lot of time and effort.

Web publishing systems can help make it easier for you by providing design templates, easy layout options, and intuitive admin functions, but in the end you’ll still have to invest a lot of your time, and potentially money, to get the most out of it.

Every easy-to-use web publishing systems has its limits and constraints, usually necessary to ensure it remains accessible to non-techie users. You’ll also be forced to work with the design elements the tool provides you with, which can mean your site looks similar to other websites out there. A way around this is to have a unique design made for you. This doesn’t have to be an expensive option – unique WordPress designs for example can be had for a few hundred dollars or less.

Web Publishing, Advantages:

• Easy to set up
• Easy to use (mostly)
• Professional design templates are widely available
• With plugins you can add all kinds of functionality to many web publishing systems

Web Publishing, Disadvantages:

• Not all systems are free to use
• A truly unique design will probably cost you money
• Each system has its limitations in terms of flexibility and functionality
• Getting to know your tool and building a good site will take time

Hire an External Web Agency

If your pockets are deep enough and/or your time limited, hiring an external agency to build your website for you is a viable option. But don’t just hire any agency – shop around and compare. Many agencies are barely more than a programmer and a salesman working out of someone’s basement, and they won’t be able to deliver proper long-term service and support.

When looking for a web agency to outsource your website to, keep the following things in mind:

Does the agency have an excellent website? For web agencies their own website should be a prime demonstration of their skills. It needs to be as good as they can make it. If you’re not blown away by their own site, they may not have the necessary capabilities to build a truly great website for you.

Do they use a lot of technical jargon? Abundant use of web-speak may be a means of hiding their lack of expertise. You want an agency that speaks your language and can communicate their ideas to you in a straight-forward manner.

Does their offer match their price? As in all industries with web agencies you often get what you pay for, but sometimes an agency might take advantage of a new client’s lack of online experience. Don’t commit to a website costing tens of thousands of dollars until you’re totally sure they’re the right people for the job.

Do they offer good (and affordable) support? Building a website isn’t the end of the process, you’ll need proper support from the agency to keep the site up-to-date and error-free. Ensure that the support they deliver after the new website is live is part of the contract, and don’t let them charge huge maintenance fees either. If you’re paying more each year in maintenance cost than your website originally cost, you’re being ripped off.

External Agency, Advantages:

• All the hard work is done for you
• A good agency can supplement your own ideas and come up with even better concepts
• Your website will be unique and (hopefully) effective

External Agency, Disadvantages:

• It’s the most expensive option – by far
• You run the risk of being stuck with a mediocre agency and an under-performing website

Building a Website – Do It Yourself or Hire a 3rd Party? is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

I recently wrote about social media and if it’s right for you to start using it as a means of generating more business. This week Michael Stelzner has published his Social Media Marketing Industry Report. This free report is an excellent resource for all who are using or considering social media as a marketing instrument.

The report is based on an extensive survey among social media marketing professionals, and you can distill some great insights from it that can help you determine if and how social media marketing can work for your business.

A few key takeaways from the report are:

• Social media marketing does help with generating sales and business.
• The most popular social media sites used by professionals are Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook.
• Doing social media marketing takes anywhere from 5 to 20+ hours a week.

The report (PDF) is very much worthwhile. Whether you’re new to social media or a seasoned pro, you’ll pick up quite a bit from reading it.

Free Social Media Marketing Industry Report is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

Communication is what the internet is all about. The world wide web is one huge gathering of voices, of people expressing themselves in many different ways. People use the web to talk to one another about anything and everything. And they can also use the web to talk about you.

Contrary to the physical world where you can rarely know if people are talking about you and your business, in the online world there are many ways to find out if others are having conversations about your organization. Everything that is online can be searched, indexed, compiled and found. The trouble is finding out where the conversations are happening. Fortunately there are quite a few tools available to help keep you updated on what others are saying about you.

First and foremost you have Google Alerts. This very straightforward service lets you subscribe via email to any new piece of internet content that matches your alert query. It will send you an email with the latest article, web page, video, and blog post that matches the keywords you submitted.

This sounds like the perfect solution, but it has a catch: you need to define your query well to prevent getting swamped with non-relevant alerts. Set your alert query too generic and you’ll get hundreds, or even thousands, of alerts in your inbox, most of which will be entirely irrelevant to your business.

A good idea is to set your company name as a Google Alert. Unless your business has a very generic name, this will ensure that you’ll only receive alerts when your company is actually mentioned in an online publication. You could also set alerts for your product brand names, the names of high profile employees, and of course your competitors.

Another very useful tool is Google Blog Search. This is a specialized search engine that only searches in blog posts. Blogs are becoming increasingly important and valuable as a form of citizen journalism, and some successful blogs can make or break the reputations of international corporations. It’s important to be aware of when and how a blogger is talking about your business.

Knowing when people are talking about you online is just the first step. Next you’ll want to join the conversation. But be careful when responding to news articles or blog posts – don’t be aggressive. Join the conversation with a civil tone – this is a public conversation after all and you don’t want to come across as a jerk.

Don’t be afraid to contact the blogger or journalist directly via email instead of openly discussing matters in the comments section. Just be sure to always stay friendly and positive, just as you would with a customer on the phone or in person. One unhappy customer in the real world may not harm your business much, but online everything is stored forever and publicly available to anyone – one negative online argument can come back to haunt you years later.

Find Out When Others Are Talking About You Online is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

1. Part 1 – Choosing your keywords
2. Part 2 – Writing good ads
3. Part 3 – Create landing pages that convert

In part 1 of this guide to search engine advertising we discussed how to choose the right keywords to advertise on. In part 2 we showed how to make effective ads. Now in the final part we’ll tackle landing pages.

Search Engine Advertising – Step 3: Create Landing Pages That Convert

You’re targeting the right keywords and your ads generate a lot of clicks, so now you have all these extra visitors coming to your website. You’re paying for these visitors, so you want to turn as many of them into customers. The best way to do this is not to send them to your website’s homepage, but to a custom-built landing page.

Image you’re an average internet user. You’re looking for a new sofa for your living room, and you do a Google search for sofa’s. You see an ad on the search results page which appeals to you, so you click on it. You end up on a general furniture website’s homepage and now you have to look for their sofa’s section. Chances are you don’t have the patience for this, and you use the back-button to return to the search results and try a different website.

So you click on a second ad that seems interesting, and this time you land on a webpage that talks only about sofa’s. It shows you pictures of sofa’s, it has a nice offer for a discounted sofa on it, and there are many links from this page to various different categories of sofa’s. This site appeals much more to you, and you’re likely to stick around longer and maybe even order a sofa from these guys.

The first advertiser you clicked on made the classic mistake of sending search advertising traffic to the website’s homepage. From the homepage a web user needs to start his search all over again, navigating your website until he finds what he was looking for in the first place. The user has to go through more clicks and has to invest additional effort, something internet users are notoriously unwilling to do.

It’s much better to send the user straight to what they want to see, which the second advertiser does. This way the user doesn’t have to find his way through your website. He immediately sees content that is relevant to his search query.

Elements of a good landing page

1. Relevance: First and foremost the page you link to from a search engine advertisement needs to be relevant. Just like the ad needs to contain the keyword you advertise on, so does the landing page. If you advertise on the sofa keyword, your ad contains the word sofa, you can’t send users to a landing page discussing kitchens or chairs. You need to send them to a page that talks about sofa’s.

Be sure to include the actual keyword you advertise on clearly visible on the landing page, preferably in a headline. This tells a visitor that the landing page is relevant to the search query they typed in to start the whole process. If you use several different phrases to say the same thing, you’ll probably have to make different landing pages for each or use dynamic HTML code to show the exact keyword the user searched for.

When you advertise on many different types of keywords, you will have to create a lot of different landing pages. It’s a lot of work, but it will always pay itself back in a higher conversion rate, higher revenue, and more return on your advertising investment.

2. Clickpath: Sometimes the landing page can be the conversion page. If you offer a downloadable ebook or small specialized item, your landing page can also be the page where users can place an order. But often you’ll need to give your users additional information to guide them to a conversion – product options, specifications, accessories, etc. Guide them through the sales funnel, from general overview to detailed information to actual conversion.

An important aspect of the clickpath is that you shouldn’t make it too easy for users to diverge from it. Take away your regular site navigation if you can, try to keep the visitors of your landing page in a clickflow that guides them to a conversion. If users sidestep your clickpath and instead go to your site’s homepage or another page, chances are you’ll lose them there.

3. Calls to action: Once you get a user to click on an ad and arrive on your landing page, don’t leave them hanging. You need to take them by the hand as it were, show them where to go and what to do. Use action words like ‘learn more, ‘click here’, ‘order now’ in your content and in your links to additional pages.

4. Easy conversion: It should be as easy as possible for a user to place an order. Don’t ask them for information they don’t really want to give up. Keep your forms short and simple and only ask for the very basic information you need to complete the order.

5. Persuade: Selling is the art of persuasion. Employ tried-and-proven persuasion methods such as testimonials, special offers, guarantees, authorative sources, instilling confidence, and more. Include them on the landing page itself and on every subsequent page you send your users to.

6. Fast loading: Your landing page should load very quickly. If a user has to wait for a bit before your landing page is displayed properly, the urge to click that back-button will grow. Make your landing pages lean and efficient to optimize loading times.

7. Measure: It’s not as simple as putting your landing page out there and waiting for the money to come pouring in. It’s imperative that you know what users are doing on your landing page. Do they stay and read your content or do they leave? What links do they click on? Do they convert into customers right away or do they bookmark the page and come back later? Do they follow the whole clickpath or do they leave prematurely? If so, where do they tend to leave your site the most?

All these things and more can be measured and analyzed with a good web analytics package. A good place to start is Google Analytics, a free service that contains all the web analytics functionality you’ll need. Use the data you gather to make informed decisions about what to improve on your landing page (and your website as a whole).

8. Experiment: Creating good landing pages is never an exact science. All aspects of a landing page, from the headline to the color of the buttons, can have an impact on the conversion rate. Experiment freely, but do it in a controlled manner. Tools like Google’s free Website Optimizer allow you to perform extensive tests with all kinds of different aspects of your landing page to optimize your conversions.

Don’t test too many things at once – experiment with one or two changes at a time, no more. Allow your test to run for enough time before you make up your mind. And once you find a landing page setup that works well, use that as the basis for a new round of further tests. Never stop testing and improving.

9. Conform to the guidelines: Last but certainly not least, be sure to read the editorial policies and guidelines of the search engine you advertise on. Google, Yahoo and Live all have strict policies about advertising on their search results pages. There are guidelines you’ll need to conform to for your ads and your landing pages, or you’ll risk paying more for each click or worse, not getting your ads shown at all.

Conclusion
Creating good landing pages for your search engine advertising campaign is not an easy and straightforward task. To do it well you’ll need to invest a lot of time and effort in building and perfecting your landing pages. But it’s never a wasted effort. Again and again the results show that good landing pages turn many more visitors into paying customers, and help earn back the money you invest in seach advertising several times over.

Search Engine Advertising: a Step By Step Guide – Part 3 is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

1. Part 1 – Choosing your keywords
2. Part 2 – Writing good ads
3. Part 3 – Create landing pages that convert

In part 1 of this guide to search engine advertising we discussed how to choose the right keywords to advertise on. This second part will talk about making effective ads for your search marketing campaign.

Search Engine Advertising – Step 2: Writing Good Ads

Now that you have a good set of keywords to advertise on, it’s time to write the actual ads themselves. Most search engine advertising is done with text-based ads, so I will focus on those. You can also do more visual ads such as banners, but they’re more difficult to make and you have much less freedom to experiment and fine-tune them. With text ads you can make as many changes as you want, tweaking and optimizing them until you get the best results.

Use The Keyword In The Ad
The first and most important tip for writing good text ads is that your ad should contain the actual keyword you are advertising on. Having the keyword in your ad indicates to a user that your ad is relevant to their search query. This means the user is much more likely to actually click on your ad. Using the keyword in your ad is a vital aspect of writing successful ads.

As a consequence you’ll find yourself writing many different ads, one or more for every set of similar keywords. Sometimes you’ll write ads specifically for one keyword. This isn’t a bad thing – on the contrary, it’s the key to a successful search engine advertising campaign. If you want to save time by writing generic ads, you’ll appeal to no one and your ads will get very few clicks. It’s important to stand out and be relevant, and that means writing ads that contain the keyword you are advertising on.

An example: say you have a furniture company and you advertise on many furniture-related keywords. One of those keywords is the word ‘sofa’. What ad do you think a user is more likely to click on when he’s doing a search for sofas? This one:

High Quality Furniture
Many Different Styles, Very Affordable

Or this one:

High Quality Sofas
Sofas from $99, Many Different Styles

The second one is a more relevant, appealing ad and will attract more attention and generate more clicks. So divide your keywords into small sets (Google Adwords calls them ad groups) and write ads for each ad group that contain the actual keyword itself. Sometimes you’ll find yourself writing ads for one single keyword – this is not a bad thing. In fact, especially for high profile keywords that get a lot of traffic, it’s a very good thing!

Write Compelling Ads
Using the exact keyword in your ad doesn’t just make your ad more relevant, you can also be much more specific in what you offer. That’s  the second aspect of writing good ads: make it compelling.

In your ad you have limited space to make an impact on a search engine user, so you need to draw them in with a compelling offer or call to action. If your business is cost-competitive, try to include a low price in your ad. This will serve two purposes: it will filter out users who aren’t even willing to pay the low price, and it will compel users who are willing to pay that amount to click on your ad and look at what exactly you’re offering. This means the traffic you generate through this ad is more likely to yield actual customers.

Another way to compel users to click on your ad is to include a call to action. Urge users to “learn more”, “act now”, “free download”, or make use of your “limited one-time offer”. These are all classic marketing phrases that work well in search engine ads. Don’t be afraid to use them, as long as you keep one thing in mind: never deceive. Always deliver what you promise.

Proper Use of Language and Punctuation
Few things can lower a user’s opinion of a company more quickly than errors in spelling and grammar. Always make sure your ads are properly written, both in spelling and grammar, and don’t contain any errors. This shows a basic level of professionalism you need to project in order to win the confidence of your prospective customers.

Sometimes you may be tempted to use bad grammar or punctuation to make your ads stand out more. You may want to ad exclamation marks or special symbols to emphasize your text. Don’t. Ads that contain these tricks come across as amateurish, and many search engines like Google maintain strict editorial policies that forbids these practices. Your ad will get deleted and after repeat offenses you may even suffer penalties on your account.

One exception: capitalization of words. Even though technically it may be incorrect, it’s still a good idea to Capitalize Every First Letter in your ad. This makes your text stand out more and helps boost the success of your ads. Only capitalize the focus words, the smaller words like “the”, “and”, “in”, “up” and so on shouldn’t be capitalized.

Test, Test, Test
Once you’ve written a good ad, write another one for the same keyword. And another one. Vary your ads with different headlines, different offers, and different calls to action. The best way of doing this is to duplicate an ad and change only one aspect of it.

Then keep a sharp eye on how these ads perform. After you’ve gotten several hundred clicks on your ads you can see which ad performed the best. Take this ad and use it as the basis for a new set of variations. Take the best ad from this new set and use that for new versions. Once in a while throw in an entirely new ad with an entirely different setup and see how its performance compares.

Never stop testing. Always seek to squeeze that extra bit of performance out of an ad. Sometimes a small change, one different word in the headline or a minor variation in your call to action, can have a huge impact on the success of your ad. Test methodically and consistently and soon you will know exactly which ingredients work and which don’t.

In the next part of this guide we’ll go into creating effective landing pages for your search engine advertising campaign.

Search Engine Advertising: a Step By Step Guide – Part 2 is a post from: The Great Websites Blog