Reviews and E-Commerce Conversion Rates
January 21, 2010
While many web marketers focus on getting more traffic to their respective sites another important concept is conversion. You can have all of the traffic in the world, but without conversion it will be tough to fund all of your traffic getting endeavors.
In terms of e-commerce often times this is when a product is sold. In order to make the sale from your specific site the person buying has to think that given the amount of time they want to spend searching for an item that your site is currently the best option. In other words, they have to trust you and feel confident that additional searches will not be necessary as any additional web surfing will result in sites that are not as good of a total value as your site. They may think that a better alternative is out there, but that takes time to find. As long as you can convince them that yours is a good enough option you will make the sale.
One way to persuade people that you are the best option is through social proof. Social proof is when another customer makes a comment about your product offering. Testimonials and reviews are good examples. With social proof what others say is true even if it isn’t really true. By providing good service and providing ways for your existing customers to interact with you it becomes easier for new customers to see what it is like dealing with you.
For newer websites providing reviews like on this site that sells a fire pit for every occasion, you can see how they have integrated a star rating system. Existing customers can rate the product and leave feedback. It makes it much easier for others to know about the product.
Additional ideas include the use of a Facebook fan page. This allows for a high level of interaction as users can post rich media and quickly share details with friends.
Reviews and other social interactions are a great way to provide social proof for websites looking to increase conversion rates.
Article Marketing
January 19, 2010
A common tactic is the use of article marketing to help promote your website. People publish articles on sits like ezinearticles.com or articlebase.com. Once published the footer or resource section of the article contains info about one of your websites. Other sites looking for content for there own site may come and pick up the article. That is called syndication. If your article gets picked up on another site it is one more place on the Internet someone can find out more information about you and provide a way to getting to your site via a link.
If your article is of very high quality you may find that the one article could be syndicated many many times or lots of people may link to the original article. All of which are excellent for helping to promote your site.
If you have a favorite article marketing technique that works for you post a comment and tell us about it.
Google Caffeine
December 24, 2009
I am curious to know if anyone has some solid data about Caffeine. Also there is this whole train of thought about utilizing Twitter and Facebook data to determine search results. I see how it could make sense. If the majority of activity is happening on these types of sites then it makes sense to try and capture that collective intelligence (or lack thereof) and try to determine ranking.
Instead of armies of overseas article writers there will now be armies of overseas Twitters and Facebook accounts. I haven’t seen any real data stating as much, but it is a trend I will be watching closely.
Wildfireapp
September 27, 2009
If you are interested in social marketing as a way of promoting your site you may be interested in using the wildfireapp which is available on facebook. One common tactic used is to create a facebook fan page. There are several advantages to using a facebook fan page over just creating an account and gathering friends. It is not quite as personal yet still gives you the ability to interact. Plus, you can only have 5,000 friends on facebook, but fans are unlimited (as far as I know).
Once you have a fan page, your page needs fans. There is no better way to get fans than to give something away. Wildfireapp makes it super easy to integrate the promotion into your fan page, customize the contest and do all of the tracking for you. It is not exactly cheap, but it certainly costs less than hiring a facebook developer to setup all the forms and tracking for you.
The key thing is that it handles all the posting to everyone’s wall. This is key for people to find your promotion and have it going viral across the Internet.
Bing.com – All Hype?
June 14, 2009
I am really interested in hearing what others think about Bing.com. I have spoken with some other webmasters who have noticed a small increase in traffic from Bing.com. Most are attributing all of the advertising and media surrounding the launch. From some of my own sites I have noticed that bing.com traffic is exceeding what has been coming in from Yahoo.com, but is nothing compared to Google.com. I ran some basic searches and it seems the fundamental engine is still based on some msn algorithims. I didn’t notice a change in ranking.
I found their ads to be compelling and think the search engines will continue to refine and get better. If I am looking for a pie. I don’t want 3.14, a graph, but do I want a recipe or to actually buy a pie. I think this is where humans have gotten more specific like, “pie recipe” or “purchase pie”. From my initial review I like the groovy graphic, but Google still rocks. Great results and easy for advertisers to use Adwords. I don’t know why other advertisers haven’t made it as easy as Google. I don’t even mess with other platforms because the Google Adwords platform really helps me nail down ads quickly and easily.
Maybe MSN will get it together, but for now Google is still my home page. I use the groovy iGoogle that has all my favorite apps like the SI swimsuit girl and the matrix themed background. What can I say I am a total dork at heart.
Using Aerelis / Internet Business Promoter
June 4, 2009
Aerelis also known as the Internet Business Promoter is a tool used to help you find other people that might be interested in linking to you. In this video we give you a brief overview of the software and some ideas on things you can do to make yourself more efficient in finding potential link partners.
The video also covers some of the basics related to building link lists through tools like Yahoo’s Site Explorer. Site Explorer will return 1,000 other sites that link to a given website.
You can then dump this data into Aerelis which will scan the site for possible e-mail matches with which you can contact webmasters who might be interested in linking to your site.
This technique is often used to find sites that are already linking to high ranking sites or competitors. The idea is that these links helped them achieve their ranking and they could help to rank your site as well.
SEO Ascender – Using SEO Elite
May 20, 2009
This video covers using SEO Elite. Some of the important functions SEO elite provides is to get some analysis into the amount of effort required to rank for a certain term. It also helps you to analyze the backlinks that your competition has already gone out and procured. You can then use that information to go out and get links yourself. There are several other features of the software and not all of them have been included in this video. The main site has more information about this particular product.
SEO Ascender Trading Links
May 19, 2009
This video covers some of the techniques and etiquette involved in trading links. One of the biggest debates you will hear in SEO circles is whether or not to trade links. We cover some of the fundamentals behind trading links and examine why both sides are correct. As you know from earlier videos not all links are created equally. We explain why some links from link exchanges may have very little benefit.
Why MSN is a Dumb Search Engine
May 17, 2009
This is not earth shattering, but in my opinion MSN is a dumb search engine. I’ve never really used but was very surprised when a site I was working on ended up in the top 10 very quickly. I was working on optimizing a camping site for a very coveted phrase. To my surprise the website ranked rapidly in the top ten for this large search phrase. Of course I was happy but it led me to believe that the search results MSN gives are garbage. I don’t fully understand why MSN ranked the site at the time. I had just started. The site had about 1,000 pages of content related to the theme, but had some big negatives in terms of SEO.
Few Links
New Site
Google and Yahoo still had the site somewhere in the 500+ range. I had just started submitting to directories and writing a few external articles on sites like e-zine. It just made me think that if this is what MSN thinks is a top ranking site then I question what other results it gives. I think a lot of other people must agree because I was getting about 5 visitors a day from the keyword on MSN whereas Google was giving me well over a hundred when it reached the top 10 on Google for this phrase.
SEO Ascender Keyword Research Part B
May 15, 2009
After looking at volume in Part A we dive into competition for Part B. Specifically we analyze what competition looks like on the first page of Google. We look at number of backlinks and Page Rank on some of the top sites. In addition we take an indepth look at a tool called NicheWatch.
NicheWatch quickly goes out and gathers key data on the top ranking sites in Google to help us determine the amount of effort required to rank a page or website in the search engines for a given niche.
None of these tools are perfect but they give you a quick guesstimate if this is a niche you would like to enter.
