Note: This article in not dealing with technical details to improve conversion rates. This post just deals with the conventional tips to improve conversion rates. Please read the article on improving conversion rates if you want more modern ideas of improving your websites’ conversion rate.
Websites are generally present because people have put them out for a particular objective. In some cases, people are interested in putting out their views to the general public through web logs that are commonly known as blogs. A lot of celebrities and media personalities like to interact with their fans and propagate their ideas through websites. This is also true of many professionals as well as religious leaders who want their views as well as sermons to reach the largest audience possible in order to spread their views far and wide. The objective of a website is to garner the maximum number of eyeballs in the best interests of the website. There are other sites also that are geared towards e-commerce or online marketing. These websites have been created with the express idea of providing means to advertise goods and services that can be used by the public to make orders and buy online. These online marketing sites generally have online forms in order to enable people to make online purchases and increase their revenue. A good example of this is companies like www.amazon.com or www.traverus.com in the realms of online sales.
A few years ago, if you spoke of search engines, one would perhaps speak of Yahoo or AltaVista or even MSN as the search engines of yore. Then came Google and almost swept the search engine market in one great sweep. Nowadays if you talk of search engines, almost everyone would swear by Google as it has indeed revolutionized the way we search for information online. The complex algorithms that Google contains are able to crunch millions of sites and bring up those particular sites that are most appropriate for our needs. It has also brought about the revolutionary concept of search engine optimization that helps online marketers ensure that their sites get pride of place in the search engine ranks and thereby get a major share of online traffic in the online war of eyeballs.
This may be bad news for many webmasters around the world. Google has recently changed the way page rank flows from one page to another.
I remember during the 2002-2005 internet marketing era, forums were a must have to create a “buzz” and keep your visitors coming back for more and more. However end 2005 blogs came in and good old days of forums took a back seat. But the fact is even today forums are not dead. Some websites still have it. Some examples:
We live in a heavily wired and connected world today. With the spread of the Internet, a majority of businesses have moved to the online world. Gone are the days of the purely brick and mortar based business models. As the online medium grows and more people conduct business online, there are opportunities galore for marketing specialists to come up with new techniques and strategies to reach out to consumers. Opt-in mails represent one such new initiative or means that marketers can use to communicate with their target consumers online.
Opt-in mail is also known as permission marketing, where marketers ask e-mail of the visitors to their site to have the permission to send them information of products and services that are on offer. In opt-in mailing system, the company forms mailing lists of those who agree to or opt in favor of receiving e-mails from corporate entities. It is quite necessary for companies to gain specific permission from the recipient/s or else the mail is considered to be a spam*. When people permit marketers to send opt-in mails, they acknowledge the fact that the company could send updates, newsletters, e-mails and notifications about product or service offerings.
Recently a German company Sistrix analyzed the web page elements of top ranked pages in Google to find out which elements lead to high Google rankings. They analyzed 10,000 random keywords, and for every keyword, they analyzed the top 100 Google search results.
Here is a fact – almost all “good” domain names are booked or are for sale at a very high price. People who want to start a business online are finding it very difficult to get a domain of their choice. Therefore what most people do is compromise with adding really ugly looking numbers or characters in front or behind their desired domain name. For example – 123keyword.com, keywordabc.com, keyword-someotherkeyword.com. You get the idea.
A successful SEO campaign has many factors that make it effective. You will need a website that is search engine friendly, has well written content, several back links from quality sites and an aged domain that spells “authority”. However, if you have taken care of all these aspects and not spared a single moment on the keywords that you should use, your effort will not serve its purpose. If you are unaware of how important keywords are, what keywords to target, don’t know how much competition is there while you try to get traffic/page rank via these keywords, you will not be able to grow your online business.
SEO is important because this is one of the very important ways to get visitors to your site.
No Visitors = No Revenue.