Is your website converting?

Setting up your website is one of the initial steps of an Internet marketing campaign, but the success or failure of your website is dependent on how specifically you have defined your website goals. If you don’t have any idea what you would like your  website to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything.

If you expect visitors to your website to perform some form of action, whether it is visitors filling out a form so a representative can contact them,  signing up for a newsletter or purchasing a product, there are some steps you can take to make sure that your website is functioning at peak efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors in a given period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which you haven’t been doing any out of the ordinary offline promotional activities.

If you find that thousands of visitors have come to your website this does not necessarily mean that your website is successful. Usually,
you want those visitors to actually do something on your site. The number of visitors to your site who made a purchase is usually called the site conversion rate, and it is one of the most important figures in determining the success of your website..

To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per month and figure out the percentage of them that actually performed the action your site is set up for. For example, if you had 4,000 hits to your site, but only 50 of them purchased your product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this percentage, just take your number of visitors and divide that figure by the number of visitors who made a purchase. Then divide that result by 100.

If your website is designed to get your visitors to fill out a form or sign up for a newsletter, make sure to also figure out what the difference is between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This is because not everyone who fills out your form will actually purcahse something. However, whether your site is set-up to sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a form, the site conversion rate will measure the success or failure of your website whenever you make changes to the site.

If your conversion rate is poor you may want to consider how easy it is for a visitor to your website to accomplish the action the site is set-up for. For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily accessible? Does the visitor have to jump through hoops to get to it? If it’s too difficult to get to, the customer may just give up and move on to another  website. Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible.

It also makes sense to have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase or fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign.

It is important to check your conversion rate before embarking on an SEO campaign to get a higher search engine rank. You can use pay per click advertising to check the conversion rate of specific keyword phrases. This can save you time upfront as you do not want to end up optimizing and promoting your website using a keyword phrase that does not convert well for your product or service.

Do you own a website or blog? Are you disappointed with the number of free visitors that you receive every day from the search engines? If the answer to these questions is “Yes”, then read on to find out how you can quickly and easily get a higher search engine rank.

Each of these 7 methods can make a vast difference to where your website or blog ranks in Google or any of the other major search engines.

(1) Double Check Your Keywords

If you are getting very little or no search engine traffic, this will be for one of two reasons. Either because you have chosen a keyword phrase for your website that doesn’t get searched on very often, or you may have a good keyword phrase but your site is not on the first page of search engine results for that phrase.  Alternatively you may not have even thought about keywords.

Whatever the answer, if you are receiving no search engine traffic it is worth taking a second look at your keywords. Use a keyword tool such as Wordtracker to generate a big list of keywords related to your website and take a look at two very important statistics for each keyword:

• The total number of searches in a 24hr period
• The number of competing pages

You need to be sure to pick a phrase that has a good number of daily searches, but you also need to be sure that the competition is not so tough that you will never be able to reach the first page of the search engines. It is a bit of a balancing act, but once you have found the right keyword phrase, read on for more tips about how to get a higher ranking for your keywords.

(2) Make Sure your Keywords are in the Right Places

Many people believe that you just need to list your keywords in the meta keyword tag of your web page to get a good ranking, but this is a myth. Most major search engines including Google do not even take these tags into account when ranking a web page. The main reason for this is that they have been spammed so much in the past that they are no longer worth considering.

Two of the most important places to put your keyword phrase are in the <TITLE> tag of your web page and in the heading tags <H1>. Try to mention only your keyword phrase(s) and nothing else in these tags to ensure that you don’t dilute your efforts.

You should also aim to mention your keyword phrase throughout the body of your web page. Mention it a few times at the beginning, middle and end of your web page, but don’t go over board  – a spammy page with your keywords mentioned too many times can have the opposite effect on your ranking than you would like.

(3) Check your Web Page is Perfectly Optimized

As well as putting your keywords in the Title and heading tags of your web page you should also mention them in the anchor text of some of the links on that web page or on other web pages on your site and in the alt and title attributes of links and images. Again, don’t go overboard with this.

When you have finished optimizing your page you may want to check your keyword density. There is no exact formula for the keyword density and it should normally be around the 2-5% mark. Use a free keyword density tool to check the density and compare it to your main competitors. Try to aim for a similar density.

(4) Create a Sitemap

Creating a sitemap can be beneficial to both the visitors to your website and to the search engines. It will help to ensure that the search engines can find and index every page on your website. You can create a site map by hand, but it is much quicker and easier to use a tool to automatically generate one.

Here is a free sitemap generator.

(5) A Little Bit of LSI

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. It sound very complicated, but it is a relatively straightforward concept.

LSI is about the meaning of the words on your web pages and how they relate to each other. If you have optimized your web page for a particular keyword phrase the search engines will analyze your web page to see if there are other words that are related to these keywords or have a similar meaning.

As well as putting your keywords in the right places and checking your keyword density you should think about including other keywords on your page with a similar or related meaning. This will strengthen your page overall and improve your chances of ranking well.

(6) Understand Who your Competitors are

Even if your keyword phrase returns a million pages when you type it into Google, the only pages of real importance are the first few websites on the first page of results. Most people don’t go past the first page or two when searching for something, so you have to aim for a page one ranking. To do this you need to take a close look at who your competitors are. Enter your main keyword phrase into Google and take a good hard look at the websites in the first few positions. How well optimized are they? What is their Google Page Rank (PR)? How many backlinks do they have? Who is linking to them?

Doing this analysis will give you a very clear picture of what you need to do to beat this competitor. In some cases you may find that the top competitors are huge multi million companies with many staff working on the website and in this case you may decide that this keyword phrase is too competitive and you may want to rethink your keywords.

(7) Boost those Backlinks

Finally and most importantly you must continually build high quality backlinks to your website. This is one of the most important factors in getting a top ranking. You can do this by writing articles, submitting your site to directories, distributing press releases, posting in forums and making comments on blogs and websites. You can get a good idea of how many backlinks you need by comparing your website to your competitors’ websites. Use a backlink tool to compare the number of backlinks on your site to your competitors.

Read about more Ways to Improve Your Google Page Rank here.

If you would like to learn about these methods in more detail or find out even more ways to get a higher search engine ranking download my report 10 Ways to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking.

Hello and welcome to 3 Steps to Search Engine Success! My name is Suzanne Morrison and I would like to assist you in achieving higher search engine ranks for your website.

Search Engine Optimizing is often though of as a complex process, but I like to break it down and think about it in 3 simples steps.

• Step 1 – Choose the right keywords (aka Keyword Research)
• Step 2 – Optimize your website for your chosen keywords (aka On Site Optimization)
• Step 3 – Build up your site’s link popularity (aka Off Site Optimization)

Here you will find lots of tips and ideas for achieving a higher search engine rank for your website and I will share with you my ideas on finding the best keywords, optimizing your website, building backlinks, using tools to help you with your SEO and more.