Conversion Rate Optimization Part 1, Google Takes the Leading Role
Within the e-commerce sphere, the “mind games” between site owners and search engine designers have focused on search engine optimization (SEO). After all, you can’t make a sale if visitors aren’t reaching your site. However, as the web marketplace grows exponentially more competitive, attention among webmasters and site owners has turned to conversion optimization — converting site visitors to buyers.
Conversion optimization has nothing to do with SEO. SEO is designed for spiders and bots. Conversion optimization is based on two factors only: the needs and motivations of human site visitors and persuasive site content and design to encourage humans to make a purchase or perform some other action. Any other considerations are sub-sets of these two factors in conversion optimization strategies.
Measuring Human Motivations and Site Effectiveness
SEO is based on the development of numbers (metrics) that are immutable. Numbers are numbers, there’s no debating that. The interpretation of site metrics, on the other hand, is a true combination of art, science and testing.
Assessing conversion rate optimization must apply a completely different approach to data gathering and the accurate, actionable assessment of the cold hard facts (percentages and such) that are the basis of SEO.
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Freeware SEO Tools for the DIY Webmaster – Part 1
Freeware tools and applications that can make the DIY (do-it-yourself) webmaster’s job a little easier
The focus of this article will be on some of the freeware tools that are available to you to use for SEO purposes. There are a fairly large number of these type of tools out there so Part 1 of this article will líst keyword, sitemap and ranking tools and Part 2 will look at meta tag generators, link popularity apps, link checkers and general SEO tools.
Keyword Tools
1. Good Keywords v2.01 (595 KB) finds the best keywords for your web pages. Features include Keyword Suggestions, Phrase Builder, Keyword Organizer, Misspelled Words, and Site and Link Popularity Finder. For Windows 95/ 98/ 2000/ NT/ XP.
2. Golden Phrases 1.0.3 (391 KB) is a analyzing utility that scans specified log files to retrieve all search phrases used by your visitors to find your website through search engines. It gathers search phrase statistics and determines the position of your site on search engines for every phrase. Its unique “Perspectivity rating” technology also allows you to find which keyphrases were not used. For Windows Windows 95/ 98/ Me/ NT/ 2000/ XP/ 2003.
3. PPC Keyword Generator (1.1 MB) is a powerful keyphrase permutator/generator. Generate 100s of keyphrases in seconds, remove duplicate keyphrases automatically, define per-keyphrase custom CPC/URLs and import/export. For Windows 98 and above.
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Let Google’s Algorithm Show You The Traffíc
Recently Rand Fishkin of Seomoz.org brought together 37 of the world’s Top SEO experts to tackle Google’s Algorithm, the complex formula and methods Google uses to rank web pages. This ranking formula is extremely important to webmasters because finding which factors Google uses to rank their index is often considered the Holy Grail of site optimization.Google’s ranking factors affect how and where you are listed in their search engine results or SERPs. Since obtaining top positions for your targeted keywords often spells success for your site, knowing Google’s ranking factors can be very beneficial.
Every experienced webmaster will know Google is the main supplier of search engine traffíc on the web, getting listed on the first page or anywhere in the top 10 positions for popular keywords will result in plenty of free quality targeted traffíc.
Briefly listed below are some of the main ranking factors you should be optimizing your web pages for in your marketing. The majority of these ranking factors will be very familiar to most webmasters who take full advantage of any and every SEO tactic which will give their site an edge over their competition.
Here are some of the main ranking factors to consider:
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