1. A personal explanation of why I think having that type of membership is important, both in a personal and in a business vein, and
2. Sharing an example of a test question I got right, and one that totally stumped me. Can you get them both right?

If you have no interest in IQs or IQ testing, this is not for you.

Why I decided to try MENSA in the first place:

1. At school I was always told I was ‘very bright’ by the teachers, and they made it easy for me to do extra classes. I kept a low profile as I was on the tennis, swimming, netball, and athletics teams….and the debate team… couldn’t fit the chess team in, conflicted with tennis – I’m clearly not that smart… My Point: I wanted find out if I really was as ‘smart’ as the teachers said – I was a bit jaded, even by the age of 16. It’s a bit of a bummer when your history teacher teaches you something that is categorically incorrect. *sigh*. I did uber well at everything except maths – got 74% total grade if I remember correctly; waaay below my usually of 80% minimum… Was it my IQ? I decided to find out…
2. At university I had a lecturer who made maths seem more ‘OK’. I sucked at maths at school. By the time I left university I was excelling in both maths and statistics. And my lecturer happened to mention that ‘the quality of my questions, and my self-delivered answers would make me a great teacher one day..’. He asked me if I was a MENSA member, at the time I said “No.”. I have yet to fulfill the ‘great’ part of teacher, but I am and have been a teacher for some years (partly of Econometrics and Quantitative Methods), both in the senior high and university classroom, and in the workplace
3. I’m curious. One of my colleagues happened to mention to me just before the birth of my twins that I would lose at least 20% of my IQ (and mental acuity) after 3 years… I agree there is some loss due to sleep deprivation and prioritization changes… but, I think “I still got me some!”

Ergo… I’m going to try it, yet again, when the opportunity arises.

Why IQ At All?

If I was to interview someone tomorrow for a role, I would be interested in their IQ test scores, just as I would be interested in their language skills. What I would be looking for – in relative order – would be:

1. Relevant/related experience
2. Aptitude tests
3. Personality tests
4. Colleague reviews (e.g. LinkedIN)
5. General Education
6. IQ Test

It’s at the bottom of the list… why? Because there are a lot of very bright people out there who have not had the opportunity of a great education, or exposure to testing. It’s nice to know, but not a deal breaker. It’s also good to know for best-fit purposes; some very high IQ folks can be very anti-social… not many mind you, but a few. There are certain jobs that fit better than others as a ‘general rule’, but that is what the interviews are for.

Heaven forbid on my first interview after high school with my IQ (as reflected) of 157, I may darn well have been locked-up as a bedlamite. I seem to be doing quite well in the real world, with a husband, 3 kids, 2 dogs, a cat and a darn good job (thanks to Intuit).

The IQ example I mentioned are here:

The one I got:

• 59 – APPLES AND PEARS
• 76 – CAVIAR COUTURE
• ? – GOLD GALORE
• 57 –  THE BREAD OVEN

What number is ‘Gold Galore’ ?….   Answer will be shared on the 19^th October

The one I did not get:

Check it out. Let me know how you did

Stay tuned!

-L

While many students who take the course/s are relatively new to the industry, some are veterans and are just looking to get the qualification (not a bad one to have as the market keeps growing and companies start asking for qualifications). But sometimes we get a savvy young entrepreneur or busy owner who has spent a fortune (literally) on paid search campaigns with very little to show for it, and they have decided to take matters into their own hands. I applaud them while I hang my head at the state of our SEM industry where many providers continue to effectively make money without knowing or doing a damn thing right.

In my experience, these wannabe ‘agencies’ have told the client that brand exposure should be the driving force, and thus, impressions rule! That little gem is followed by promises, and sometimes proof, of a high click-through rate (CTR). This click through rate (which actually isn’t all that high mind you at around 1-2% – on the relevant key-phrases) is cited as the industry average (I disagree [and throw my toys out the cot in a hissy-fit for which I should get a reward] on a number of industries with which I have had direct involvement). Please note there are many really great PPC firms out there, and I can point you in the right direction. (I’m not paid to do so which is why I say contact me for my advice, I won’t advertise unnecessarily.)

I have had students involved in many retail and service B2B and B2C industries. A few have, as business owners, simply taken the course to learn enough on the PPC front to lose the agencies who are bleeding them dry, and have in addition learned some salient organic optimization basics to take to their in-house developers…. I digress.

PPC Sharks – What I’ve Seen Lately to Watch Out For – Sharks want your repeat business because they take between 10-18% of your spend (industry standard last time I checked)

1. Sharks want to boost your clicks, so they write blinding adcopy that vaguely relates to what you are selling:
   1. E.g. you are a hotel in Florida (competitive, no?) and they write adcopy based on keyword research running you up with a beach front location, an inhouse spa and a swimming pool…. You have a spa, but you are 2 blocks from the water and you have no pool. Your advertisement CTR (click through rate) is fantastic, your placement in the SERPs (search engine results) is wonderful, but you cannot fulfill the other 2 requirements… bounce rate sky-rockets… but bounce rate and conversion was not part of the contract, because the supplier/customer did not know it was needed. They were sold on the idea of getting clicks, and trusted the agency. They are paying for every click, in many cases more than $9 per click.
      BEWARE!

1. Sharks want to boost your clicks, so they make all your keyword BROAD MATCH.
   1. That means that if you are advertising ‘bathroom toilets’, and they broad match that phrase, the chances are that your ad will show up for everything related to bathrooms – it’s a pretty solid given, including bathroom tiles, floors, baths, sinks, décor, curtains, showers etc… Impressions will be awesome, CTR depends on how shady they are… but there is an easy way for you to check:

i. Ask for the login to your Google Adwords account, and ask your agency account manager to stay on with you as they guide you through finding and clicking on your most expensive campaign:

1. Tell them to open the keyword view (it’s pretty intuitive and you could do it on your own)*
2. Look at the keywords. If you see keywords without any surrounds, you’re being duped, by surround I mean just the words without “ “ or [ ] around them, like this:
   1. White bathroom toilet
   2. toilets
   3. toilet

If you see the words or phrases without any qualifiers at all, you are in trouble. What you should see are phrase or exact match phrases for small budget, small business operations with a specific product or line offering. Phrase match keywords are surrounded by “ “, so “white bathroom toilet”, and exact match phrases are surround by a square bracket [ ], so [white bathroom toilet].

WHAT does that MEAN?

Phrase matching means that if someone types in anything before or after your phrase “white bathroom toilet”, or the phrase itself, your ad will show; so ‘ceramic white bathroom toilet’ will be displayed, as will ‘white bathroom toilet cover’.

Exact matching means that the EXACT phrase will show, “white bathroom toilet” must be typed in for your ad to show.

Remember, you have 3 Objectives Regarding PPC (paid search advertising) – High Level

1. Broad exposure looking for impressions
2. Limited exposure but driving brand awareness targeting clicks to site (funnelling down)
3. Conversion based advertising targeting pre-qualified searchers who are ready to buy.

Sharks want to boost your clicks, so they write blinding adcopy that vaguely relates to what you are selling:

Very few businesses, even big businesses, will allow a pure exposure ’broad’ campaign to run. The metrics are not effective nor are they efficiently measureable without significant pre-launch planning. But small businesses are being sucked in all the time.

I have seen this with more than one student, and while I am thrilled to be in a position to educate and/or help them, I am hissy-fit rats-ass angry (déjà vu?) at the agencies who perpetrate this crap.

Lucky for me I do know a number of agencies I highly recommend for their integrity. Let me know if you are interested in finding out more about them.

And be careful out there with your money, OK? Spend well, swell well.

@lauracallow

Apart from my session on Global Search Marketing, I was intereviewed by Greg Jarboe, President and Co-founder of  SEO-PR. It was the smoothest, most convivial interview I have had to date and I wanted to share it with you (2 minutes).

Linda: What are the top SEO concerns for global ecommerce websites?

• Laura: There are a number of challenges facing global ecommerce sites, but 3 high-level issues that seem to be universal include communication, testing, and clear planning and reporting structures and processes…. (Read more)

Linda: A big decision for any webmaster is whether to go with one site for all countries or multiple, localized sites. From an SEO perspective, is one approach “better” than the other?

• Laura: The first thing to consider concerns your resourcing limitations. Many global sites use CMS (content management systems) and are template based. If you are planning on targeting Saudi Arabia and the UK for example, you will need different templates due to user behavior, so different localized sites makes sense… (Read more)

Linda: For a site with, say, 15 localized country sites, would you recommend each site have its own SEO team, or can efforts be centralized?

• Laura: Different countries, even those with the same official language, can have very different culturally driven user habits, expectations and behaviours. It is always possible to achieve economies of scale by sharing data and winning test versions or copy, but those should be tested in-market without preconceived assumptions… (Read more)

Linda: We know nothing can substitute for a local speaker when writing copy, but that can be expensive. What are some ways to get high quality translation/copywriting at a reasonable price?

• Laura: If you’re going global and expect to achieve global returns, you have to speak the language of your users on a country-by-country basis. In fact, in many instances it comes down to dialects. You can go small and use free or minimal cost translation services and you may perhaps get lucky… (Read more)

Linda: What is the number one SEO mistake you see with global ecommerce sites?

• Laura: It’s hard to say what the number 1 mistake is, but I’ll include 3 here that make up a big majority of potential misses and mistakes… (Read more)

Enjoy!

Join me on Twitter @lauracallow

The purpose of this post is to try to address the main concerns while simultaneously dispelling a few paralyzing fears:

1. FACT: SEOs are Rightly Concerned About Duplicate Content

Original, quality content is the backbone of on-page SEO. Even as the emphasis is now on overall site quality as opposed to page-by-page optimization, the need for original, quality content remains as important if not more so.

• We already know about canonical issues, and have the canonical tag (attribute rather) to help clean up the mess.
• We have XML sitemaps to ensure all our content is indexed, hopefully correctly.
• We can assign ownership (particularly relevant for news sites) with the source tags (original and syndicated).
• We know that Google is serious about content farms and scraper sites – hence the scraper update in January 2011 and the Farmer update in February 2011.

2. FACT: Google is Rightly Concerned About Duplicate Content

In my humble opinion they have every right to be concerned with and about duplicate content. Like any big corporation (and Google is certainly big), they have stakeholders to whom they are accountable and for whom they are responsible. See this quote from Google:

“However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results.” (emphasis is mine)

To take the thought further:

• If the users have a poor user experience they may simply run the search again – on another search engine.
• If there are fewer users, there is less revenue.
• If there is less revenue, there are likely to be lay-offs.
• If there are lay-offs, there is likely to be uncertainly which will (as will revenue loss) negatively affect share prices and shareholder returns, ergo bad business…

3: FEAR: We’ll Get Hit with a Duplicate Content Penalty!

Duplicate content ‘penalites’ exist, but have never been labeled as such as the action taken by the search engine is not so much ‘penalizing’ the site for spammy content as adjusting the algorithm to ensure a better user experience. This is also rather rare, and there is a significant difference between ‘penalty’ and ‘algorithmic spam adjustment’.  See what Google says:

“In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.” (emphasis is mine)

There is most definitely a duplicate content filter that can feel like a penalty. But there is, again, a very big difference between ‘penalty’ and ‘filter’:

• If a website were to be penalized, it would be a deliberate attempt or act on the search engine’s part to downgrade the site’s rankings, or penalize their listings.
• A filter on the other hand is simply the engine’s best-attempt to provide their users with the most relevant listing/s to their search query, and the filter is applied on a query-by-query basis. See what Google says:

“Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a “regular” and “printer” version of each article, and neither of these is blocked with a noindex meta tag, we’ll choose one of them to list.”

4. FEAR: We Can Never Leverage our Content Assets & Resources Globally as we’ll be Penalized or even Banned!

Clearly, part of this fear has been dealt with above…

As to the rest of it; yes, Google does apply a filter but it is done by geo-targeting. Much as different language renditions or translations of the exact same content will be filtered by language, content targeted at different international audiences will be filtered by geo-target, usually by one or more of the following:

• ccTLD
• Server location
• Webmaster tools

See what Google says:

• “Dealing with duplicate content on global websites:
• Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs.
• This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. 
• While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible for all pages and variations from the start…” 

Does that seem contradictory? It shouldn’t… Refer back to Fact 2 above, I’ll copy the relevant information here for you:

“However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results.” (emphasis is mine)

• A user in South Africa is not going to see identical English-language UK, Australian, Irish, British or Kiwi results when searching on Google.co.za.
• If there are duplicated pages across multiple ccTLDs, the South African searcher on Google.co.za will most (highly) likely see the .co.za result.
• The .com page will show for .com searches – and may encroach (at least initially) on new country target market engines, particularly if the ccTLDs are hosted State-side. Why? Simple offline SEO math - the US population is much bigger than other primarily English-speaking countries (10x population of Canada; 4x population of UK; 11x population of Australia and so forth) and hence the pages and sites have the (somewhat ‘doh!’ factor) likelihood of gaining both greater traffic and quality backlinks – faster and more regularly too; remember we’re assuming duplication of content on ccTLDs or across same-speaking country borders.

Closing Thoughts:

With global online marketing and sales becoming ever more prevalent and economically viable and important to many countries, it is of benefit to any company engaging on a global scale or growing internationally to confidently – and with a good SEO company or inhouse team – go about:

• Effectively sharing quality, relevant content resources to achieve economies of scale and greater global exposure in their target countries without fear of ‘penalty’ or negative filtering; thus effectively leveraging what and where they can – an enormous benefit to businesses in the global online space.
• Localizing as much as possible, not simply for any latent duplicate content fears, but because same language countries have very different vocabularies and unique colloquialisms.
• Leveraging (as a result of tactical and strategic changes) winning test-page content and layout; blog posts; articles; converting content and copy; and more.

One closing thought is that content or page recipes that work in one country may not actually be your best option in a different country/new market, even if they do speak the same language. Don’t assume that taking from the source will provide you with the ‘winning-ticket’. Measure and test as much as possible in-market, and ofcourse, develop unique and original target specific content as quickly as possible with those learnings. Just remember, Google’s not out to get YOU, they’re out to keep their stakeholders happy – as any good business practice requires.

Twitter @lauracallow

IS IT VALUABLE TO MEASURE EMAIL ROI?

The speaker made a big deal of the importance of measuring email ROI… and he said ‘…the reason to measure it is to make a case for having an email program at all.’ We beg to differ.

The high conversion rates and the great opportunity to build engagement among email recipients is cause enough for email programs… and email ROI is only a good metric for businesses with garbage opens, clicks, and conversions.

Here’s why: We’ll amalgamate experiences and call our target company ‘Company A’:

• Company A had terrible open rates, terrible click-throughs, high unsubscribe rates, no email testing program… just a completely dazed email marketing program (or lack thereof). But the CEO thought they had a great email marketing program because the person running the show reported ROI of 200% to 350% to him.

Sounds good, right? Not when you look at the data. ..

A big part of calculating email ROI is factoring in the $ spent per email… which usually works out to anywhere from $0.03 to $0.07 per email. Company A was spamming its list repeatedly and getting:

• Open rates that were 10% below standard (15% vs 26.5%)
• Click-thrus 5% below standard (2.5% vs 7.75%)
• Conversions 1%-below an already low standard (0.1% vs. 1.1%)
• (They weren’t reporting unsubscribes… but you can only imagine what those might’ve been)

But their ROI was high because they:

• spent very little on the emails
• blasted them to tons of people (bear in mind that last word ‘tons’)

So what do you think? Have you seen cases where measuring ROI accurately reflected the health of the email program? Maybe [our] opinion is tainted by brutal experience.

Food for thought… and hopefully for discussion.

Follow us on Twitter @lauracallow and most awesomely @jruthwiebe

Thanks!

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For moms looking for easy childrens books – www.duffelcoatjournals.com

You can’t ‘get’ them. Not the organic ones anyway. The algorithm is entirely automated. You can’t buy them like you can buy PPC Ad Sitelinks. And even then with PPC Ad Sitelinks (an ad extension at the campaign level), unless you are in the top 3 results above the organics – in many cases limited to the #1 position (so remember your high quality score requirement) – those Ad sitelinks may not show. But wait…

Some Sites Get Organic Sitelinks – Why and How…

Google has consistently – since 2006 - told us that:

• The results must be useful to the user
• The site structure must allow the algorithm to find good sitelinks
• Your link anchor text/alt attributes must be “informative, compact and avoid repetition.”

In September of 2009 when they rolled out the one-line sitelinks (see second image below) Google told us this (and look at the post’s title – they’re telling us right there):

“First, ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections. Second, ensure that each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name (i.e., not just “Section 2.1″), and that your page includes a “table of contents” which links to the individual anchors. The new in-snippet links only appear for relevant queries, so you won’t see it on the results all the time — only when we think that a link to a section would be highly useful for a particular query.”

 While it is still only the first organic results that has the big ‘box’ of additional sitelinks (up to 8);

Lower ranked listings can show a smaller but still highly relevant horizontal list of up to 4 one-line sitelinks; 

There are a few other factors that are thought to contribute to the display of these sitelinks including:

• Relatively high organic traffic
• High organic CTR

And…There is also the patent to consider (awesome resource – http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=406 ).

• The patent application tells us that those pages are the ones that searchers might most likely want to access. 

My best advice based on everything you have read here and in the linked to resources, and based on my own experience, is to consider the following top 3 factors:

1. It certainly appears as though user behavior plays a pretty big role in the algorithm, and that likely implies that the pages that ‘acquire’ these links have sufficient traffic to warrant a full analysis.
2. The structure of your site is important in terms of topical relevance and unique, logically sequential content, so make use of unique title tags and other onpage elements.
3. Your link structure (part of your structure) is vital. Use unique, relevant, descriptive concise anchor text/alt attributes in your navigation as well as in your body content.

Influencing/Optimizing for Google Sitelinks. Can I?

Yes, you can.

First; you can physically remove any you don’t want to show in webmastertools by ‘blocking’ them. BUT you can’t add or request any. You can attempt to optimize for them by legitimately reworking your site based on what little we know of the algorithm while you work at attempting to gain a significant amount of natural traffic to, as well as interest in, specific, deeper pages.

Second; you can play around with key areas of your pages to change the text displayed. This is by no means an exact science and should be undertaken with care and the expectation that you may lose the sitelink by messing around with original text.

In my experience, the majority of sitelink text comes from the anchor text off your home page navigation (global or local). A secondary source is the alt attributes of images that get a lot of click throughs on your home page (hero images; banner campaigns etc). And thirdly, in some cases parts/all of the Title tag or the H1 tag have been the text displayed.

EDIT: March 9 2011 – The Title Tag is possibly the most influential.

The really cool thing about attempting to optimize these for the algorithm is that you are forced to optimize them for your human users, simply because regardless of how you go about it you HAVE to make them relevant, short (or they’ll be cut off) and descriptive. If you try to get spammy, you’ll probably lose the link. Play right and reap the rewards!

How to Optimize for Sitelinks – Getting Started

If you have sitelinks and want to try it out, first identify which element of your content the link is mirroring. Initially experiment with the sitelink you will least mind potentially losing. Then change the content. Take screen grabs before and after and see what happens. In some cases the attampt to change has worked. In others I’ve lost the link - not entirely, just to another page – and that only (frequently) temporarily.

While there are numerous tests I might share, the one that I’ve already included above makes a pretty good example. Explanation below:

In many cases the display text is long and is cut off with an ellipsis ‘…’. Initially the text in the block above was the H1 tag on the landing page ‘HST Solutions for Business…from QuickBooks!’. It was cut off in the display and I am not fond of half-sentences personally unless it is in the meta description and it’s been specifically written to entice or encourage a click through. ( A new listing for us – which seems to be a result of a recent test – is the ‘QuickBooks vs’ text. I don’t like it, but it’s only 2 days post-crawl since test started and I’m waiting to see if that reverts or changes. I’ll also watch the analytics, and it may be that Google did us an unexpected favour :)

Case Study: sort-of

We changed the H1 Tag to ‘HST for Business’ (in case); changed the anchor text in the footer navigation to ‘HST QuickBooks’, changed the (then) alt attribute off the home page to ‘HST Solutions from QuickBooks’ ( a bit long but we’re experimenting) and changed the title tag to lead with ‘HST QuickBooks’ (I have seen parts of the title tag used in some instances, usually that before the pipe, but sometimes it’s the text after the pipe). Right after the next crawl, I went to check. The sitelink text was ‘HST QuickBooks’ (as in image above).

We reverted the H1 tag to its original text. Nothing changed. The image on the home page has since been removed. Nothing changed. The title tag continues to lead with ‘HST QuickBooks’, and the footer navigation remains as ‘HST QuickBooks’. It is often a different result in each test, but the basics of great anchor text in the navigation (first impact) and well written, topical, relevant, structured title tags win out every time. I left both the title and the footer navigation as they were working in this case for us, for our users and for the engine.  I ran a small intermediary test leaving the footer but changing the title, and the sitelink remained unchanged. I’m going with the footer as the mirror. But it was a short-term test and I’m not willing to stake my rep on the fact that the title is not playing a part.

Remember, as with anything to do with SEO, optimize legitimately – always keeping your human users top of mind. The search engines have their stakeholders (employees, customer and shareholders). They are required to be responsible them, and they are answerable to them. If you try to manipulate the engines, it will not be to your benefit as it is not to the benefit of the engines. Optimizing for the engines and their stakeholders is a very different practice and births from a different long-term mind-set. There is nothing wrong with optimization testing and technique refinement. There is a lot wrong with manipulation. Have fun!

In the spirit of this post, please accept my disclaimer; nothing I say here may or should be attached to any employer, current or previous. This is my personal blog. The views expressed on this page are mine alone and not those of my employer.

PPC ADLINKS

I’ve recently been inducted to the Online Faculty at the University of San Francisco as an Instructor and Subject Matter Expert, and one of the topics I lecture on is one that most PPC marketers may find of interest – Adlinks. I was asked to write a guest post for SearchEnginePeople.com and I used the opportunity to write about Adlinks.

Excerpt:
“Ad Sitelinks have been around for a while now, and I must admit I’m really surprised to see that many companies are still not using them… Ad Sitelinks are the paid search equivalent of the much sought-after organic sitelinks, and they’re one heck of a lot easier to get – especially for quality ads….” – Read full article here.

IN-HOUSE SEO

I spoke at SES San Francisco this week on Bringing SEO In-house. My topic was ‘8 Common In-house Pain-points’ – which speak in many cases to some agencies too.

1. Unclear expectations of SEO
2. Branding limitations or requirements
3. ROI forecasting
4. Lack of top management support
5. Perception of conflicting objectives
6. Lack of exposure/integration to/with other marketing initiatives
7. Legal red-tape
8. Project management and process

I’ll be speaking again at Pubcon in Vegas (November) on the same topic as well as on a hard-core spot-light in-house session, and possibly at SMX East in October. But in the interim,  lovely readers, if you have any specific questions on any of these points just comment with your query and I’ll get back to you! Otherwise, do try to come and say ‘Hi!’ if you’re in my sessions. It would be super to meet you!

I also recommend you check out Jessica Bowman’s blog. As CEO of In-house SEO, Jessica is an authority on in-house search marketing. The blog is here at SEMInhouse.com and I believe that her team may be sharing more on process in the coming months.

See you around!

While this is in no way meant as an hysterical babble, I know some may find it such. I urge you only to continue reading having been warned that it may impact your thoughts on social media – in how much you choose to share… or not. It’s an enigma in many ways.

In the second world war – not so very long ago in the grand scheme of things – anyone in Germany suspected of being a Jew was rounded up and summarily transported to a camp and most likely executed. Neighbors betrayed neighbors, friends betrayed friends – not for fun you understand, but because there was a noose around their own necks. They were known to have associated with Jews or to have ‘Jewish tendencies’ – the shops they visited, the clothes they bought. It was very easy to be caught out as an ‘accomplice’. The Nazis even had what they called ‘persils’ – ‘clean’ documents for any Jew who would turn in a fellow Jew – and how did they encourage that type of betrayal? Fear, and promises of death to family members.

The persil seekers were sent to cobblers and shoe stores. They waited for the Jews on the run to come in and get their shoes mended, and they ‘befriended’ them – and then betrayed them.

Too much knowledge shared with anyone outside of your closest family meant the camps. It was an environment of fear, treachery and death.

That was 70 years ago. The other most renowned evidences of word of mouth betrayal in our western society (though there are thousands more – and this is not meant to diminish those) involve the French Revolution and the English Court of the 15-1600’s.

• During the revolution it got to a point where business rivals were denouncing their competitors as ‘royalists’ to ensure their trip to the guillotine;
• During Henry 8th’s time as well as during the time of his daughters Bloody Mary and Elizabeth the first – during the huge upheaval of the Church in England, thousands were denounced as heretics and burned in Smithfield, or beheaded on Tower Green. This account doesn’t even consider the desperate state for hundreds of years on the greater continent where just about anyone could denounce his fellow brother/sister/neighbor/priest as an heretic during the dreadful inquisition.

I know that we are a free society, but history has taught us that freedom is hard-won and earned. Hard work and dedication to a clear objective keep it so. I’m as guilty as many of airing my opinions and thoughts in our free press society – but if ever we needed to be concerned about what big-brother, his cronies – or his enemies – were wondering, one only has to look at the reputation management tools of today to know that every-thought we put down in the moment is kept safe for future reference by… who knows who?

Just a thought to consider, one I do anyway. Perhaps I am paranoid, perhaps I am too realistic. Perhaps I am over-protective, perhaps I am a fool. Regardless – these are some thoughts I wanted to share – whether you agree with them or not – perhaps they may generate some conversation among you and your friends – or not.

BUT after years of experience, research and seeing how things work on numerous sites across multiple industries, as well as chatting with experts focused on core deliverables, this is a list of my ‘ultimate conversion tips’ with a short list of links to other fantastic, and more comprehensive, conversion tip posts, documents and articles.

Conversion Tips – Get Started People!

I’m going to make a few very basic assumptions:

• Traffic should be sent to relevant, quality, targeted pages,
• Design should avoid clutter and navigation on dedicated landing pages should be minimal,
• Content should get to the point with a relevant large headline <h1> with key content above the fold, even if the page is very long,
• Promissory enticements, and repeat calls to action are important, but histrionic copy may detract from authenticity and the perception of trustworthiness; things like ‘Today only!’, ‘You’ll regret it if you don’t buy it RIGHT NOW!’, and other dire declarations common to pushy sales-men.
• Testimonials, reviews and statements must all be true, but more importantly, verifiable

With those out of the way, I’ll head on into a countdown of the top 10 conversion tips I personally have found really make a difference throughout my  experience.

10. Make your add-to-cart buttons exactly that – ‘add to cart’¹. The button colour can also have an effect – depending on industry. In many cases I have found it is not a significant factor, but a charity site found that green definitely contributed to online donations².

9. Understand your target market. Know what they like online. Even if you don’t have dedicated usability studies and access to paid research faculties, it’s actually pretty easy to check (give yourself a reasonably wide margin of error and narrow it with tests). Use Google Ad Planner (beta) to find sites that appeal to your target audience, and analyze them. Then to get an idea of their PPC spend, projected revenue and more, Adgooroo (or free similar products) can provide insights. Take that data and extrapolate out using your tailored SEO equation. It’s guestimates in some cases, but it does usually give you a pretty good idea of what is and isn’t working, what your audience likes and does not like in terms of design, content – and it’s always important to filter and sort by industry to get trends for relevant tactics and strategies for your own industry/site.

8. Your online (web) and offline (retail) competitors may well be different, but keeping track of what both are doing online is very important. If you can see they’re testing something, mark it down for a future test yourself. If it’s something you’ve done already you can make a note of their approach and any differences. Following up again with a similar test is not a bad idea to glean learning’s, unless your first test was a total bust – in which case you’re ahead of the curve – a nice place to be. Conduct a usability study of their page, take the learning’s and run with them. Learn from their victories and their mistakes.

7. Usability has already been mentioned a few times, so in essence if the term is new to you – it’s about how fast the essence and functionality of a page is communicated, and how quickly and effectively it is engaged. Show your page to folks outside of your department who fit into you general demographic (age/sex/geo-location) and give them 6-8 seconds maximum to tell you what they think the page:

• is about,
• if they like it,
• if they would leave it,
• what stands out,
• if they would bookmark it.

Like Family Fortunes – quick, fast and fun. Have competitions for a free lunch for the team who agree (or disagree) the most. If they take more than 8 seconds to tell you what the page is about – you got a problem. If they want to leave it – problem. If nothing stands out – being unmemorable is bad from a landing page perspective as far as return conversions are concerned – and while they’re not generally the target, your audience may be characterized by research-and-select based behaviour and you need them to remember your page one way or the other; tag-line, brand name, imagery, propensity to bookmark (you need to offer that functionality)… figure out what it is they use to remember you by testing. Be as usable and user-friendly to your users as possible without being a kid’s game site, unless that’s what you are…

6.  Bear in mind email, DM, banner ad, TV ad, radio ad etc web landing pages are all different, or should be. Each target market demographic is different in some way; older/younger; attentive/inattentive; employed/stay-at-home; employed/retired; busy/bored and so forth.

If you can target your landing pages to convert the demographic you are specifically targeting, it’s all the better. That requires in-company communications and campaign scheduling. It also requires getting full details from your TV/radio/print(where-ever) folks to make sure you have a heads up to online-target the right folks with the best content and design, at the right time with effective use of your vanity URL. Clearly you’ll have vanity URL’s to effectively track activity, as well as a crack phone team/different call-in numbers.

This is about conversion. There are a lot of different sources you need to consider for inclusion as separate entities in your armament .

5. If your conversion page includes a form, keep the mandatory elements for completion to a minimum. Not ideal for market research sure, but ideal for conversion. Include auto fills wherever possible, make it as easy as you can. Tick email sign-ups and notifications ‘OFF’ and encourage click to subscribe with enticing content offers/future discounts – whatever your product/service and market may find of interest. Don’t leave it clicked as ‘Yes/Opt-in’ unless at the bottom of the form, and even then be careful. Encourage them to want to hear more from you. Experienced web writers can effectively manage that conundrum. I’ve seen it work. The objective is initial conversion – repeat conversion is a somewhat different animal. Focus on your core objective with your landing page.

4. A lot of folks find that the ability to print a pdf to refer to is of use. This is especially of interest when it comes to big purchase decisions. Make sure those pages have everything they need with a print option. If you can manage to include a print coupon or discount percentage on print only  with clear legalese to that effect that’s even better for the end user when they are doing their comparisons. Stress your tech specs/reviews/price/capacity/capability/functionality/requirements/ whatever are your selling points. Make sure the pdf is usably designed, and always leave a clear link to the dedicated, targeted conversion page they first found in the copy that can both be easily typed into a browser, or clicked to via a pdf. It’s all about the conversion.

3. Make it easy for comparison shoppers. More and more people are using sites like pricegrabber/ebay/amazon/kijiji etc to search. Review and check pricing on products and services. You don’t have to be cheapest. You do need to be the most informative, authoritative and have a track record of delivery and performance – reviews are becoming more and more important. Even if you don’t have them on your site, enable them via your third party online vendors. Pay attention to what peeps are doing in terms of CTR and conversion, and also pay attention to your review commentary. Pass it to R&D and support. Conversion optimization is not a silo effect. You need to feed your learning’s on.

2. A/B test everything. The copy/size/colours/placement of your buttons; the functionality of your page; headlines; copy length/grammar/formality; image size/colour variation/placement/ type; text size and colour; page layout/design and navigation placement; the navigation itself; calls to action. Visual click heat-maps are great to gain an understanding of paths of interest as well as which areas of the page are underperforming, or which buttons/calls-to-action/links are underperforming. Moving, changing and testing can give you the best possible design, content, and conversion tactics if you do it consistently and with accurate, quality tools.

1. It’s a harsh truth, but a necessary one that many affiliates would agree with even if reluctantly; while you can master – and I mean guru status – 1 (maybe 2 specialties) in general; ‘a-jack-of-all-trades is master-of-none’. If you really want to make a difference in terms of landing page conversion, you need a specialist. If possible, you should have a team of specialists each contributing their own dedicated area of expertise to maximize your users landing page exposure and experience and thus your own conversions;

• hire an SEM for SEO and PPC,
• a social expert for SMM,
• an expert web copy writer for web writing,
• a proven web designer for landing page design,
• an experience designer for additional conversion tips and tricks, as well as
• a qualified web tester to handle your actual testing.

Of course not every business can afford a perfect ‘dream-team’, but if you know what you want to achieve, and give yourself time to achieve it that is realistic and dependant on your resourcing (people or time) limitations, there is no reason that a smaller team of dedicated pros willing to get down and dirty with research and testing can’t make a significant difference to your conversion rates. I speak from experience when I say it’s tough out there, and it’s getting tougher. As a man (or woman) alone, you’ll get there, but it will take you a lot longer, so use the net to gain from other’s experiences to simplify your own learning curve. Bigger businesses can afford dream teams, and those teams perform. Depending on what you’re selling online, it is imperative to your businesses or sites survival and continuance that you be able to compete at some level.

Happy conversions folks!

¹ www.getelastic.com/add-to-cart-buttons/

² http://www.donordigital.com/projects/donordigital_donation_page_optimization_research.pdf – the bottom of this article includes links to an additional 2 research articles:

• Improving Conversion 50-60% by Applying Continuity and Congruence
• 7 rules for landing page optimization

Other resources

- Unbounce.com ebook – 101 Landing page tips

- Seldomstatic.com – Top landing page tips from the pros

- eMarketing Testing – Conversion Papers