Your website will only cost you money if your website visitors don’t become customers of your company. For that reason, it is important that you get the basics right.

Check the following six points to find out if your website turns enough visitors into customers:

1. What is your website about and what’s in it for the visitor?

You have only a few seconds to keep a visitor on your page. If the visitor is not convinced within seconds that your site is worth reading, he’ll go away.

Clearly tell your website visitors which problem your product solves and why your solution is better than other solutions. This piece of information should be presented as prominently as possible.

2. Is your website trustworthy?

Tell your visitors who you are and don’t hide your address. If possible, show customer testimonials. Show your website visitors that you are a real company and that you can be trusted.

Are you a member of an industry organization? Has your company received awards? Tell your website visitors!

3. Does your website look professional?

Another way to create trust is to use a professional website design. Avoid clutter and extreme colors. Use a clear design that makes it easy to read your web pages.

If your website displays ads, consider if they distract your website visitors too much from the real content. Your website visitors might also wonder why your site shows ads for other companies.

4. Make it as easy as possible for your website visitors

Tell your website visitors what you want them to do: “Download the free demo”, “Create a free account”, “Download the free white paper”, “Subscribe to our newsletter”, etc.

Focus on a single task. Don’t ask the customer to subscribe to your newsletter or to download the demo or to request more information. Focus on a single task and tell the visitor in great detail why it would be good for the customer to complete that task. Of course, you can use different tasks on different pages of your site.

Add user instructions to every task. The less your website visitors have to think about how to complete the task, the better.

5. Make it a risk-free experience for your customers

Emphasize your respect of privacy and remove unnecessary fields from your sign-up forms. Avoid registration forms or make the forms as short as possible. The more fields a form has, the less people will fill it out.

Offer money back guarantees and other guarantees that show your website visitors that it is risk-free to complete a task on your website. Always deliver on your promises!

6. Give search engines what they want while pleasing your website visitors

The title and the major tag line on your web page should contain the main selling proposition of your website and one or two good keywords.

When a searches sees your website in the search results, the title will show the searcher that the he has found a good match. The content on your web page should confirm and clarify this with more detail.

Increasing the conversion rate of your website is an easy way to increase your revenue without increasing the number of website visitors. The more visitors of your website become customers, the more you will earn when your website is listed on Google’s first result page.

Citations are defined as “mentions” of your business name and address on other webpages, even if there is no link to your website. An example of a citation might be an online yellow pages directory where your business is listed, but not linked to. It can also be a local chamber of commerce, or a local business association where your business information can be found, even if they are not linking at all to your website . You may also see the term “web references” used on other websites—a synonym for “citations”.

Citations are a key component of the ranking algorithms of the major search engines. Other factors being equal, businesses with a greater number of citations will probably rank higher than businesses with fewer citations.

Citations from well-established and well-indexed portals (like Superpages.com for example) help increase the degree of certainty the search engines have about your business’s contact information and categorization. To paraphrase former Arizona Cardinals’ coach Dennis Green, citations help search engines confirm that businesses “are who we thought they were!”

Citations are particularly important in less-competitive niches (like plumbing or electrical) where many service providers don’t have websites themselves. Without much other information, the search engines rely heavily on whatever information they can find!

Citations also validate that a business is part of a community. It’s hard for someone to fake membership in a chamber of commerce or a city or county business index, or to be written about in a local online newspaper or popular blog. Citations (and links) from these kinds of websites can dramatically improve your Local search engine rankings.

Currently, the ‘Web Pages’ tab of your Google Local Business Listing is the most complete list of your citations, though Google probably doesn’t show every single one it knows about.

Also see Local Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Source – Mashable.com

Syracuse University has purchased six-month subscriptions to Brand-Yourself.com’s online reputation management platform for all 4,100 of its graduating seniors. The platform will help students monitor and shape their online presence during the job search process.

According to a recent study by Cross-Tab Marketing services, 75% of HR departments worldwide are required to screen job candidates online. Seventy percent of recruiters and HR professionals in the U.S. clam they have rejected potential hires based on information surfaced online, and nearly half say that a strong online reputation influences their hiring decisions to a “great extent.” A similar study conducted by CareerBuilder last year found that 45% of HR professionals screen job candidates on social media sites.

Given these numbers, the partnership seems like a smart move for Syracuse University’s Career Services department. “Our students need a way to put their best foot forward when they’re being researched by potential employers on Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn,” the director of the department, Mike Cahill, explained. “Brand-Yourself helps prepare our students for success in today’s digital environment.”

Students can use Brand-Yourself’s platform to evaluate their current online presence, build professional profiles on their own websites and platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and then optimize these profiles to rank above negative or irrelevant results in Google search. Students can then use the platform to monitor their online presence as it evolves.

Brand-Yourself’s professional relationship with Syracuse began last year. The startup, whose four employees all studied at Syracuse, observed that some students were failing to get hired for jobs and internships because of their online presence was poorly managed. Initially, Syracuse hired the team to hold workshops for career coaches and students on online reputation management while they developed their SaaS.

Brand-Yourself soft launched their platform nine weeks ago and is currently averaging about 100 sign-ups per week. The company also just raised its seed round of funding — 275K — from private investors, including a managing director at Black Rock.

Do you think universities should provide online reputation management tools to their students? What other tools do you recommend to optimize your online presence?

I put this short instructional video together to help anyone who is looking to do SEO or is currently doing SEO, so they can better understand what Google’s looking for.

This way you have a better chance of hitting your goals and increasing your ranking in the natural search results with Google. This data is provided by SEOmoz an industry leader in SEO tools and reporting.

Other tools used …
Web Site Grader – Grade your website’s effectiveness. See where you can improve (Free Tool)
Yahoo Site Explorer – See how many links you have and where they’re coming from (Free Tool)

For Immediate Release: April 19th, 2010 – Partner SEO Kiwi

Coming off of its strongest month in its history a 120% increase in sales, Genesis PURE is setting the pace for the network marketing industry. As many of their competitors seem to be following the economic trend with layoffs and downsizing, Genesis PURE continues to expand both internationally and right here in the U.S.

Since officially launching last October, Genesis PURE has consistently exceeded their previous months’ sales as their PURE products matched with their generous rewards plan attract network marketing veterans as well as those looking for a healthier way of life. Their broad product line includes everything from weight-loss and increased energy to anti-aging skin care. The variety allows for a wide range of customers to which the Independent Business Owners (IBOs) cater.

While IBOs across the globe share the opportunity for a healthier and more financially sound future, the corporate staff based out of American Fork, UT continues to provide support appreciated by their IBOs. By creating innovative promotions and awarding IBOs at each stage of their growth, IBOs are empowered and motivated from the moment they sign up.

Continually finding ways to get the word out, Genesis PURE is consistently increasing their visibility online with improved search engine optimization and promotion through social media such as Genesis Pure Facebook, Twitter, Blogging and LinkedIn which has heightened their web visibility and increased brand awareness and loyalty. March 2010 was the biggest sales month to date for Genesis PURE. But their exponential growth since their launch suggests that they won’t be stopping any time soon. This young company will undoubtedly be one to watch for years to come.

To learn more about Genesis PURE please visit www.GenesisPURE.com

About Genesis PURE

Genesis PURE launched in October of 2009 and was created to offer the very best in nutrition and opportunity to the world. Genesis PURE is focused on revolutionizing the nutritional network marketing world through their product philosophy of “Cleanse, Balance, Build”, their lucrative rewards plan and experienced management team. PURE is more than a name at Genesis PURE. They maintain that what differentiates them is that they have PURE intentions, ingredients, loyalty and quality.

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While most people, even the Web savvy ones, still don’t even get basic SEO, search engine optimisation has evolved drastically over the the last couple of years. SEO is now much more about visibility in popular places than anything else these days.

First page ranking on Google results is just one of a plethora of options to get people to see your website and buy your products or services.

Every business is unique to some extent and there’s no one size fits all strategy any more. You need to apply different SEO techniques to an ecommerce site than you would to a local business web presence. You have to use different methods for a global player than you do for a local supplier.

So what kind of SEO services do you really need? There are certain business types that are common. I’d like to describe a few of them and to suggest what kind of SEO services they usually need. This way you may get an idea.

local business
A local business is a business with a real street address where people actually go to personally to buy something. A florist is a local business, a Chiropractor, Dentist, CPA, Lawyer. A local business needs LOCAL SEO. What is local SEO? Local SEO can mean a lot of things. It starts with optimisation for a query like Woodland Hills Psychologist, a good listing on Google Local/Maps, yellow pages online and a myriad of other measures we can’t fit in this blog post but you get the idea.

e-commerce site
An e-commerce site is in most cases an online shop in other words, but also a shopping search engine is ecommerce. In case you sell any kind of product via the Internet you probably have an e-commerce site. An e-commerce site needs good old link building to rank in regular search reusults. It also needs its products to get submitted to relevant shopping search engines (unless it’s such an engine itself). Also you need so called conversion rate optimization for e-commerce to make sure the visitors you already get and the additional ones who appear via SEO find what they look for and hit the “buy now” button.

start up
A start up is often a company that has build something new. It may be a software or an online service. The most important web services of today have been start ups in the past. Google, Facebook, Twitter to name just a few. A start up may offer a product or service people don’t even know that it exists. So they can’t possibly search for it, can they? Many will search for it circumscribing the kind of product they seek. Most of the others would probably seek it when they’d knew. So maybe you need something else. Viral marketing for instance, or video SEO for your presentation.

virtual goods
Some businesses sell virtual goods these days. What are virtual goods? Music downloads are completely virtual. Also images are in most cases purely virtual. Software and apps (mobile software). So you already see you might need some visibility in a mass of music search engines. Also image SEO to apear in Google. Mobile SEO is obviously the way to go for apps. Conventional software for computers on the other hand requires some heave link building like in the old days. There’s lots of competition here.

global business
A global player is not necessarily a multinational corporation. In case you ship to the US, Europe and Japan you already a global player. While multingual SEO might be a good choice not everybody can afford to optimize for a 12 of more national markets. Your best bet is more likely language independent content: Images and other media that don’t depend heavily on language.

Of course few businesses match just one of those types. Depending on your own mix you have to adapt. Thus your SEO methodology will vary. Even more confused by now? Overwhelmed by too many buzzwords?

I don’t blame anybody who doesn’t get SEO today.

After all it’s a full time job to understand and master SEO. That’s why we’re here. Otherwise SEO would be dead by now. The industry is still growing rapidly though.

Do you want to know what kind of SEO services you really need? Let us tell you.

Contact us and get a quick assessment for free. We might even tell you that you don’t need SEO services at all. In case you really need SEO services you can get a quote as well.

#1 On Google In Just 6 Weeks, Small business Success.

I’m pleased to announce one of our clients (www.southbaytreatment.com) who came to us just 2 months ago and had no website or Internet presence at all. Now has the #1 natural search result in Google for his territory and the top keyword he was after as well as 1st page listings on 8 of the 10 initial keywords we targeted.

My client is a successful Clinical Psychologist and Ph.D. who runs a therapy center in Torrance, California. We created a website in just 2 days using WordPress then launched right into an SEO campaign to promote the site and get him ranked for the main keywords. We have also got him a website grade of 85% from websitegrader.com in this time …

#1 on Google in his territory for “Clinical Psychologists Torrace” …

Due to the website being so new we’re not yet showing up in the Google local listings next to the maps, everything has been submitted to Google for this and fully optimized. I imagine within the next 2-3 months we will be predominately featured there also.

Other Keyword Success, 1st Page Results ….
clinical psychologists torrance – #1
clinical psychologist torrance – #3
child psychologist torrance – #2
child therapist – #5
teen therapy – #7
clinical psychologist phd – #7

Here’s a great video by Matt Cutts at Google on different ways to generate solid reputable links to your site …

How 11 companies, like Nissan, Microsof, OfficeMax are listening, engaging and measuring.

Here’s the report, done by Marketing Profs.

By Andre Voget, CEO Axandra Search Engine Facts

Getting listed on Google’s first result page is the goal of many webmasters. Unfortunately, many webmasters still do the wrong things to improve their rankings.

It’s not possible to get top 10 rankings on Google by focusing on a single strategy. Getting listed on Google requires you to work on all elements of your website. Here are the top 5 factors that influence the position of your website in Google’s search results:

Ranking factor 1: website accessibility

It doesn’t make sense to optimize your web pages if search engines cannot access your web pages:

Your robots.txt file should allow search engines to visit your web pages. If your robots.txt file contains errors then many search engines won’t list your website.

The HTML code of your web pages should be error-free and your web server should return the correct response code. The contents of your web pages should be readable to search engine spiders. Details can be found here.
Before you start to optimize your web pages, check if search engines can read your web page content. You can do this with IBP’s spider simulator. Double-check your robots.txt.

Ranking factor 2: site architecture

Google wants to show relevant websites in the search results. Your website shouldn’t be a collection of random web pages. If you want to get top 10 rankings on Google, the pages of your website should be related.

Your web pages should show Google that your website is relevant to a certain topic. All pages of your website should be linked. If possible, web surfers should reach any page of your website with a maximum of three clicks.

The links and the directory structure of your website should make it easy to search engines to categorize the contents of your website.

Ranking factor 3: keywords

Choosing the right keywords is one of the most important steps. If you choose the wrong keywords, you won’t succeed with your campaign.

Optimize different pages of your website for different keyphrases. The more pages of your website you optimize, the better.

Start with very targeted keyphrases that consists of many words, for example “find inexpensive hotels in brussels”.

When you have top rankings for these targeted keyphrases, proceed with more general keywords such as “hotels in brussels”.

When you have top rankings for these keyphrases, you can proceed with very general keywords such as “hotels”.
In general, targeted keywords have a much higher conversion rate than general keywords, i.e. you will get more sales per visitor with “find inexpensive hotels in brussels” than with “hotels”.

Also think about the type of visitor that you attract with a keyword. Are these people interested in information or do they want to buy?

Use IBP’s comprehensive keyword tools to find the keywords that will work best with your site. You can find further information on how to find the correct keyword type in the IBP manual (PDF).

Ranking factor 4: content

Your website won’t get high rankings on Google if it only offers articles and affiliate links that can be found on dozens of other websites.

Separate your website from the rest by creating unique and trustworthy content. Write your own articles about the topic of your website, publish them on your own website and make your website a useful resource.

Ranking factor 5: links from other websites

It is not possible to get high rankings on Google without having links from other websites.

The more links point to your website, the more likely it is that your website gets good positions in Google’s search results. The links to your website should be from trusted websites.

If a web page that links to you is related to your own website then the effect of that link on the search engine rankings of your website is higher than the effect of an unrelated link.

It also helps if social bookmark websites link to your website. If many people bookmark your website on social bookmark sites, then this is a sign that your website might deserve high rankings.

A small error in one element can destroy your effects in all other ranking elements. For that reason, it is important to use the right strategy when optimizing your website.

Detailed step-by-step instructions and checklists can be found in our free search engine optimization eBook.