One of the newest and most talked about Internet marketing strategies these days is Landing Page Optimization. Your Landing Page Design can make or break your conversion rate.

All the search engine optimization (SEO) Internet marketing and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising isn’t going to create the sales you want with bad landing pages. You’d be just wasting your time and money.

And the truth is that almost EVERY page on your website is a landing page, except for your Privacy Policy, Terms of Use or Service, and possibly your About page.

I’ve seen websites more than DOUBLE their conversions with landing pages that are properly designed to convert traffic to conversions…those opt-in sign ups and direct sales.

Think about it — doubling your sales without increasing your PPC advertising or without increasing your SEO efforts! How much money could that put in your pocket?

When you take advantage of strategies like that, that’s when you start beating out your competition!

What’s Landing Page Optimization All About?

When searchers come to our websites from the search engines, they are in a path from one website to another. We have to interrupt that process, drawing these searchers into our website and into our story. We must balance the connection with our visitors and make an emotional connection, while offering them real substance, as well.

We MUST answer these questions:

1. where am I?

2. what can I do here (what is your offer)?

3. Why should I look here and STAY rather than click away? This MUST be answered in the top 4 to 4/12 inches of your Web pages (above the fold)

How Do You Begin Optimizing Your Landing Page Design?

First, start by clearly explaining what you want your website visitors to do and WHY they should do it.

Why should they buy from you or opt-in for future contact? What’s in it for them?

Why should they choose you over other websites they can visit? What separates you from your competition?

Essentially, what’s your Value Proposition?

You should be able to clearly explain the advantage to your website visitors in 2 to 3 short sentences.

Right now, if you’re not sure exactly how to describe your Value Proposition, you’re surely NOT alone! The great majority of people I coach with their websites are in the same boat, when they start out.

My suggestion: Start brainstorming and making good notes. It also helps to have the input of a Internet marketing consulting coach outside your business, who can help you clearly define and explain what you offer your website visitors in a compelling manner, without using your industry jargon and lingo.

Reduce Anxiety From Your Purchase And Opt-In Processes

Anxiety can also be defined as fear or concern. Now, you can never have a anxiety-free website, if you sell a product or service or if you seek an opt-in email address.

Anxiety occurs in opt-in sign up processes, when providing an email address. When making a purchase, providing credit card information causes anxiety.

But how can you REDUCE the anxiety to the least level possible?

There are many techniques you can follow to accomplish this.

One of the best examples is to post your Privacy Policy page link right next to your sign up button, for your opt-in contact. This helps reassure your visitors you aren’t selling their email address and will generate a higher opt-in conversion rate than not posting your privacy policy, all other things equal.

Other anxiety reducing techniques are:

1. emphasize credit card security when ordering 2. offer pricing guarantees 3. deal with product | service quality concerns with guarantees and third-party certifications, awards, etc.

These techniques must be used at the exact point where the anxiety occurs.

Next, Reducing Friction From Your Web Pages

Friction can also be defined as annoyance and irritation. To maximize your sales and opt-in conversion rate, you need to minimize the friction all across your website.

Friction occurs in the prospect’s MIND, not really on the page.

It is a Psychological resistance to a given element in the sales process.

So, how can you reduce friction?

One way is to limit fields to the minimum number needed for both purchase and opt-in forms. Friction = Length and Difficulty.

While space here limits a complete discussion of all the techniques you can take advantage of, another way to limit friction is to make your landing page design take advantage of natural eye movement, working with it, rather than against it. You’ve got to be careful with multi-column designs.

Wrapping It Up

Consider the value to you of an Internet marketing consulting coach, who can help maximize your landing page design at an affordable cost.

Using Landing Page Optimization techniques will help you potentially DOUBLE your conversions…your direct sales and opt-in sign ups…without increasing your PPC advertising expenses and without requiring higher SEO rankings.

This is real money we’re talking about.

And there are even coaches out there who can train you to do the work yourself, without you having to pay full-service prices (and without you having to spend the money or the time to become fully trained and certified in Landing Page Optimization).

This could turn out to be the KEY element missing from your Internet marketing plan.

Editor’s Note: This article previously published here.

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Marketing online since 2004, Paul Marshall can help you market on a budget. He’s a Landing Page Designer offering affordable marketing services (and d-i-y Coaching). Receive your Free Introductory Consultation, just visit Strategic Web Marketing.net today!

Read more articles written by Paul Marshall

Some website owners are more frustrated about Google optimization than for other search engines. They feel it is harder to perform search engine optimization for Google.

Whether you are making direct sales from your website or sales lead generation (or both), optimizing for Google doesn’t need to be that hard.

In fact, in time you may find it easier to perform SEO for Google than for other search engines.

Remember That Google Is Much Smarter Than The Other Search Engines

Since Google is more intelligent, you have to treat them differently.

If you’re trying to spam them, their intelligence is going to be a problem for you. If you’re playing by the rules and providing valuable content for searchers, then you should have no problem.

What Google wants is valuable content that satisfies their users’ search queries. They want searchers to find what they’re looking for, not clicking the back button quickly, but who stay on the sites they visit.

There are some in the SEO community who believe time your visitors spent on your site is one of the calculations Google uses right now in their algorithm to assign organic rankings.

Whether this is the case or not is really irrelevant: we should all want to deliver quality content that meets our searchers query, keeps them on our sites and that leads to a conversion, a sale or sales lead generation.

Are You Optimizing For Yahoo! Search And Bing, Too?

With Yahoo! Search and Bing (formerly Live Search and previously MSN) you need to have the keyword phrase you optimize for on the page. There may be some exceptions, but this is a solid rule to follow.

The order of the keywords makes a difference with them, too.

As an example, with Google, Blue Widget and Widget Blue are treated the same way. Not so with Yahoo! and Live, they are treated as completely different search phrases.

Given the very high market share that Google has, you may want to just optimize for Google and not Yahoo! or Live. After all, depending on whose numbers you’re looking at, Google’s market share is basically 60% to 70% of all U.S. searches!

(And there are hundreds of other much smaller search engines, with such small market shares that they aren’t normally worth worrying about.)

But if you decide to also optimize for Yahoo! Search and for Live Search, then you will likely have to create more pages, to cover all your keyword phrases.

So, as you create more pages for your keywords, you clutter up the Internet, unless those pages are really unique, valuable content.

And then there is that duplicate content filter that Google has…you don’t want to run afoul of that.

If you do optimize for the other engines, unless the additional content is very unique, you might be advised to keep Google out of those pages (using your robots.txt file).

Knowing That Google Is More Intelligent, How Do We Optimize Differently For Google?

With Google’s use of LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), your pages do NOT actually have to contain the keyword phrase(s) you’re optimizing for. But your pages had better contain words strongly related to your chosen keyword phrases.

In fact, it is common to see high ranking pages where the keyword phrase isn’t in any of the HTML tags and where it also isn’t in the page text, either. Common keyword density numbers for top ranking pages in Google range from 30% all the way down to 0% keyword density.

Why is this and how do we benefit performing Google optimization?

Google is smart enough to understand similar words and phrases (now is when we get to use that word Synonym from English class). Thus, the actual keyword phrase doesn’t have to be on the page. But words related to the same theme as your keyword phrases need to be on the page.

But if our keywords don’t actually have to be on the page for Google to understand the page is about our subject (our keyword phrases), how does Google make that determination?

Off-Page SEO Is The Key To Your Google Optimization And To Your Sales Lead Generation

The links from other websites to your Web pages and what these links say about your pages is the KEY to optimizing for Google. Remember, links need to be pointed towards your interior pages, not just to your home page.

And those links need anchor text.

Anchor text is the wording that people click on to go to your Web page, when the actual link doesn’t show your website url (and file name, if going to an interior page).

Anchor text tells Google (and to a lesser degree, other search engines) what your Web page is about.

Even if the actual keyword phrases aren’t used on your page, the theme of the page text should match the anchor text pointed to that page. You want the wording to be compatible and complimentary.

You don’t want to confuse Google as to your pages’ themes. That can cause real problems.

Quantity Versus Quality

When considering links to your Web pages, quantity is important. You will have to research your competition to give you an idea as to the number of links you may need.

Two tools you can look into are SEO Elite and OptiLink. You can Google both.

But MUCH more important is the quality of your links. The better quality your links, the fewer you will need versus your competition.

Part of how you can evaluate quality of potential links to your site is that site’s home page Google Page Rank.

Now, Google Page Rank is on a page-basis, not a site-wide basis. But the home page Page Rank can tell you if Google considers that site to be an “authority site”.

You can install the free Google toolbar if you haven’t already and activate the Page Rank feature. While the information is literally months old, it’s the easiest way to view a page’s Page Rank.

You want some links to your site from websites with a home page Google Page Rank of at least 5.

One thing you do want to watch: Don’t have to high a percentage of your links containing the same anchor text. Aim for no more than 50% of your anchor text to any page being the same exact anchor text.

Wrapping It Up

For effective Google optimization, start by pointing enough quality links to your Web pages. One-way links are much more effective than reciprocal links, where you link back to the site that has linked to you.

Stay away from triangulated or 3-way links schemes. This is where site A links to site B which in turn links to site C. This is a “no-no” which Google can catch and will penalize for.

Use your keywords as anchor text for your links. Hold down the percentage…don’t have 70% of your links to one page using the same exact anchor text!

Even if you don’t have the keyword phrases on your page, you can still have top rankings, as long as your links’ theme matches your Web page content those links are aimed at.

Following this strategy, you can also optimize your pages for more than one keyword phrase. And without creating dozens and dozens of junk pages, just to cover all your keywords.

You’ll be able to increase your online sales and your sales lead generation, more easily.

Editor’s Note: Also published here.

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Marketing online since 2004, Paul Marshall can help you market on a
budget. He’s a Sales Lead Generation expert and an
Affordable SEO Services specialist offering affordable marketing services (and d-i-y Coaching). Receive your Free Introductory Consultation, just visit Strategic Web Marketing.net today!

Read more articles written by Paul Marshall

Can any new search engine beat Google, probably not, mainly because Google isn’t going anywhere but up. It is the dominant search engine with around 72 percent of U.S. online searches and its percentages are much higher in other parts of the world. (Source: Hitwise) However, there are some serious new competitors that may just take a bite out of Google’s rosy search numbers. Never know, one or several of them, may just give Google a run for those all important search engine dollars.

Recently, there has been a whole army of new search engines debuting on the web. If you’re a full-time online marketer like me, you really have to keep your eyes open to what is happening on the web, especially relating to search engines which deliver most of your quality traffic. Also keep in mind, this piece may be fairly biased since Google is directly or indirectly responsible for around 80% of my online revenue, so any opinions may be slanted in Google’s favor, not that they need any favors from me or anyone.

But as an online marketer you have to try to remain objective and examine all angles in regards to these new search engines. Despite this, in marketing and webmaster circles, everyone will know even if you have the number one ranking for a certain keyword in all three major engines Google, Yahoo! and MSN – Google supplies the most traffic, hands down.

Despite its obvious dominance, Google is still basically the new kid on the block. We have to remember, there have been many search engines before Google and there will be many more search engines after Google. Every entity has its day and then hands the torch along to whatever comes next. It’s one of those subtle facts of life we all learn eventually.

Everybody has their day – empires, countries, leaders, companies… or even search engines. Are Google’s days as top dog really numbered? Probably not in the immediate future, but there are some new kids on the block that could definitely kick some sand in the face of Google and stir things up, we might even see a few serious squabbles here and there.

In a recent article on CNN, by John D. Sutter, entitled “New Search Engines Aspire To Supplement Google” the author examines some recent new search engines. The author discusses: Twine, Hakia, Searchme, Cuil, Kosmix, Wolfram Alpha, Topsy, TweetMeme and OneRiot. Each of these are different, making your web search more personal, more visual, or connecting your search to new social networks like FaceBook and Twitter.

Some experts say Wolfram Alpha is the most likely candidate to give Google some serious competition because Wolfram can do something Google can’t; it can create information rather than just reading/presenting content already on the web. Will it present a solid threat to Google’s dominance?

Perhaps, a more fitting sparring partner will come from an old rival with very deep, deep pockets. We are talking about the new search engine from Microsoft called Bing, which is very similar to Google in many ways, yet different. Bing’s results are very similar to Google in a lot of ways, yet Bing serves up the results in a very pleasing arrangement, with a nice preview button for each listing and giving you related searches and your search history on the left hand side. Only time will tell if everyone would rather be binging instead of googling. To Bing or not to Bing, that is the question? There’s a very informative article on Bing by Farhad Manjoo on Slate entitled: “Beware Google: Microsoft’s New Search Engine Isn’t Half-bad.” Just Bing or Google to find it!

I personally like this search engine much better than MSN mainly because the home page of Bing is very appealing and only has the search box on it so you’re not distracted with other news listings like on MSN and Yahoo! One of the main reasons for Google’s success, besides the superior search results, has been its simplicity. Keep it simple and you may just be able to compete.

Then again, this is a bit of a biased judgment, since many of my own keywords and sites rank high in Bing; some even higher than they are listed in Google. I routinely monitor countless keyword phrases in all the search engines and lately Google has been favoring big Brand Name listings on their first page results. We are also seeing more Product Listings (Old Froogle), more video and more news listings… competition for Google’s first page has become multi-layered and extremely competitive. What’s a poor small online marketer to do when Google goes corporate?

Actually, Bing is not my favorite search engine of the new ones forcing their way into the spotlight.

For me, the one that shows the most promise and may give Google some competition is Searchme, which is a visual search (much like the iTunes interface) where you can shuffle through screenshots of webpages instead of a list of links. Searchme, which touts itself as the first multimedia search engine, has been around for a few years but is not widely known to web users. Performing a search on Searchme with a 24 inch monitor and 64-bit Windows is a hundred times more enjoyable than using Google Search or Bing for that matter. It is a hundred times faster than Google mainly because you can generally find your information without clicking through to the sites displayed.

Searchme is truly an eye opener but can it give Google some serious competition. The jury is still out, but I believe over time as web users upgrade their computers, operating systems, and their graphics… Searchme will be more accessible to more web users. Never know, with the right backing and marketing, any of these search engines, especially Searchme and Bing could blossom into a formidable opponent even for the mighty Google.

Here’s why: Human Nature!

Whether we admit it or not, most of us (Humans) are lazy, we want the fastest and easiest route to solving any question or problem. Searchme gives us the answer much quicker than Google and in a much nicer way. Mainly because we are also visual creatures, given the choice between receiving pages of text and viewing images of sites/answers, most of us will take the visual route – we will choose TV over radio, music videos over records… video enhanced content over just plain static HTML. As the web turns into more of an interactive multimedia operation; visual search will always win out over text search any day of the year.

Most humans also have a need for speed, in our fast paced life styles, we all want a speedy solution to our problems. Search is no different, we want quick answers now, we want instant solutions and immediate gratification. Nature of the beast. If Searchme, Bing or any of the other search engines becomes faster than Google at giving the right answer, then it’s a whole new ballgame.

Google must obviously know there are challenges to its search engine dominance. Otherwise, why would they be offering many new features in their SERPs; we are seeing more images and videos. Plus, Google has just introduced the “show options” link at the top of their SERPs, which presents their search results in many different ways. They even have introduced the “Wonder Wheel” as another viewing option, which gives a whole new way of using Google’s search results.

Google’s Achilles’ Heel may just be the thing that gives it all its revenue: text ads. There may be a backlash on all those Google ads littered across the web, especially among the younger computer savvy crowd using such sites like the Google owned YouTube, where Google has nearly obliterated the videos with its ads. Everyone dislikes advertising, no matter what form it takes.

However, any news of Google’s demise will be greatly exaggerated, because Google, like any smart company with tons of resources, has kept morphing and changing with the times, quickly adapting to new features as our usage of the web keeps changing. Google has perfected the art of staying one step ahead of the competition. This is one champion that won’t go down without a fight to the finish. Top dogs rarely do.

If they ever present a serious challenge to Google, Searchme, Bing or any of the above search engines, will have a formidable opponent in the opposing corner, one that has gained almost insurmountable prestige and brand recognition around the world. Any major battle will instantly have a “David vs Goliath” scenario attached to it. And we all know how that one played out!

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The author is a full-time online marketer who has numerous
niche sites. These 10 SEO Tactics Bring Me Over 2000 Visitors Daily:
SEO Tips. To learn more Internet Marketing Tactics try:
Marketing Tools. Copyright (c) 2009 Titus Hoskins. http://www.bizwaremagic.com This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

Read more articles written by Titus Hoskins

White Hat SEO methods are meant to improve the performance of your organic search engine marketing campaign, while adhering to the terms of service laid out by Google.

What Does the Term ‘White Hat SEO’ Mean?

White Hat SEO is the opposite of Black Hat SEO. Generally, search marketers who practice White Hat SEO (or ethical organic search marketing) techniques try to improve their organic rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs), while maintaining the integrity of their website and following Google’s steadfast set of rules.

Some examples of White Hat practices include:

* Offering quality content, products and services
* Using relevant keyword-rich meta tags
* Making your website easy to navigate

Why are Ethical SEO Techniques Important for Good SEO?

In short, engaging in suspicious behavior can get your site banned from Google and other search engines, which should be a big deterrent for any search marketer or Web master. As the undisputed king of the search engines, Google is used by millions of people every day, and each user presents an opportunity for your website to be discovered. That said, Google has the power to drive tons of traffic to your website, so being banned from Google would result in a dramatic drop off in traffic and sales for business websites.

Considering all the work that goes into your website, think about how devastating it would be to get banned from the Internet’s most popular search engine. Adding insult to injury, once you’re banned from Google, it can be impossible to get re-listed again. A lifetime ban from Google would have tremendous consequences for your website, which for many companies could very well put them out of business.

Should You Use White Hat SEO Techniques for Your Website?

Implementing White Hat SEO practices is the most effective means of establishing a principled and successful website and business. In addition, practicing ethical search marketing ensures that your website will have longevity, authority and credibility with the search engines.

Let’s look back at each of the above examples of ethical organic search techniques and go deeper to see how to implement each one.

Offer Quality Content, Products and Services

The key to getting traction in the search engines is to author great content around your quality products and/or services. People like good content and so do search engines because good content makes for a good experience for the user. The better your content the more likely people are to visit and explore your website and buy your products.

Using Relevant, Keyword-Rich Meta Tags

A big part of ethical SEO is the inclusion of meta tags in your “off page” site content. Meta tags include meta descriptions, title tags and to a lesser degree meta keywords. Treat your title tags and meta descriptions like ad copy and include target keywords and a strong call to action. For the record, meta descriptions and title tags are the “ad copy” that displays for your website in the SERPs when users run a search query and can be the difference in whether or not a user chooses to click on your site.

Making Your Website Easy to Navigate

Organizing your website to be user-friendly and search engine-friendly is another important part of ethical SEO. To do this, you should map out your pages ahead of time and create a logical hierarchy, grouping pages in a tree with home page first, followed by top level category pages, then leading down to more specific tertiary product pages as drop downs in the sub navigation. This logical formatting makes is easy for both users and search engine spiders to navigate your site and discover information.

When in Doubt, Play it Safe

White Hat SEO practices produce effective, ongoing and principled enhancements to your website and are always good business practice. Unethical SEO practices may deliver quick results, but the results are short-lived. Plus, getting on Google’s bad side is the equivalent of a death sentence for most websites. By following ethical search marketing practices, you’ll stay in Google’s good graces.

Ken Lyons is a Marketing Manager for WordStream, Inc. WordStream offers a suite of dynamic keyword research tools and AdWords Tools for keyword grouping and keyword suggestion for paid and organic search engine marketing.

Article Source: http://bb-articles.com

When you turn on your computer and connect to Internet Explorer or Firefox, call up Google or Yahoo! and begin to look for information, have you ever wondered what is happening behind the scenes of the words or phrases you entered into the search window?

The instant you type in your search request and hit enter, search engines, like Google, are scanning their databases for the best possible match; and almost instantly what you see on the results page, are links to the most relevant sites that the search engine has indexed.

So, how do the search engines build their databases, or indexes? A search engine finds information for its database by getting the information from their web crawlers, spiders, or robots.

A web crawler (spider or robot) is a program or automated script, which browses URLs (web pages) on the Internet in an automated manner. Web crawlers are mainly used by search engines to index downloaded pages for search term relevancy and for automated maintenance tasks on a website, such as checking links or validating HTML code. The more relevant the site’s content is to keywords or search terms, the easier it is for search engine robots to crawl, index, and rank the site.

Most web developers and even some seasoned search engine optimization (SEO) professionals tend to forget the overall purpose of the search engines, which is this: search engines are designed to find the best results for users and to provide the user with a compelling experience.

Its common knowledge amongst developers and optimizers that good SEO practices are to make a site more user-friendly for visitors, and that the site needs to be easy to find; when you build a site that focuses on the needs of your audience, you are simultaneously building a site that search engines can easily crawl and will be interested in.

Compelling Content For Users and For Crawlers

Creating compelling and useful content will likely have the greatest impact on your website’s popularity. Internet users know what they are looking for, and with good content, you can make sure they find it! The one thing we know for certain is that when an end-user can find what they are looking for quickly, and they like what they find, they will tell others about it. They spread the word through blog posts, social media services, emails, forums, and many other means. Organic or word-of-mouth buzz is what helps build your site’s reputation with both users and the leading search engines, and it rarely comes without quality content.

When creating your content, keep in mind that search engines love providing web users with relevant results, so the more relevant the content is to the end user, the more likely it will eventually be served up by the search engine to that end user.

In the vast field of optimization, you can’t learn enough about the proper use of keywords and keyword research. When composing your site s content, it is not always the best practice to focus on the most competitive term in your copy. Search terms that are overused create redundancy; and just because a term is used frequently, it doesn’t mean it s the best available term and certainly doesn’t make it the most relevant to your site’s mission. By focusing on the less frequently used keywords, it is possible to gain a significant amount of traffic overall from several longer, lower search volume phrases.

Just as important as getting the search engines to give you a high ranking, you want web users to visit your site for a reason, and that reason is to do business with you. So once you get them to your site, you will need to create content that will keep them there. One of the most effective ways to do that is by creating content as if you were your own audience, your own customer. If you were your own customer, what search terms would you use? What intriguing piece of information would keep you on your site and make you want to do business with yourself? Thinking in terms of your customer’s needs, will help you create content that search engines will gladly index and share, resulting in higher ranking and a more defined audience.

Another way to develop quality content for both users and search engines is to know who your competitors are. Once you identify your competitors by using common keywords and phrases, you will discover how to make your keyword list more focused to your business, and at the same time you will build your own unique image. You don t want to look exactly like your competition, so do your homework and create your own search engine identity.

Tony Mandarich owns & operates Mandarich LLC, a full-service web media business specializing in web site development & optimization, video production, photography & Internet marketing.

Article Source: http://bb-articles.com