Source: http://www.getelastic.com/how-publishers-can-embrace-multiple-platforms/
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Conversion optimization is an ongoing concern for serious businesses. When viewed in the shadow of a big change like Google's recent Panda Farmer update, optimizing your site's existing traffic streams becomes even more attractive - or necessary - to remain competitive.
A book was released recently by O'Reilly, authored by Khalid Saleh and Ayat Shukairy, the co-founders of Invesp - a leading conversion optimization company. Entitled: Conversion Optimization: The Art and Science of Converting Prospects to Customers it is now available from Amazon and most other book providers.
For developing a better understanding of the foundational basics and lucrative potential of conversion optimization, it is a book I would highly recommend.
Conversion optimizing is a dense subject, with lots of bits-and-bytes of small, related information tied together to make a complete picture. Saleh and Shukairy tackle this book with the intention of making this dense, complicated subject easier to understand conceptually, and therefore, profit from.
The first two chapters offer simple foundational ideas for the novice, covering the general concepts, analytics and formulas typically used in measuring and improving conversions. However, in the introduction the authors make this clear - and suggest those with a bit of experience may want to skip right to chapter three. I appreciated the suggestion, but read from the beginning anyway. :)
I like the way this book progresses in this manner - each successive chapter builds on the ideas posited in previous chapters. Even though I have some experience with optimization, I read the book from the beginning. While it was not new information to me, it was nice to reaffirm where my thinking aligns with conversion experts and identify places where our opinions diverged.
Once chapter three starts, the simple ideas presented in the beginning of the book are built-on slowly, which encourages you to see how smaller ideas nourish the roots of larger results. This is a an example of a well considered and deftly executed book idea - and it makes reading and learning easier.
A simple tone from industry experts is common with O'Reilly books - it is part of what makes them solid study materials, especially for introducing you to new subjects. What I think Saleh and Shukairy do uniquely well, is inject just enough warmth in their tone to keep the flow engaging without overdoing it and diluting the impact of the subject matter. It is a careful balancing act - they obviously have a ton of information to share and don't want to overwhelm the reader, but at the same time need to keep it on a level that most anyone can embrace.
Cold facts often need warming-up before serving them. Saleh and Shukairy say: "Conversion optimization is a blend of science and art. It is the intersection of creative, marketing, and analytical disciplines." I would add that creating an easily digestible tome on a genuinely dry subject matter is an art of its own. It requires an intersecting of knowledge, warmth, experience and understanding, and the writing skills to blend these seamlessly. Saleh and Shukairy use a simple tone and style to layer their ideas upon each other and leave the reader with a sense of foundation and conceptual understanding.
The meat of this book concentrates on presenting eight principles that combine into what Saleh and Shukairy call the "Conversion Framework." They believe that understanding this framework correctly allows you to apply it judiciously and continue to benefit from conversion optimizing efforts both online and offline. They want to teach a man to fish, not simply feed him.
Here again is where the reader benefits from the approach of these specific authors. Rather than using ideas that are rooted in topical or fleeting "what is working now" type of thinking, Saleh and Shukairy want you to avoid the simple path, and learn something deeper - something that will continue to offer you value.
These concepts are explained and well supported by examples, numbers and facts. For example, when discussing the creation of personas, they are adamant to warn against getting lost in this effort and provide realistic numbers for you to use to keep your own efforts in-check. While they are encouraging the implementation of conceptual information, they offer guidelines and warnings that are much more concrete. They walk you slowly to the intersection of art and science.
After the Conversion Framework concepts are presented and supported in chapters 3-8, in chapter nine Saleh and Shukairy present you with 49 specific things to consider in optimizing your website. This part of the book is something very concrete that you can return to for any new project. While you may not want to do all 49 of these things to every effort, it is a safe bet that your best moves for most optimization projects are clearly detailed within them. I'd recommend a bookmark here.
One thing I like about these 49 specific things to address, is that Saleh and Shukairy are candid about what to expect. If a change is not likely to produce much of a lift, they state it. What this does, is helps you to approach your own efforts with additional perspective on potential results. You can save time through the benefit of following the authors' expert advice.
Ultimately, the informational depth of a book like this should work to save you time and efforts - bringing an understood focus and purpose to your next move. By establishing a conceptual framework and then offering concrete, actionable items Saleh and Shukairy present a well-balanced and useful resource that achieves this purpose.
While I feel most people who work in selling products would benefit from the ideas presented in this book, the authors themselves offer a warning in the preface to answer the question, "Who Should Not Read This Book?"
We cast a wide net when we wrote this book, but there are a few people who might not enjoy it. Developers whose work stays far from the actual user of their application (i.e., developers of backend applications) aren't likely to enjoy this book. Those who believe that conversion optimization is only about testing may not like our approach to optimization. Finally, those who are looking for pure tactics and are not concerned with the theory behind conversion optimization might find some of the chapters in the book boring.
Personally, I believe that with the simple tone and structured logic in the way the concepts are presented, this is a quick read that offers a lot to gain. Having the 49 items to optimize as a reference-ready checklist simply adds to the overall value.
Consider this: Brand new, this book (offered bundled in both print an e-format) retails for less than $40 US, and you can buy it as just an e-book for even less. This is a very small investment if even one idea in it pays off for you somewhere. If more of these ideas resonate, you may implement new strategies that increase your returns by thousands, or even hundreds-of-thousands of dollars. The potential effect of conversion optimizing cannot be overstated.
In times when it gets harder to count on the search engines to bring you more and more traffic, it is a shrewd move indeed to look toward conversion optimization. Saleh and Shukairy offer you a simple, straightforward means to consider; reading Conversion Optimization: The Art and Science of Converting Prospects to Customers can easily be seen as a small, but smart investment in remaining competitive.
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Google announced Commerce Search 3.0 yesterday. In essence, this is a massive update to their search solution for e-commerce sites. The key features of this update are:
Instant Search: Every keypress starts streaming product results and search suggestions directly within the search bar.
Realtime Inventory Search: Users can see if an item is in stock in a nearby store. Again, streamed directly within the search toolbar results.
On-site Complimentary Product Promotions: Merchandisers can create banner ads for product offers related to the search query, which when clicked, land on a query-based landing page - essentially a search results page.
User Engagement Based Product Recommendations: Essentially a Google Labs experiment for a "users who viewed/bought this product also viewed/bought" type web app as is commonly found on many high end e-commerce sites.
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Only a small percentage of your visitors leave a comment. This group of people is probably also interested in subscribing to your newsletter, if you have one. So I created a method to add a "subscribe to my WordPress newsletter" checkbox to my comment form a couple of weeks ago. The result? 40 new subscribers [...]
Turn your commenters into subscribers! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!
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Are Text Link Ads Effective?
Post from: Quality SEO Services & Link Building Services
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I was looking for information about the nuclear reactor issue in Japan and am glad it did not turn out as bad as it first looked!
But in that process of searching for information I kept stumbling into garbage hollow websites. I was cautious not to click on the malware results, but of the mainstream sites covering the issue, one of the most flagrant efforts was from the Huffington Post.
AOL recently announced that they were firing 15% to 20% of their staff. No need for original stories or even staff writers when you can literally grab a third party tweet, wrap it in your site design, and rank it in Google. Inline with that spirit, I took a screenshot. Rather than calling it the Huffington Post I decided a more fitting title would be plundering host. :D
We were told that the content farm update was to get rid of low quality web pages & yet that information-less page was ranking at the top of their search results, when it was nothing but a 3rd party tweet wrapped in brand and ads.
How does Huffington Post get away with that?
You can imagine in a hyperspace a bunch of points, some points are red, some points are green, and in others there?s some mixture. Your job is to find a plane which says that most things on this side of the place are red, and most of the things on that side of the plane are the opposite of red. - Google's Amit Singhal
If you make it past Google's arbitrary line in the sand there is no limit to how much spamming and jamming you can do.
we actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side. - Matt Cutts
(G)arbitrage never really goes away, it just becomes more corporate.
The problem with Google arbitrarily picking winners and losers is the winners will mass produce doorway pages. With much of the competition (including many of the original content creators) removed from the search results, this sort of activity is simply printing money.
As bad as that sounds, it is actually even worse than that. Today Google Alerts showed our brand being mentioned on a group-piracy website built around a subscription model of selling 3rd party content without permission! As annoying as that feels, of course there are going to be some dirtbags on the way that you have to deal with from time to time. But now that the content farm update has went through, some of the original content producers are no longer ranking for their own titles, whereas piracy sites that stole their content are now the canonical top ranked sources!
Google never used to put piracy sites on the first page of results for my books, this is a new feature on their part, and I think it goes a long way to show that their problem is cultural rather than technical. Google seems to have reached the conclusion that since many of their users are looking for pirated eBooks, quality search results means providing them with the best directory of copyright infringements available. And since Google streamlined their DMCA process with online forms, I couldn?t discover a method of telling them to remove a result like this from their search results, though I tried anyway.
... I feel like the guy who was walking across the street when Google dropped a 1000 pound bomb to take out a cockroach - Morris Rosenthal
Way to go Google! +1 +1
Too clever by half.
Source: http://www.seobook.com/huffington-post
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Google's autocomplete feature no longer contains the word scam. The autocomplete feature offers results based off search volumes (i.e., if you're seeing something suggested, it is being heavily searched for). However, search queries containing the word "scam" are now filtered out, forcing users to type in scam for themselves rather than see it offered as a top suggestion.
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Google is planning for higher quality Gmail ads; more targeted, useful, and tailored towards desires.
Although Gmail is said to be implementing changes in the ads already, the personalization-based ads could still be a month out.
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Firefox 4 was just released. It is much smoother & faster than prior versions of the browser. And the persistent memory leaking issue seems to have been tamed, even with many extensions installed. Overall an awesome upgrade. I can see this once again becoming my main web browser while also remaining my primary SEO research browser.
With the upgrade I only had 2 major issues
In time we will likely think about moving the icons for Rank Checker and SEO for Firefox out of the status bar & into the upper menu, as it is not great for us to create extensions that are reliant on another extension which is then reliant on a browser that changes too ... too many moving parts.
But for now stuff works well enough again if you download the Status 4 Evar plug-in, something over 10,000 people a day are doing!
We also just updated the documentation on the plug-in download & upgrade pages for our extensions such that those who do not read our blog still know what they need to do in order to keep everything going smoothly. It also prevents us from having to read too many support tickets like these gems a crazy gave us today, which helps us maintain at least a bit of hope for humanity. :)
In moderation such messages are humorous...but you just hope that the person isn't crazy enough to hunt you down and shoot you because they think Yahoo! is a superior browser to Firefox. Not for the least of reasons because Yahoo! isn't a web browser! :D
Source: http://www.seobook.com/upgrading-firefox-4
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Google's autocomplete feature no longer contains the word scam. The autocomplete feature offers results based off search volumes (i.e., if you're seeing something suggested, it is being heavily searched for). However, search queries containing the word "scam" are now filtered out, forcing users to type in scam for themselves rather than see it offered as a top suggestion.
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PayPal ? Is It A Monopoly?
Post from: Quality SEO Services & Link Building Services
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Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Is Syndicated Content Duplicate Content?
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How much time do you spend doing SEO per day?� Or, specifically, how much time do you waste reading about SEO instead of doing it? Unless you are beginner who is still �learning, if you’re spending more than an hour reading about SEO everyday, you’re probably wasting your time. While the SEO space is filled [...]
This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.
How Much Time Do You Spend Actually Doing SEO
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This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.
Bing Drops “Write a Review” Link; Good Move or Bad?
Source: http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/bing-drops-write-review-link/4176/
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© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Linking Out Instead of Link Building to Rank in Google
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Microsoft today filed a formal complaint in Brussels accusing Google of curating a monopoly of the search market and unfairly promoting their own products. The chief concerns from Microsoft is the monopolization of YouTube indexing, the Android market, and Google advertising.
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Posted by nadiaking
This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Two weeks ago, Google rolled out changes to its algorithm in an attempt to decrease visibility and rankings of low quality sites on 11.8% of search queries, called the Panda Update. “Low quality” is defined on search engine blogs as content that is shallow or limited, poorly written, copied, and generally not useful to users.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but whenever a big Google update rolls out, I’m back in elementary school gingerly turning in a pop quiz – I think that I’ve paid attention in class, but in that moment, all I can do is lace my fingers behind my back and wait patiently for the teacher to grade my work.
In addition to the SEO benefits of fresh user-generated content (UGC) on product pages, we have seen time and time again that UGC aggregated into branded archive-like pages can attract a substantial amount of ridiculous long tail keyword traffic. As the Panda Update was announced, we knew that UGC Archive sites would be affected in some way. With a bit of cautious uncertainty in mind, we randomly selected a group of archive sites and started monitoring.
The UGC Archive sites we used in this study include a very basic navigational link structure that follows the company’s category hierarchy. At the deepest level, product UGC pages have minimal product details and are dominated with user language – typically 20 Reviews or Q&A per page. Because these archive sites are typically isolated from other marketing initiatives, and have very few backlinks, they created a very pure sample with which we could evaluate how the Panda Update reacted to UGC.
The sample included 10 U.S. Archive sites in various industries (general retail, specialty retail, electronics manufacturing, beauty manufacturing, and entertainment) for two types of UGC – reviews and Q&A. The sites have a wide range of UGC volume – some literally have millions of pieces of content, and some have tens of thousands. To isolate the impact of the Panda Update on Google organic visits, we compared the two weeks since the update against the two weeks immediately prior, and then compared those to the same weeks last year.
After a day or so of nail biting, the Panda Update pop quiz came back remarkably well:
Based on this graph, we can see that:
We wondered if all of this traffic was coming from more keywords or simply higher SERP rankings, so we analyzed how the number of keywords had fluctuated during the same periods outlined above:
From this data, the results are still pretty clear – in 2011, for 8 out of 10 sites, there was a higher increase number of keywords in the weeks after the Panda Update than there were the previous year. We already knew Google values UGC; with this data, we now know Google values aggregated UGC.
As for Google Webmaster Tools data, impressions increased recently for all of the sites between 39-84%; clicks dropped slightly for a couple of sites but increased by 10-15% for most sites; CTRs increased modestly for all sites. The most interesting data point I found in Webmaster Tools was average position – four of the sites actually dropped in average position, but those same sites had the highest increased impressions. It makes sense that when Google introduces new sites to replace old ones, it could drag down the overall average position in SERPs for the new sites.
User-generated content, while sometimes only one sentence individually, aggregated together can be very powerful for an SEO campaign. Customers convert higher when they see authentic content from like-minded users, driving Google to gravitate towards pages with legitimate UGC. To get the greatest value out of UGC for SEO, inject a small amount of the most recent UGC into product pages to increase richness and freshness; however, also make sure to have a branded interactive archive that allows Google to fully index all UGC for each of your products. With the Panda Update, Google impacted 11.8% of search queries. Once again, UGC proved to be a vital asset as these sites are reaping the benefits of the algorithm change.
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