1. Go out and register a bunch of “keyword-rich” domain names. Duplicate the content from your main domain to each of these and link them all back to the main domain to “help” the main site’s popularity.  Make sure that you “Forget” to tell your SEO that you’ve done this.

Not only will this not help, but it may prevent even your main domain from being displayed in some search engines. While the search engines don’t actually penalise duplicate content, they will either ignore or eventually filter out the duplicates – and they might just decide that your primary domain pages are the duplicate ones!

If you haven’t yet done anything like this, but you’re thinking it might be a good idea, save your money.  You’re much better off spending your time effort and money on optimising your actual site rather than a half hearted effort on lots of sites.

2. Hire a web designer who knows nothing about SEO to produce a site for you. Bring the SEO in at the end of the process, after the site is already completed. Forbid your SEO from making any changes to the on-page display of your site.

Virtually any existing site, no matter how search-friendly it is, will need some changes. If your site isn’t search-friendly already, the changes may be significant indeed.

If your SEO tells you that you don’t need to make any changes to your site and everything can be handled “behind the scenes,” then you should think about getting yourself a new SEO! They’re either clueless, or they’re planning to use sneaky tactics that can eventually get you in trouble with the search engines (or both!). Solid, long-term results come from hard work, not trickery.

Of course, the best tactic is to bring your SEO and your designer together from the start, so your site will be search-friendly from the get-go.

3. Neglect to tell your SEO about previous attempts at optimisation, particularly if they involved questionable practices. After all, there’s no sense in dredging up ancient history.

If your previous SEO efforts managed to get your site penalised or banned, your present SEO needs to know this. There are things that can be done to try to rectify the situation, but those things won’t be done if your SEO doesn’t know they need doing.

Even if the tactics used haven’t yet caused any actual penalties for you, it’s important to let your new SEO know what went before, and what might still be lurking about in dark corners of the Web. This will help your new SEO get things cleaned up and avoid any unpleasant surprises on down the road.

4. Start calling your SEO approximately two days after they’ve first started work on your site, asking when you’re going to see your rankings go up for your favourite key phrase. Call back at approximately two or three day intervals from then on out until you rank number one for your chosen phrase, or the SEO jumps off a bridge, whichever comes first.

Optimization takes time to reach full effect. For instance, it may take up to a year before a new site will rank well on Google for competitive key phrases. Even for less competitive phrases, you could potentially be looking at a period of several months before your site’s natural rankings settle in. In the meantime, Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC) can get your site on the first page even for highly competitive terms, as long as you’re willing to pay the cost per click.

5. Focus all your energies on a single phrase. No matter how much your SEO tries to convince you to diversify, or tells you this phrase isn’t going to be all that useful to you, insist on single-minded concentration on this one phrase. After all, your competition’s site ranks at number one for this phrase, and you have to beat them to get bragging rights.

Depending on its size, a well-optimised site should focus on dozens to hundreds of key phrases. There is simply no reason to limit yourself to one, or even a small handful of phrases. If your site doesn’t have enough pages to support all the useful key phrases recommended by your SEO, consider adding additional pages of content rather than shortening the list of targeted phrases.

Follow your SEO’s recommendations about which phrases should get priority. A good SEO will start any project by doing a detailed key phrase analysis to determine which words and phrases are most likely to be used by people who are searching for the kind of stuff you offer. There’s no point in ranking highly for phrases that no one ever uses for an actual search.

Don’t let your ego or vanity limit the potential of your site to rank well for multiple, valuable terms.

6. Check your rankings on a daily basis. Call your SEO to report (and, if needed, complain) about every fluctuation.

It’s a fact of life: rankings vary on a daily basis – sometimes an hourly or even minute-by-minute basis. Checking your rankings daily, or even more often, is simply a waste of time.

Sure, number one rankings are cool for bragging rights, but rankings alone don’t put food on the table.

The true measure of the success of an optimization campaign should not be rankings, or even traffic. It should be conversions – that is, how many people end up doing whatever it is you want your site visitors to do. (Buy your product, subscribe to your membership area, sign up for your newsletter, whatever.)

A good SEO will focus on this metric and will try to help you do the same.

Well, there you have it. Six easy ways to drive any good SEO insane. Now, of course, if you’d rather have a profitable web site, you might want to consider not doing any of these things. The choice is yours.

Better to show a banner than show nothing.

Not advertising at all means no sales at all. People have to get to know about you before they’ll buy from you. Compare banner advertising to a newspaper of 50 pages. There are a lot of ads in a newspaper. Quite frankly, you’re not going to see all of the ads even if you look at each and every page. Most websites are designed in an organised fashion where only a few ads are shown at a time. This gives you a better likelihood of having your banner shown.

To make sure that your banner advertising dollars are spent well, your banners must be designed and implemented with the following characteristics:

1. Keep your message short and simple.

You only have a few seconds to capture the attention of the viewer. Hence, you must be able to get your point across in a few words, as a wordy ad won’t get read. Find the right words and images – including animated GIFs ofr flash that allow short messages to rotate – to trigger action. Too much clutter adversely affects the performance of a banner and negatively impacts on a banner’s ability to brand. Concise ads are successful because they deliver a message or name that the viewer can remember.

2. Provide something interesting to viewers.

It is not necessarily true that people do not read ads. People only read what is interesting to them – and sometimes, it can be an ad. Making the case for targeted placements, your banners will only be successful if you seek out people receptive to your message. You banners will simply be part of the clutter to be ignored if you serve up your ads to viewers who considers your message irrelevant to them.

3. Give people a reason to click.

Viewers will only respond to a compelling proposition. Your banners must be attractive or interesting enough to be successful in generating even the slightest flicker of response. People react favourably to banners that provide them a chance to win something. A banner where they can get something for free or a special discount also gets high click rates. Develop your banner’s message around the most persuasive reason why people would want to go to your site, be it the information you provide, special offers and promotions, or products that can make their life much better.

4. Develop follow-through mechanisms.

Leading users who clicked on your banners to your home page is acceptable if your advertising goal is to develop branding for your site. However, if you offered a special promotion or solicit a specific action from the user, you must create follow-through mechanisms for these users. A special page explaining the promotion in detail, for example, provides visual or messaging clues about what to do next. In addition, having a special page for each of your banners can help you determine which creative is more effective in bringing in traffic or sales.

5. Always test your ads.

Before going full-blast in your campaign, you need to test your banners with a subset of your target audience. You should experiment with various banner designs to gauge the appeal of your promotional offers and the type of message that brings a high-interest customer. Most ad networks now allow advertisers to conduct a test run.

6. Consider using rich media.

Rich media banners, which include animation, sound and other special effects, can increase your response rate. These banners could facilitate e-commerce and may even lead to instant revenues. Some rich media banners have a built-in order area, expandable order forms, and even secure server technology to protect credit card transaction.  The drawback, however, is that rich media banners will cost more to produce and place; and they are not available on all web sites. Plus,  the banners can sometimes slow down web page loading times. If you have the resources, try incorporating rich media in a banner and test how it performs with standard banners.

Finally…Some Quick Design /Content Tips

• Banner Ads are 468 x 60 pixels in dimension. This is a standard size.
• Banner ads should be 15k or less in size. Otherwise they take too long to load.
• Display your website address on your banner. This way, if nothing else, the viewer sees your website.
• Always include your company name on the banner.
• Include just one main benefit or interest point on your banner. Something that would immediately draw an interested parties attention.
• Use fonts that are easily readable.
• Use colours and designs that are attractive but not gawdy. If you’re not sure, ask some friends what they think.
• Look at the ad and ask yourself if you would understand what this banner is trying to advertise. Don’t assume that people understand what you’re trying to sell. If after looking at it, you don’t understand what you’re selling, please redo the ad. Ask your friends to critique the ad for you.
• Make the best use of ad space. Let’s face it, 468×60 is not a lot of space. You have to get the best value for the space.
• Make a few ads and then test them out to see which ones perform better. Even though you feel you’ve made the best ad in the world, you might find better results with different ads. It happens all the time.

Do this Now ! Run a search on Google and find your Pay Per Click (PPC) ad. Click on it. Where does it bring you? Your home page? I hope not. If it does you should consider creating a specific landing page for your PPC ads. A landing page is the page you create with the primary goal of converting your PPC traffic into sales or enquiries. This page should encourage your potential customers (that you have already paid for!) to go exactly where you think they want to go.

Here are some tips to create a good landing page:

1) Focus! Focus! Focus!

The landing page should be about your product or service. No links to other sites, no advertisements, no waffle. When people arrive at your landing page, they should already be predisposed to buy (since you wrote such an excellent ad to get them here in the first place) and are trying to either find out more information about your product/service, or click the “Buy now” button.

2) Specialise your landing page

Use a different landing page for each group of keyphrases. If you sell Widgets and Wodgets, don’t use the same landing page for each. Create a new landing page for each product (or each group of products) and send the clients directly to the page they are interested in.

3) Give them information

If they are not yet sold on your product or service, then they are going to be looking for more detailed information when they arrive at your landing page. Give it to them. You have to convince them that you have the perfect product or service to solve their problem. If they run out of information before they make a commitment to buy, then you have lost them. Nobody will spend money until they are convinced that your product or service is the right choice for them. So prove it.

4) Tell the reader what you want them to do

Use calls-to-action. If you want them to buy your product, than tell them often how to do it (“Click here to buy”). If you want them to call you, post the number up with instructions (“Call us now at 1800-999-999″). Repeat it throughout the text, then again in big and bold at the end.

5) Use graphics

Use pictures to sell your product or service. Pictures of the product or pictures of satisfied customers sell. Use them – and use them often.

6) Run tests

Set up two (or more) landing pages to see which ones convert better. You can use Giigles Website Optimiser toolf for tjhis or set up two identical ads and send one to each landing page, then compare conversion rates for each page. Figure out why one converts better and try to improve the other one. Then, run more tests until you are completely satisfied with the results.

Set up your landing pages so that your potential customers arrive for a safe and controlled landing. If all goes well, they will step out of the plane with their credit cards already in hand – and their money almost in your pocket.

It was found that 28% of online sellers were using customer ratings and reviews. More than half said they were considering it.

Asked about the effects of customer ratings on their Web sites, over half of online retailers in the United Kingdom, the United States and Europe said their overall conversion rates had gone up in the past year, compared with only 9% who said they fell.

Nearly eight in 10 online sellers thought a major benefit of such reviews was to increase conversions, while 73% thought improved customer retention and loyalty were major benefits. Nearly six in 10 thought the fact that customer reviews improved search engine optimisation was a significant benefit.

“Tapping into social commerce can be a great way of gaining a competitive advantage, for example through ratings and reviews,” Linus Gregoriadis, E-consultancy’s head of research, said in a statement. “But apart from the early adopters, this is something a large proportion of online retailers are only just starting to think seriously about.”

Unfortunately, companies love the idea of getting their messages into these channels and more and more adverts and marketing are finding their ways into blogs. Marketers are increasingly using  blogs, and social network pages specifically to promote their products or services.

Your Opportunity

Although it’s a shame that there is so much ‘advertorial’ out there , it also presents opportunities for you.   As levels of credibility and trust sink lower, readers will seek out content that is honest and useful. They’ll be hungry for information they can trust, and once you have their trust, you are more likely to be receptive to the products and services that you offer.

What not to do

There are some excellent, trustworthy sites around which support themselves through all manner of advertising and sponsorship deals. The trick is not to remove the advertising, but to clearly separate editorial from advertising.

People understand that information media needs to support their existence through advertising. What isn’t OK is when you try to trick your readers.

It’s not acceptable to:

• Write content that’s thinly-veiled advertising
• Try to make people think a certain page is editorial they can trust, when in fact it’s there to deliver a marketing message
• Write a blog entry that appears to be editorial when you’re being paid a fee by a company to write it
• Write poor content simply to attract readers in the hope they’ll click on an advert

These are the practices that dilute trust and make web users sceptical about the next blog, forum or website they visit.

How to build trust

Online, every marketer is in a hurry to make money. But if you just slow down a little you’ll end up doing better in the long run.

Create valuable, useful and honest content, whether it be in the form of articles, reviews, guides, white papers, or blog entries. Keep marketing messages out of your content. Add them separately, and keep them separate. Over time, people will come to trust your site and the information you provide.Trustworthy content will win in the end

So while we’re in the midst of an explosion of sneaky marketing right now, the smartest marketers will be investing in sites and  blogsthat are genuinely trustworthy. They will be the winners in the end.

If you answered yes to these questions – you are in the majority – most business’s make money by selling products or services.  Assuming that you have a good value product/service (which doesn’t necessarily mean cheap) surely the success of your business depends on making the sales process as painless as possible ?

So why is it that so many online businesses seem to insist on placing one hurdle after another in the way of potential customers?

A traditional shopping experience goes something like this :

You go into a shop, you see something you want to buy, you pay for it, and you leave with the item.

Whilst there are undoubtedly benefits in buying things online – it is not always convenient (or possible) to pop down to the shops to get exactly what you want, the process often seems unnecessarily complex, and in some cases a great deal of commitment and perseverance may be necessary.  As a comparison to the above example, here is a typical scenario for buying something online :

• I see something I want to buy
• I convert the price to my local currency (where is my calculator)
• I check to see what the shipping costs are (and if they actually deliver in my area)
• I add the item to my shopping cart
• I go to the checkout
• I’m asked if I’m a registered user :
  If I am not already registered, I need to provide a variety of userid/email address/password/contact details and have to wait for my email address to be confirmed before I can proceed.

  If I am already registered, chances are I can’t remember my login details, so try a variety of userid/email address/password combinations before giving up and requesting a new password.  I then have to wait for my new password to be emailed out before I can proceed.

  By the time I get to check my email, there is a good chance that I’ve now lost interest in / run out of time for / been distracted from or am annoyed about, buying the thing I had wanted to buy in the first place – simply because they made it too much trouble to give them my money and leave with the thing I wanted to buy.

Get the picture ?  These are just a few of the hurdles you may have faced yourself when buying something online, I’m sure you’ve experienced all of these, and could probably list many more.

In light of this it is remarkable really that online sales are becoming increasingly popular – but how many sales from your website might you be missing out on, simply because of unnecessary or awkward steps in the sales process?

Here are some scary stats relating to a “forced registration” process:

75% of people clicking the “forgot password” button don’t come back to finish the purchase.
23% of people abandon the checkout process at the first sign of a registration prompt.
45% of registered customers have bad memories and register multiple times

In most cases you can make it easier for people to give you their money, by streamlining the sales process, removing unnecessary steps, making it quicker and easier for users to complete a sale, and  by not forcing them to register (give them a choice instead).

If you are concerned about the sales process on your own website, you should consider having a Conversion Optimisation Review undertaken – as a means of reducing or eliminating hurdles in your sales process.

This approach really does not make much sense – not only have they probably missed out on a number (maybe a lot) of sales while they were focusing on SEO – but the SEO and Conversion Optimisation processes and activities have a pretty high degree of overlapand working on them together is usually a much more efficient option.

People mistakenly think search engine optimisation is the one-step process of getting ranked highly on search engines. You “do” SEO and when you’re finished, like magic, your site is ranked highly.

In reality, SEO has numerous steps, all of which interlink with the foundation of your marketing plan. For instance, if you were creating an online marketing plan for a brand new site launch, your activities would almost certainluy include (amongst others) the following :

Good design
You would want a design that instills trust and confidence while reducing anxiety. Your site needs to promote a professional image

Effective Navigation
Clearly, you want it to be as easy as possible for visitors to find what they’re looking for. If they aren’t able to navigate the site quickly, they’ll get frustrated and very likely leave.

Good Copy
Just having words on your pages isn’t enough to connect with your visitors. You want specific copywriting about each product or service that entices, explains, convinces and converts.

Interestingly, these same three steps are also critical to developing a solid search engine optimisation strategy. If you complete the steps with SEO tunnel vision — without giving any thought to your visitors along the way — you may need to repeat everything you’ve already finished.

Creating an attractive, user-friendly design.
Often, sites designed strictly to rank highly in the engines skimp on the design process. You can have a site that’s at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) and gets a ton of traffic, but causes visitors to immediately click away due to lack of trust. If this is the case, you’ll need to change some or all of your design elements, which could possibly have a subsequent impact on your rankings.

Organising an effective navigation structure.
Some companies develop navigational structures specifically for the engines. They tell their clients to avoid cross-linking between certain pages or areas of the site so as not to “confuse” the search engines. Whether it confuses the search engines or not, if you want to make more sales, cross-linking and up-selling are excellent strategies that make it easier for your visitors to find — and buy — what they need. If you’re ranking highly but not making sales, it may mean you need to improve your navigation.

Writing persuasive copy that informs and sells.
Keyword-stuffed, third-grade-level copy that is repetitive and boring won’t make sales. If you’ve slapped up any old copy thinking you would improve it later, you may be in for a shock. Copywriting is a fundamental (but often neglected) element in search engine optimisation. Unless you’re having great success with a massive linking campaign, copywriting will play a major part in your rankings. Changing copy can (and almost always will) cause a
change (negative or positive) in positioning. If your copy is preventing your site from converting, it needs to be changed immediately even if that means a temporary drop in positioning.

Keep in mind that the search engines do not make your site successful. The search engines don’t buy anything from you. All they do is send traffic your way. Your site is what makes you money and it needs to be developed for your visitors first. By focusing strictly on SEO, it is likely you may be forced to change much of what you’ve built in order to improve conversions later on.

That means spending more time and money on something that could have been turning a profit much sooner.