What do you want your visitors to do when they get to your site? Do you facilitate this effectively and clearly? If you want people to call and schedule appointments, is the number above the fold on the site? Does it pop off the page and make people want to call? If you are looking to capture leads, do you have a lead capture form on every page above the fold? Does the lead form make you want to enter your information and click submit? If the answer is no to these questions, your website probably does not have a clear call to action, hurting your conversion rate.

2) Make it easy for visitors to buy a product (or complete the primary site objective)

Within 3 clicks, visitors should be able to perform a desired action, whether that is purchase a product, fill out a form, or visit a conversion-oriented page, and they should be able to do this from any webpage. Don’t be afraid to clearly direct people to the product or service page you want them to visit.If they want to buy a product or service from you, they want to do so as easily as possible. If people have to click through too many pages before beginning the checkout process, they are more likely to leave your site and take their business elsewhere.

3) Use Trust Logos

If your website does not use trust logos, you are not converting as many visitors as you could be. Take a look at the Petco web site or any other high converting ecommerce websites, and you will see a prominently placed McAfee trust symbol. The implementation of a trust symbol, or simply moving an existing trust symbol above the fold, can have a profound impact on your conversion rate.

4) Proper Packaging

If you are giving away bonuses, free email/phone support, expert documentation, free shipping, discounts for larger orders, or anything that differentiates yourself from the competition, you need to make sure your visitors are aware of these promotions. Make any promotion as clear as possible, especially if it will only last a limited time. Creating urgency can often push a potential sale to an actual purchase.

5) Determine the Value of a Visitor and Conversion

Knowing the average monetary value of a visitor and conversion is vital to running a profitable website. By employing a tracking system such as Google Analytics, you can begin tracking data on the actions your visitors take. This will enable you to focus your search engine optimization strategies on the keywords that deliver the highest converting traffic. With enough data and proper analysis, you will know which products to promote, allowing you to plan future promotions on products that will deliver the best return for your company.

The Power of Conversion

To give you a sense for the power of conversion optimization, let’s consider an e-commerce site that receives 10,000 visitors a month. If your site converts 1% of those visitors, or 100 per month, and 1 conversion averages $50, then your websiteís monthly revenue equals $5,000. Through increasing the conversion rate by 50% from 1% to 1.5%, your website will generate an additional $2,500 in revenue for the company. This slight conversion increase is the equivalent of increasing traffic by 50% for an additional 5,000 visitors per month. This isnít rocket science, but it shows how important conversion optimization can be as part of a companyís broader SEO and Social Media strategy.

The fact that we are able to reduce a clientís search engine marketing costs while making an acceptable profit for ourselves tells us that SEO knowledge is still imperfect and not as widespread as those of us in the internet marketing bubble probably assume. Furthermore, once the SEO campaign is completed, our clients are left with an online asset that will continue to generate traffic and business after our work is done (with the caveat that like all properties, online properties deteriorate over time without proper upkeep).

Inevitably, as more companies embrace SEO and competition increases, the cost differential between SEO and PPC will be reduced. For SEO companies to be able to deliver a return on investment to clients and maintain an acceptable profit margin for themselves, they will have to become more intelligent with their strategies and more efficient with their execution. This will increasingly mean that SEO companies must have expertise not only in SEO but also in social media marketing, web design, and traditional marketing, and be able to deliver synergies between these elements and SEO.

We think the ability to continually deliver comprehensive marketing strategies that achieve tangible returns for clients will determine which SEO companies are able to stay relevant and stay in business.

Below is a case study demonstrating the Rank Leveraging process we used for www.blankspaces.com.

Step 1: Determine which keyword you should target Through an analysis of site traffic (in this case, we used Google analytics), we discovered that the keyword phrase ëoffice space los angelesí is both a high volume and high-converting Google search term. By conversion, we mean a visitor who is directed to blankspaces.com through an organic search result and then signs up for a free trial. Because we felt that this search term could deliver a high number of converting visitors to the website, we decided to utilize rank leveraging for this keyword as part of our broader SEO strategy.

Step 2: Use Google query to find the most relevant pages on your site for targeted keyword We performed a Google query for ësite:blankspaces.com office space los angelesí to determine which page we would focus our ranking efforts on and which pages we would utilize for internal linking. On the results page (see image below), the first listing is considered by Google to be the most relevant page on the website for the targeted keyword. The second listing is the second most relevant page and so on. We now know that after the home page, the resources page, press page, map page, and team page are the most relevant pages for “office space los angeles”.

Step 3: Internal linking Armed with this information, the final step is to create links to the top page from the additional pages Google considers to be relevant, making sure to use the anchor text ëoffice space los angelesí for the link. As with all SEO efforts, it could take anywhere from a couple of days to several weeks for rankings to improve for your targeted page. When employed intelligently, however, this tactic enables you to harness the power and relevance of your entire domain to achieve a particularly high page ranking for a targeted keyword.

Key wave features include:

• Regular email Drag + drop new users to Waves Drag + drop new pictures to Waves (Not even supported yet in HTML 5)
• Extract just pics from a Wave to a new Wave easily-Ability to respond exactly inside messages (screenshot)
• Embed waves to blogs and additional web sites -> All responses show up in central Google Wave account When people respond to Waves on sites they are embedded all responses appear on the site embedded + in Google Wave account
• Change captions of pics easily in Waves like editing a folder on your desktop
• New users have access to a feature called playback to go through original Wave in order of user contribution
• While multiple people can be on a given Wave, there is the ability to send private replies
• When both users are online they see live chat that updates by letter typed, not the pencil Feature to turn off scrolling type-Automatic spell check/correcting
• Many more features (This is only a review of the first 40 minutes of the 1:20 video below).

Conclusions:

Google s new Wave Communication and Collaboration web application will become the future of online collaboration and the way information is shared, spread, and collaborated on. Some of the new features are so advanced that they can barely be described with words. The wave is a 2-year project that has been spearheaded by Lars and Jens Rasmussen (The brother engineering duo that created Google Maps). Google recently invited 4,000 of the most talented coders and API specialists in the world to this conference and gave those who attended sandbox access to being creating magical add-ons, components, plugins, and accessories that previously made Google Maps such a wild success.

It appears that the Google s Wave web-based communication and collaboration software is going to be the undisputed champion of communication and collaboration when it hits the public in September of 2009. The full video of the Google Wave demonstration is available on Youtube here.