Getting listed on the first page of Google is great providing your website is designed to convert customers. It is a pointless exercise if you receive tons of visitors as a result of your high search engine results, but only a few people buy your product.

Investing time, effort and money in Web Page Optimisation will not be cost effective if your website is not able to convert your visitors into customers. You must also review your website, to make sure you have done everything possible, to encourage your visitors to buy your product.

Optimising the conversion rate of your website is extremely important

Imagine that you sell a product for £50. If the average conversion rate of your website is 1% then 1 out of 100 website visitors will buy your product. Therefore you will sell 2 units if 200 people visit your website and so on.

If you wish to double your sales, you will need to double the number of visitors to your website. That is usually quite a difficult task to achieve.

If you can optimise your web pages and double your cutomer conversion rate to 2% then you will have doubled your sales without the need to secure more visitors. Increasing the conversion rate of a website is usually an easier option than getting more customers.

What can you do to improve the conversion rate of your website?

There are several things that can be done to improve the conversion rate of your website.

Drive traffic to the most relevant pages on your site

Your visitors should enter your website at the most appropriate page relevant to their keyword search term. For example, if you advertise on Google AdWords for the search term “buy tennis shoes” then your landing page should be a page about “tennis shoes” and it should be possible to buy these shoes right on the page. The same applies for visitors that you receive via your regular search engine rankings.

Check your website statistics for your pages with a high bounce rate

Analyse your website statistics to find pages on your site that have a high bounce rate. If too many people leave your website too quickly,then you must improve your web pages and make them more relevant to what your potential customers are looking for.

Adding a “call to action” on all of your landing pages will help to improve customer conversion rates

Every landing page should contain a call to action. It is likely that a website visitor will only visit a single page of your website. That is why all pages should contain a call to action so that your website visitors know what to do.

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Would you like your website listed twice in Google’s top 10 results for your most important keywords?

Although Google usually shows only one page from every site in the top results, it is possible to achieve two listings if you structure your web pages correctly.

This type of listing is called an indented listing. Google explains this type of listing as follows - “When Google finds multiple results from the same website, the most relevant result is listed first, with other relevant pages from that site indented immediately below it.”

Having an indented listing in Google’s search results means that you will have two listings on the first page instead of one. Obviously a double top 10 listing in Google will help to  increase the number of visitors to your website.

So how do you achieve indented listings for your targeted keywords?

Firstly, you must have a web page that already has a top 10 ranking for a specific keyword.

Create a second web page on the same domain that links to the web page that has the top 10 ranking. Optimise the second page for exactly the same keyword as the first page but make sure that different web page content is used, in order to avoid the Google “Duplicate Content” rule.

Then link from the first page to the second page using your targeted keyword as the anchor text. This is more effective if a contextual link is created within the actual web page content rather than creating a new navigational link within your main menu structure.

Once this has been done you will need to develop the link popularity of the second page by securing a number of One Way Links. Depending on how competitive your targeted keyword might be, a few high quality one way links may be sufficient to achieve the indented listing.

If you can achieve two listings on the first page of Google, then this will represent 20% of the top 10 organic results instead of the normal 10%.

That will improve your potential for increased visitor traffic enormously and ultimately your profit!

If you need any help with your Web Page Optimisation please do not hesitate to Contact Us.

Has your website been banned  from Google’s search engine results or penalised in some way?

Learn how to submit a best practice “Google Reconsideration Request”.

If you are responsible for developing or maintaining a website, it is important that you familiarise yourself with the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

In particular you should pay close attention to their  “Quality Guidelines” which detail some of the illicit practices that may lead to your site being removed entirely from the Google search engine results or otherwise penalised.

According to these guidleines the following practices will almost certainly result in your website being penalised by Google:

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Do not use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Do not send automated queries to Google.
• Do not load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Do not create multiple pages, subdomains or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Do not create pages with malicious behaviour, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans or other badware.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programmes with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate programme, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

Although the above cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behaviour, this is not a comprehensive list. Google states that they may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here, such as, tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites. It is not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique has not been mentioned on this page, Google approves of it.

If your website is judged to be in violation of the editorial guidelines and has been removed from the Google index or penalised in some way, you will need to fix the violation issues and then submit a “Reconsideration Request”, to ask Google to reinstate or stop penalising your site.

What is a “Google Reconsideration Request”?

The following official Google video, featuring Rachel Searles and Brian White, from Google’s Search Quality Team, explains the process and provides tips on how to create a good, best practice  “Reconsideration Request”.

The main tip from the video is that you should check the Google Webmaster Guidelines, before submitting your “Reconsideration Request”, if you are unsure why you have been penalised.

Rachel also mentions that you should include in your request all the changes that you have made to fix the problem, rather than just telling them that your site now follows the guidelines.

Brian states that you should not try and fool Google by submitting misleading information. This will not help your case, as your request will be reviewed by actual humans and if the information you provide is incorrect they will simply disregard your request for reconsideration.

If you are having issues with Google penalising your site, then I would recommend watching this video.

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Do you use underscores or hyphens in your URL’s?

Have you ever wondered if one method is better than the other?

Have you ever considered if Google interprets an undersore differently from a hyphen?

Well, the answer is yes they do. According to Googles, Matt Cutts, hyphens are recognised as a separator and underscores are not.

This may not be important if your URL does not contain any major keywords. However if you are targeting a keyword within your URL, you will need to ensure that the relevant Keywords are separated by a hyphen and not an underscore.

For example www.professional_carpet_cleaning.co.uk would be interpreted as www.professionalcarpetcleaning.co.uk, in the eyes of Google. This is a missed opportunity as their are two primary keywords (”Professional Carpet Cleaning” and “Carpet Cleaning”) that would not be recognised by Google.

However, if this URL had been structured as www.professional-carpet-cleaning.co.uk then Google would recognise the individual keywords, which would help your Web Page Optimisation efforts.

So, there you have it, always try and use hyphens as opposed to underscores in your URL’s, for maximum benefit.

Whilst it is generally accepted that using a keyword search term as part of a web page URL will help to improve your search engine rankings, the exact position of the keywords within your website’s URL’s has always been a bit of a grey area.

However, Google’s Matt Cutts has recently clarified the situation. During a recent Google Moderator session he was asked if the position of keywords in the URL have any significant impact on ranking. For example is ‘example.com/keyword/london’ better than ‘example.com/london/keyword’?

Matt  decided to publish his answers in the following video:

It would seem that the official Google advice is that we should not obsess about the position of keywords within a URL, as they are unlikely to have any impact on a websites ranking, although having targeted keywords present within the URL will help a little bit. He warned that webmasters should not start stuffing keywords in the URL as this just looks spammy to users. He also suggests keeping the number of keywords in a URL to a minimum of 4 or 5.

So, if you are concerned about the position of the keywords within your URL’s, take the advice straight from Google and “don’t obsess” over it.

If you have any feedback based on your own experiences, feel free to let me know in the comments section below.