Once a potential customer has found your website it is important that they are encouraged to stay on your site for as long as possible. It can sometimes be a challenge to persuade your visitors to take a second or third click, in order to explore your website further.

The most important factors that will encourage your visitors to stay longer on your site are as follows:

Make sure the keywords you are targeting match the actual content of each web page?

There is nothing worse than clicking on a website, only to find that the Keywords and Description displayed in the search engine results, do not match the web page content and the  website has nothing to do with what you are looking for. If you do not ensure that your web page content is relevant to what your searchers are looking for, they will leave your site very quickly. Therefore your Title, Description and Keywords Meta Tags should be updated accordingly, to ensure that your search engine listings reflect an accurate description of your web site.

Do your web pages load fast enough?

The speed of which your web pages load is one of the ranking factors Google takes into consideration, when deciding your position in their search results. If your web pages take longer than 10 seconds to load, then it’s highly likely your visitors will become impatient and leave your site. Your visitors have a massive choice of thousands of sites that they could visit, if your site is slow to load they will not wait and will simply move on to the next site in the search engine results.

Position your most popular links and call to action buttons at the top of each web page.

It can be very frustrating for your visitors if they are unable to locate the information they are searching for very quickly. Therefore, it is important that your most popular links and call to action buttons are located towards the top of each web page and preferably towards the left of the screen. This will ensure that your most important information is displayed on most monitors, without the need for your visitors to scroll down the page.

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Your website’s navigation structure is an extremely important element of the search engine optimisation process. If your website’s navigation structure is poorly designed then Google and the other search engines will struggle to index all of your web pages.

The search engines use automated software to crawl your site and rely on the navigation links embedded in your code, to move from page to page.

There are two main elements to consider when designing your website’s navigation structure:

• Your primary consideration should be to your website visitors. Your sites navigation structure needs to be designed in a simple format that will help your visitors locate the relevant content they are searching for quickly and easily.
• The second most important consideration should be the search engines. Your website’s navigation structure needs to be made as search engine friendly as possible, to ensure that Google and all other search engines can crawl your site and find and index every page of content. This is a vital part of the search engine optimisation process.

It is possible to create a navigation structure that will satisfy both visitors and search engines by following these simple guidelines:

• Choose text based links rather than image based links
• Using simple text based links offers the most reliable, search engine optimisation method. In addition to being a structure that can be easily followed by search engine spiders, a text based navigation structure also provides an opportunity to include your most important keywords within your page content. The targeted keywords contained within your navigation links are important to all search engines and the keyword rich text used for each link can help other pages to rank well.

If coded correctly, search engines will still be able to crawl image based links, but you will lose the keyword targeting benefit that can be achieved using a text based navigation structure.

The position of your navigation structure is also important

Generally speaking, it is more effective to position your navigation structure either along the top or down the left hand side of your web page. The reasons for this are as follows:

• This will keep your navigation links towards the top of your HTML code for each relevant web page, which is extremely search engine friendly.
• This will also ensure that all your navigation links can be easily located by your visitors.
• It is also important to maintain a standard location for your navigation links, across all pages of your website. If the position of your navigation links switch position on different pages, it will become very confusing and frustrating for your visitors.

Avoid using Javascript

Search engines find it difficult to understand Javascript code, which can result in crawling issues. The best option is to avoid a JavaScript based linking structure, as this will almost certainly result in search engines missing some of your web pages and being unable to perform a complete crawl of your website.

Finally, I would recommend uploading an XML Sitemap to your server, as this will help the search engines find and index all of your sites web pages.

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The last few years has seen a major explosion in the use of online video marketing to promote a website. There is no doubt that adding video to your site will help to improve the user experience and ultimately your customer conversion rates. However a lot of website owners do not understand how to optimise their videos for maximum exposure.

Video search engine optimisation should be an important part of any online video marketing strategy and understanding how to harness the power of video search engine optimisation is a worthwhile investment of time, for any website owner.

Benefits of Video Search Engine Optimisation

The following top video search engine optimisation tips will help to improve your video marketing efforts:

1. Include relevant text on your website.
Search engines are unable to interpret the content of your video. Therefore it is important to ensure that when you embed a video on your webpage it is surrounded with relevant text containing your primary keywords or transcripts of the video.

2. Optimise your videos Meta Tags for relevant keywords.
As with most media, videos contain meta tag elements that allow you to optimise titles, descriptions and keywords. It is vital that these tags are created to target your primary keywords; this is easy to do when using 3rd party video hosting websites.

3. Add the word “Video” to your title.
As the majority of people tend to search for videos by adding “video” to their search query, it is important that this keyword is added to the title of your video and included in your Title Tag.

4. Submit your video to as many video hosting sites as possible.
Whether you host your own videos or not, you should consider submitting your videos to as many major video hosting sites as possible. Remember that YouTube is not the only game in town and your video will receive far greater exposure if it is syndicated to as many video hosting sites as possible. This will also help to improve the ranking results for your video on Google and the other search engines.

5. Optimise the file name of your video.
You should also optimise the filename for your video. Choose a file name that contains your primary keyword, but also try and keep it short and user friendly.

6. Make sure your video URL is included in your XML sitemap.
Google and other search engines will allow you to specify video URLs in XML sitemaps, as this helps them to index your videos. Visit Google’s Video Sitemap guide for further information.

7. Promote you video via your social media accounts such as Twitter or Facebook.
Once you have published your video on your website, or an external video hosting site, it is important that you make use of the various social media sites to promote your video. Promoting you video on Twitter, Facebook etc., with links back to your site, will help spread the word to a much larger audience.

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If you wish to rank highly in Google and other search engines for local search terms, it is important that your website is optimised to target a range of local keyword phrases, that are relevant for your business.

Local search terms are usually made up of a generic keyword with the addition of a local town or region, for example:

• Chinese Restaurant Manchester
• Carpet Cleaning Birmingham
• Structural Engineer Edinburgh
• Cosmetic Dentist Sussex

The following top local search engine optimisation tips will help you to achieve top Google organic listings for your chosen local keyword search terms:

1. Meta Title Tag

It is extremely important to include your location in your meta title tag. Including your location in your title tag will definitely help to improve your local rankings on Google and other search engines. Many website owners fail to include their location in their title tag, which is a missed opportunity.

For example, if you are an interior designer based in Brighton, then the content of your title tag should look something like this:

“Professional Interior Design-Brighton”

In addition to targeting Brighton, if you also wish to target the surrounding areas, then your title tag should look something like this:

“Affordable Interior Design-Brighton-Eastbourne-Sussex”

Reinforcing your location in your Description and Keywords Tag is also worthwhile.

2. Business Address

If you have not already done so, you should consider including your actual physical business address on every page of your website. Including your address in the footer of each web page is an easy way to inform Google that your site is highly relevant for a specific location and any relevant local search terms.

Therefore if the majority of the content on your website is about interior design, and every page also mentions Brighton, Google and the other search engines will determine that your website is highly relevant to customers searching for “Interior Design Brighton”.

3. Google Places

You should also make sure that your website is registered with Google Places, in order to appear on their local map listings. Google Places is a free service which allows you to provide Google with up to date information about your business.

4. Local Business Directories

Getting listed in local business directories will help to build incoming links to your site which are closely related to your industry and location. Some of the local directories to consider are as follows:

• Hotfrog
• Qype
• Local Data Search
• Thomson Local
• Yelp

By following these top local search engine optimisation tips you should have a strong foundation for achieving a high ranking on Google and the other search engines, for your local targeted keywords.

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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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