Filtering and sorting are huge components to making browsing for products easier, but it seems like many sites—and we’re even talking about some big, well-known brands here—are letting these features slip through the cracks. Sure, they exist in some form or fashion: Sort by price, low to high. Filter by size or color. At the end of the day though, these basic options don’t always cut it. Here are some examples of bad sorting trends.

One trend is simply not having enough filtering options, like on the 1-800-Flowers website. I found that once I chose a category on this site, from there I could only sort the items by price. There weren’t any more filtering options! There were some oddly placed subcategories, but really, 1-800-Flowers could benefit from adding filtering options that are specific to their products. For instance, type of flower, color, or even container (arrangements come in a variety of vases, baskets, and more) would be very helpful. The better a site can tailor the filters, the easier it will be for shoppers to find the products they want.

On the other hand, some sites have plenty of filtering options, but they just aren’t relevant to the search. You can find an example of this on Best Buy’s website. Here, you can filter by current offers, price, brand, color category, and so on. These are all great, but these options don’t necessarily matter for every product. In this case, I was searching the Best Buy site for a solid state drive. For a device like that, is filtering by color relevant? Not really. A more helpful option would be the ability to sort by storage capacity, as well as type (laptop or desktop). Again, tailoring the filters would be a lot more beneficial to the shopping experience.

Another filtering mistake to avoid is when the filtering options are not only irrelevant, but don’t match the products at all. An example of this comes from Sierra Trading Post, during a specific sale they had before Black Friday. When I clicked on the sale, there were two filtering options available: Sleeve length and style. Unfortunately, the style choices were carry-on, suitcase and duffel. So what are we talking about here, a shirt or a piece of luggage? Mismatched filters like these are not conducive to an easy shopping experience.

The filtering mistake on AutoAnything was a particularly weird one. This site chose the bizarre method of keeping the filters hidden, which is almost as bad as not having them at all. I had searched for a ski rack on the site, and my initial results page allowed me to narrow by category, price range and customer rating. Then once I selected a category, I was given many more filtering options, including current offers, brand, lock type, mounting design, and capacity range. Now these are very helpful, but why couldn’t I see them from the beginning? It’s better to provide those options sooner so that shoppers can more easily find what they’re looking for, rather than risk a potential customer giving up on their search… and your site.

The last bad filtering trend I want to highlight is simply a visual one: Make filters easy to find and read. Seems obvious, right? But it isn’t always done, like in the example below from the Urban Fetch website. When the categories are in the same font and size as the products within them, it’s hard to distinguish what you’re looking at. It’s important to set things apart, and make it easy on the eyes. Otherwise, it’s almost pointless to provide the option.

Neglecting your filtering and sorting options is a big don’t in the e-commerce world. Tailoring your options to your specific site and products is way more helpful to shoppers than sticking with generic options, or keeping them hidden. It’s all about the user experience, so make it a good one to keep people coming back to your site!

Sasha Butkovich is a contributor to the Ecommerce Outtakes blog, which aims to improve usability and the ecommerce experience one blog post at a time. To read ecommerce tips and news, and to submit your own site for a free review, visit EcommerceOuttakes.com.

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1. Learn to Bid and Budget

Understanding how to bid and budget your funds is crucial to Adwords success. Spending $20 a day may appear to be the way to go for cost-conscious advertisers, but a budget that low will also limit your ability to profit. Likewise, bidding low initially can save you some money, but it might not get you very many clicks. While you don’t want to spend beyond the budget, you also don’t want to limit your potential, so learning how to manage your funds in accordance to the ad platform is key.

2. Avoid Bidding Battles

Getting the number on spot in Google’s sponsored results can be a costly endeavor for advertisers who choose to slug it out for popular keywords. Rather than go for the homerun, aim for the base hit that will help you score the number two, or even number three position. The low volume keywords will make for a cheaper investment, that over time, can help you increase your click-through rates and even wrestle that number one spot away from the competition.

3. Insert Keywords in Your Ads

The one similarity between organic and paid search marketing lies in the importance of keywords. In the paid arena, targeting the right keywords is what gets you visibility in the results. While you don’t have to use them in your ad copy, there are benefits to throwing them in there, mainly the indication of relevance. Google displays your keywords in bold text, which not only makes your ad stand out, but lets the user know it’s relevant to their search.

4. Be Daring with Keywords

To say that the competition among Adwords advertisers is fierce would be an understatement. Sometimes, you have to dare to be different, and once again, keywords are the key. By scrolling through your search query report, you can uncover a whole list of negative keywords that if used regularly, can help you save money while increasing click-through rates and improving your ad position in the process.

5. Divide and Conquer

New advertisers often create a single ad, for a single ad group that is loaded with dozens of keywords. While it is certainly possible to garner success with this method, less is usually more. So if you’re a vendor selling cloud computing services, instead of bundling all your keywords into a single ad group, you would create separate groups for keywords such as SaaS”, “PaaS”, “cloud storage”, and so forth. This approach not only makes your campaigns more targeted, but easier to manage and track as well.

6. Play with Multiple Ads

One of the cool things about Adwords is that it lets you create several ads within a single ad group. This is a nice luxury to have for marketers looking to get the most from their efforts.

In the process of running of these multiple ads, you can experiment with a few ideas and get a better feel for what works, and what doesn’t. Google provides a convenient way to simultaneously set up multiple ads, which in turn, offers an effective way to target more keywords, increase impressions, clicks, and improve overall results.

7. Track After-Click Performance

Google gives you access to reports that provide a comprehensive view of ad performance. That’s nice, but if you want to know what happens after the click, you need a fully loaded web analytics solution. Luckily, Google makes it easy to connect Google Analytics to your Adwords account. With Google Analytics, you can find out how long people stay on your site after clicking an ad, what pages they view, and much more. This information is not only vital to measuring campaign performance, but also gaining the insights needed to improve overall marketing results.

Mastering the Adwords advertising platform is a skill that only a select few have developed. You have a lot of tools at your disposal, but what’s in an arsenal if you don’t know how to use it? Add these optimization tips to your strategy, and you’ll be well on your way to seeing big improvements.

Chiko Noguchi is a best practices activist and advocate for a leading provider of event marketing services. She can be found on @email_wiz.

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Google prefers a canonical URL and doesn’t like messy redirects.

About 15 months ago we saw drops in rankings as a result of using a particular WordPress plugin that allowed for an easy addition of a mobile site. Even though we had already begun building our new sites with responsive, we needed a cheap “fix” for older clients, especially those on maintenance budgets. We learned the lesson quickly however, that the plugin was redirecting to a mobile URL, which looked to Google like some sort of shady cloaking. After the plugin was removed our rankings jumped right back.

Do Responsive Sites Rank Better?

Why yes, as a matter fact they do, and here’s why…

Link Concentration

When links are built to a website, they stick to the domain to which they point. You can change hosting and where you point your DNS, and all the links to that domain will remain connected to the domain name itself. That’s one reason you sometimes see very high auction prices for domains in GoDaddy. Essentially people are buying a lot of existing links for a relatively inexpensive price.

The point being, if you have multiple access points for web visitors (a mobile site hosted elsewhere or on a subdomain) you will be dividing up your web power currency, and links are the number one factor for Google to determine where to rank a website in search results for competitive search queries.

Pro tip: If you have subdomains or pages that you’ve gotten rid of or plan to by switching to a responsive design, be sure to 301 redirect them to equivalent pages on your new site. That way you’ll collect any links previously sent to those now orphaned pages, as well as about 90% or the pagerank flow.

Link Integrity

With a responsive site, when your site is linked to from Facebook, Google+, and other social networks, visitors following those links will always end up at a page displays correctly for their browser. If you decided not to go the responsive route and someone shares a mobile link that is later viewed on a desktop, you’ll have some interesting redirects with which to work, a less than perfect visitor experience, or worst case, broken links.

Time on Site

Another ranking factor that Google’s algorithm uses to determine the quality of your website’s content and overall user experience is just how long visitors spend reading, viewing, or interacting with that content relative to other similar pages on other sites.

Now, you can have a site with a responsive theme installed and not set up, but done correctly, a responsive site will look far better when viewed on phones or tablets, that’s the whole point.

Google even says they’d rather “never show a horizontal scrollbar, whatever the window size.” This is yet another strong recommendation from Google to design responsively.

Credit for All of Your Content

All else equal (and often not so equal) large websites beat out small websites in ranking results. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t index iPhone apps. Apps aren’t a bad idea at all. They often offer great user interface and functionality, but what you don’t want to do is eliminate your mobile content from Google’s index by moving it all to an app. The good thing about mobile apps not being indexed is that you don’t risk duplicate content penalties by having both an app and responsive mobile site.

Liquid Layouts

If you’re a designer ready to take a responsive test drive, you’ll want to start with liquid layouts. Liquid layouts define all the containers on a website by percentages, which allows them to resize fluidly when you change the window size. They are based on the viewport, rather than the original containing block.

Responsive Themes for WordPress

If you’re on WordPress or are considering a switch there a ton of options available to install ready-built themes with responsive capabilities built in. You’ll be responsible for some of the markup, defining logo sizes, and often using shortcodes to organize your responsive theme, but all the heavy lifting is already done for you. Checking out a responsive theme is also a great way to get acquainted with responsive coding.

We like ThemeForest for premium themes, and you can search WordPress.org for themes tagged “responsive” or check out our list of very good-looking free responsive WordpPress themes.

When designing responsive you’re building a better user experience and also developing a site that is significantly more future proof. As more sites move to flexible layouts and the percentage of mobile web users continues to grow, sites lagging behind will see a decline in search rankings.

Ryan Howard is the search strategist and owner of the professional SEO services company, CWR, which builds responsive WordPress websites, architects SEO campaigns, and develops eCommerce marketing solutions.

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Setting this up for a blog with only one author that is posting content is pretty straight forward and there is a lot of good information available on how to do it.  The problem comes when you have a website or blog that has multiple or more than one authors posting content.  Unfortunately the steps that would allow this to work in a single author instance do not work when there are multiple authors and you would end up with the wrong author receiving credit for the content.

After a fair amount of searching I was still not satisfied with any of the answers I had found on how to create the authorship credit when there is more than one author.  A lot of the posts that I found contained old and outdated information or steps that are honestly not necessary to this process.  Finally after piecing together a bunch of information, I was able to find a solution to my problem that was surprisingly even easier than I had expected! In these next couple sections I will cover how to configure the author credit for both of these scenarios (single author or multiple authors) in WordPress.

First lets go over the basic steps that are needed to make any type of author credit appear:

1. You must have a link containing rel=”author” on every content page pointing from your website or blog to your Google Plus page.
2. You must have a link in the contributor section of your Google Plus profile that points back to your website or blog.
3. You must have a picture up on your Google Plus Profile picture.

I think it’s important to understand what exactly is happening in this process so I am going to explain the Single Author method first.  If you are new to this process I would highly recommend reading the Single Author Method first.  If you are already aware of this or are just antsy to set up multiple author credit you can jump to that section by clicking the link here: Authorship Credit for Multiple Authors.

The Single Author Method (Hardcode)

The easiest way to do this when there is only one author posting content;  is to “hard code” the link that points back to your Google Plus page into the <head> of your WordPress template.  This way, the link will automatically be on every page in the blog (don’t worry it will be invisible but it’s there!) and will ensure that any post created is attributed to your author profile.

In order to do this, first click on “Appearance” and then “Editor” from your WordPress dashboard.

You should now be at the “Edit Template” page and click on “Header” in the list of templates on the right side of the page.

Once you are inside the header, you will need to add the following one line of code DIRECTLY before the closing head tag </head> (see example below).

• Code: <link rel=”author” href=”https://plus.google.com/111282263725232080636/>

NOTE: YOU MUST REPLACE THE GOOGLE PLUS URL IN THE EXAMPLE ABOVE WITH THE URL FROM YOUR OWN GOOGLE PLUS ACCOUNT.

After you have added your link to the template like shown in the example above click on “Update File” at the bottom of the page to save the changes you have just made.

Now that you have a permanent hidden link on every page of your site pointing to your Google Plus page, we must switch over to Google Plus and add a link as a contributor pointing back to the site or blog that you just linked from.

Setting Up Your Contributor Link

To do this, after logging in at plus.google.com, click on “Edit Profile” at the top of your Google Plus profile page (the button should be near your picture at the top of the page).

Once the “Edit Profile” page comes up, scroll down to the bottom and you will see a section labeled “Contributor To.”

Make sure the privacy option is set to “Public” then click to add a new custom link and then input your website or blogs main URL.

Note: Use the main URL of your website or blog.  For example, our blog URL is www.seomoves.org/blog but when setting up the contributor, I will just use www.seomoves.org like shown in the example below.

Done!

Now that we have links pointing in both directions (From Site to G+ and from G+ to site) we just need to check to make sure that Google is picking up on these references.  In order to do that we can use the Google Structured Data Testing Tool!

Simply enter the URL of your website or blog like shown below and click preview.  If you have followed the above steps correctly than you will see a preview like this below:

Success! From here on out once your pages are indexed by Google, they will appear with the correct author credit.  Additionally below, you should see that your Author Credit is now “Verified” and should look like this:

Why This Method Doesn’t Work for Multiple Authors

Unfortunately as easy as this is to set up, it will not work for a situation where the blog has multiple authors that create content.  This is because we have basically hardcoded the site to always defer authorship credit to the one single profile that we added.  Additionally we are only able to put one rel=”author” link into the header section of the WordPress template.  If you put links to more than one Google Plus profile into the <head>; the link that is on top (and processed first) is the only one that will be picked up by Google.

A bunch of the other posts and old information that I read on this subject recommended to create an author page for each individual author with bio text about them as well as adding a rel=”me” tag that points to the newly created author page.

Although this method will work as well, if you were in a situation like I am and need to be able to give credit where it’s due to a massive amount of Authors, creating these pages manually seemed to be more trouble than it is worth so I continued searching for another solution.

Setting Up Authorship Credit for Multiple Authors

That’s when I came across this awesome free WordPress plugin that automatically handles all of the link tagging for all of the different authors.  All that is needed is to add your Google Plus URL into a new field that has appeared in your WordPress User Account settings.

• Google Authorship for Multiple Authors

This plug in is so easy to use and has worked perfectly for me on every WordPress site that I have used it on.  The plugin adds a new field labeled Google Authorship Area to the bottom of your user profile page.  Your authors can now simply log in and paste their own Google Plus profile link into the field like shown below (Make sure the Location is set to “Hidden” so that nothing appears on your actual site).

The plugin then automatically links back every post that is created by each Author to their respective Google Plus profile page.

Once you have the Google Plus URL correctly in the Google Authorship Area field like shown above, you must still make sure that you have the contributor link pointing back from your Google Plus profile to your main site or blog (see example above in section: Setting Up Your Contributor Link)

• After that is complete, we can check using the Google Structured Data Testing Tool like we did above with one slight change.

The difference between this and the single author method described above is that since the code is not being hardcoded on every page of the blog and there will not be any author credit shown for the blog home page (This is good! We don’t want to have author credit for a specific author referring to our entire blog).  Instead, the author credit will show on every piece of content that is posted by any of the respective authors that have this plugin properly configured.

In order to check to make sure it is configured properly, simply copy the URL of a post that you have written and put the entire URL into the Google Structured Data Testing Tool like shown in the example below:

Note: You will not see these changes in live SERPs until the pages have been re-indexed by Google but any content posted going forward will automatically contain the authorship credit when indexed the first time.

Hopefully this will help clear things up for others that are trying to set up Google Authorship for multiple authors.  I’m also interested in hearing any other opinions on this subject and am totally willing to answer any questions that may arise!

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Here are three qualitySEO tools available now for Android users that will help any webmaster keep up with his or her online business on the road or in the yard. Not all of us are road warriors after all but it’s still important to keep our finger on the pulse of our business while hanging out next to the pool.

mAnalytics Pro

mAnalytics Pro gets straight to the point like few useful mobile apps do. Although the various analyses you can accomplish using this app are significantly less complex than those available on your more powerful desktop mAnalytics Pro is fast and simple. You will probably find yourself using this app even when other software solutions are available because it so user-friendly and quickly meets many common daily needs.  Quickly access the following by date:

• Visits
• Unique Visits
• Pageviews
• Bounce Rate
• Average Time on Site
• New Visits

Data can also be broken down by country, browser, and more.  One I set up my site profiles I was one or two screens away from about 80% of what I need on a regular basis.  Not bad at all.

mAnalytics Pro is currently available for $1.30 at GooglePlay and holds a 4/5 star review with 91 votes. There is a free version of this app that is driven by advertising and it is so frustrating you will very quickly shell out a buck for the premium version.  I tried both and the ads are really too much.

WebRank SEO

Users of SEOSite Tools for Chrome will be happy to see this app. From the dashboard in the app you can pin various sites that you want to track regularly or you can copy and paste URLs directly into it to get the following information:

• Google Page Rank
• Alexa Rank
• Pages Indexed in Google or Bing
• Backlinks in Google, Bing, and Alexa.
• Facebook Likes
• Tweets
• Google+Data

The settings of the app can be adjusted to add or remove Google, Bing, or Alexa from any of the data analyses.  This can help further streamline the reports to just the facts you need.

The app is currently averaging 3.7 stars out of five with 89 votes cast. The reviews on Google Play appear to be mixed with many users pleased and a very vocal minority who are unhappy with the current features of the app. After using WebRank SEO for a few days I find that it does exactly what it says it’s going to do quickly and easily. I will continue to use this app regularly. The app is available at Google Play and is currently free although the download page does say the free version is available for a limited time only. Take that for what it’s worth.

SEMTab SEO Pro

SEMTab SEO Pro is designed to help webmasters keep track of the social signals associated with their website. Specifically this app helps track Facebook, Delicious, Google+, and Twitter activity across one or more sites. Social signals are quickly becoming a very important aspect of search engine optimization so tracking this data is only going to become more critical. SEMTab SEO Pro tracks the following:

• Google PR
• Facebook Shares
• Backlinks
• Twitter Activity
• Alexa Rank
• And More

Available from Google Play for $1.99 this app is certainly worth the price. This will help webmasters keep track of the social aspects of their user’s experience and therefore help tune a site to better serve their visitors.This in turn could help avoid issues such as a Panda Update disaster. The Panda says keep people happy and this app can help webmasters figure out what that actually means. After using this app for a couple of weeks it’s definitely going to stay on my main desktop.

The three apps discussed above have been on my phone for at least a week. I have found that my use of various software suites has decreased significantly since I downloaded them. Although I can get a much more in-depth data analysis from my trusty desktop software the ease-of-use of these apps makes them very attractive for smaller jobs. If I just want to see visitors for the previous day instead of logging into one two or three accounts I just push mAnalytics Pro and within seconds I have what I need. The same can be said for the other two apps as well, and although there are naysayers out there for myself I recommend them highly.

You can read more from Jon T. Norwood at Internet Service Providers, a site with all you need to know about Internet Service.

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This will be a somewhat speculative post, so I feel compelled to say that these opinions are my own, and don’t necessarily reflect the opinions of Northcutt as a whole.
Where did this crazy idea come from? It started with the realization that, back in 2009, Google’s Chief Economist told McKinsey Quarterly “I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s?”

Now, besides the encouragement that I picked the right major, I also immediately realized that this would have implications for the future of search. There is certainly no doubt that Google is hiring statisticians. Furthermore, the Panda update was almost certainly the result of algorithms that leveraged correlations between various factors and what surveys deemed “bad content.”

After giving the matter some thought, I realized that Google’s massive dataset (the entire internet) offers plenty of opportunities to detect authority and relevance on the web, and links wouldn’t necessarily be the best way to do it in the years to come.
In theory, the best way to identify an online influencer isn’t with links. It’s by measuring the waves they make online.

Okay, So What Are “Waves?”

Let’s start with a real world example. As a science blogger, I know one of the go to places for science news is EurekAlert. Whenever an organization publishes new scientific research, they go to EurekAlert to publish their press release. It then gets syndicated and spread throughout the web. From there the story gets picked up by The New York Times and an onslaught of bloggers (like me) who comment on the news.
The site recently published a press release entitled “Climate model is first to study climate effects of Arctic hurricanes.” A search for this phrase in Google reveals EurekAlert’s version of the article first, followed by several copies of the article and similar articles throughout the web.
This is what I’m calling a “wave.”
In other words, if a site produces content that gets emulated by others and spawns related stories throughout the web, it’s an influential site. That is, in fact, pretty much the definition of influence.

Is it Really Possible for Google to Measure “Waves?”

As somebody with a decent amount of experience in online journalism and copywriting, I can tell you that websites copy each other all the time. They just don’t, for the most part, plagiarize each other. I am also convinced that the technology already exists to make a reasonable guess about whether one article was based on another one.
So I feel fairly confident in saying yes, it is possible for Google to measure such waves. I don’t believe they are doing so currently, but I believe the technology and the statistical techniques are already there to make it happen. Such an algorithm would work something like this:

1. Look for statistically significant fluctuations in the terminology, phrases, and subjects discussed on the web, and searched for through the search engine. Look for pages that have similar subject matter and article structure.
2. Identify the turning point when the subject increased in popularity, and identify the sites that covered the subject first based on index date.
3. Look for correlations between mention of the subject and mentions of specific brand names (co-citation).
4. Supplement the process with link data.

If you think this is speculative, you’re right. But if you think it’s far fetched, consider how the Panda update most likely works:

1. Use human quality raters to categorize content as either low or high quality.
2. Use a machine learning algorithm to find correlations between various factors and which pages were considered low or high quality.
3. Use those correlated factors as a proxy for quality, and adjust rankings accordingly.

Panda may also already be using pattern recognition to identify redundant articles: articles that don’t use the exact text as another article, but have a similar topic and structure. In that case, identifying at least some waves would be as easy as tracing these redundant articles to their source.
Furthermore, the search engine has already become very good at interpreting query meaning. Anybody involved in keyword research should already have noticed that minor changes in keyword hardly change the search results, especially in the top three. Combine this with Google Insight and Google Correlate and I’m convinced Google could identify shifts in the chatter across the web with relative ease.
If you still think this is unlikely, consider this:

• Suppose that whenever the algorithm claimed to detect a page that was based on another one, there was only a twenty percent chance it was correct.
• In that case, it would still only need to detect 21 “positives” in order to be 99 percent sure that at least one of those pages really was based on another one. (Use this binomial calculator if you don’t believe me.)

And, if you didn’t know this, Google has already built an algorithm capable of training itself to recognize pictures of humans faces, body parts, and cats with 82, 77, and 75 percent accuracy respectively.
I repeat, those are pictures, not text.

Why Would Google Do This?

• Hard to fake. Chatter spreads to far more corners of the internet than links do (or social does, for that matter). This would give the search engine a lot more data to sort through for unnatural signals than links can alone. Measuring “waves” would be tantamount to measuring influence directly, rather than using links as a proxy.
• Noncommercial. For the most part, only noncommercial subjects propagate through chatter. People don’t stand around chatting about commercial products in forums, social networks, and blogs. This is good news for Google, because it wants most of the commercial content on its own properties, not the organic search results.
• Brands. The one exception here, of course, is big name brands, which people do mention frequently. Since Google would look stupid if big brands didn’t show up in the search results, this also suits the search engine’s motives.
• Intimidation. Such an update would likely cause many SEOs to call it quits and move over to AdWords, a good move for Google.

Possible Incarnations

There’s more than one way Google might use such technology if they end up implementing it.

• As a supplement to links – It may turn out that waves aren’t quite as easy to detect as I’m theorizing. Under these circumstances, they may be used as a method of detecting unnatural links. For example, if a site has a much higher link to wave ratio than average, the link profile is probably artificial.
• As a domain level signal – There is a good chance that waves would be too hard to measure for individual pages. It’s more likely that the search engines would use it to measure the influence of a domain, except in the case of very influential pages.
• As a “replacement” for links – While I don’t think this is likely, it’s possible that waves and other statistical signals may eventually become better signals than links, and end up replacing them as the dominant ranking factor. This very well may be coming, but I doubt it’s coming in 2013.

Why it May Not Happen

It’s possible we won’t see this happen in 2013, but if so, I don’t believe it would be because the technology isn’t there to do it. Instead, it would be because:

• Google’s search results are “good enough” and they would prefer to focus on expanding Google Shopping and their other properties
• Google is too busy building tablets, Project Glass, and cars that drive themselves to invest in search the way they used to
• Google will be too invested in the push toward mobile and social to advance their core search technology

Implications for SEO

Whether or not “waves” become the new ranking factor for 2013, I have no doubt that Google is looking for new and innovative ways to measure influence. If I were in Google’s shoes, “waves” would certainly be my next step forward. Either way, SEOs should be considering expanding their influence by:

• Becoming known as a source of content that can’t be easily found anywhere else
• Building relationships with other influential people online
• Creating products and services that naturally lend themselves to online discussion
• Engaging in community building, crowdsourcing, and gamification
• Focusing on getting indexed rapidly so they are attributed as one of the first sites to cover a subject

So, what do you think? I’d love to hear how people weigh in on this. Is this the direction the search engines are headed, or am I crazy?

Carter Bowles is a freelance writer, science blogger, and SEO enthusiast. He lives in Idaho with his wife and daughter, where he is pursuing degrees in physics and statistics. Carter writes for Northcutt, a Chicago based SEO and Inbound Marketing company. Like Northcutt on Facebook,  follow them on Twitter, and check out all they have to offer at www.northcutt.com.

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Yesterday when I updated a routine ad campaign,  to advertise a recent post for a client, I performed the usual:  chose a recent post, and unpaused the campaign.  Typically the ad stays in Pending Review and is automatically approved within a few hours, and we receive an email confirming when it launches.  Not this time. With no explanation, while I happened to be on my personal Facebook page, a frame “Your Ad is Almost Ready!” and invites me to Finish My Ad.  That’s odd since I finished it hours ago.

This takes you a Review page to name and review your ad.  But it’s not the ad I chose, so I have to chose Edit Ad.  This takes me to a dead page. It’s broke.

Round two, the following day, ad campaign still pending review, nothing launched, I see the same Frame “Your Ad is Almost Ready” and this time the ad is correct.  Success you think? Afraid not, clicking Approve Ad also takes you back to the same page, nothing will approve and the ad will not launch. It’s broke.

Facebook just implemented a system where an ad you already approved has to be approved by you a second time? And you only know this if you happen to log on to your Facebook page later that day? No email notice for this? No warning you will be expected to approve it? And then it does not even work?  That has to be great for conversions! The most popular website on the planet in dire need for advertising revenue, and their systems are not tested before launch.

This is the equivalent of checking out at Amazon, and randomly visiting their site later in the day to be asked “Are you sure you really really want to buy these things?” and they are not the right things. Or you do click Yes I Really Really Want to Buy These Things, and are ignored.  No sale, no shipping, no conversion.

I wish I could share a solution for anyone experiencing this right now.  Yeah yeah, try a different browser, clear your cache, delete the entire campaign and start over, RIIIIIIGHT, I’ll get right on that.  I think I’ll turn up our AdWords campaign instead.

Rant over.

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Step 7: Measure

I remember a very energetic web guy back in the dot.com glory days who pitched us on his money-making system with the declaration, “He who has the most data wins!”

I must admit, I thought that was pretty cool and used it myself a time or two to impress people. But experience has shown me that quality data is really the key, because today we can measure things to the point of becoming overwhelmed.

Metrics are everywhere. Just watch a sports show on TV and you’ll see how every aspect of player performance has some sort of statistic. And if you have ever witnessed a presentation of data in a meeting you have probably also witnessed eyes glazing over and slow little pools of dribble accumulating out of the mouths of those present. Try and avoid that.

Quality data starts with the basics first:

• Who – as much as we can easily collect by name and contact info
• What – was it a red squeegee or an SEO scorecard request?
• When – because at some point, we’ll need to know if the weekends are an active time period for us or not.
• Where – Why in the heck are we getting so many sales out of Kentucky?
• How Much – our average sales are below $2.00 – the merchant fees alone are killing us!
• How Many – we took in 10 case forms yesterday, more than we did during all of last week. Why?

Once you have these core metrics you can compare them based on historical data over time and then you’ve got half the battle won already. But there is more to know. And the more you immerse yourself in simple data, the easier it becomes to start to peel out more granular information that turns into actionable data, such as:

• The day of the week to send emails based upon highest open rates
• Testing a new form with modified fields, resulting in a 40% increase in forms received, when previously two out of every three forms were abandoned
• Determining sticky (or confusing) landing pages to increase average minutes per visit

And there are many, many tools of the trade to help you measure such data. Google Analytics is the free giant, but Webtrends, Unbounce and Hubspot also offer tracking metrics and lead measurement within their own subscription platforms.

Step 8:Wash, Rinse, Repeat.

Sorry. Go back to Step 5, modify, and try it again.

Step 9: Understanding Results, or What the Heck is my ROI?

The ongoing name of the game is to increase that conversion rate, whatever you, your business, your agency or your internet marketer have agreed upon is an actual conversion is (see Step 1).

But the holy grail of conversion rate optimization is the Return On Investment.

Because the more you improve that conversion rate, the more you improve your chances to make more money. And the best part about the internet is that it’s so highly measurable. Of course, the worst part about the internet is it’s so highly measurable. So let’s turn this into an SAT-worthy word problem with a common illustration of the ROI formula:

• It takes 50,000 impressions a month to get us 500 clicks which get us 25 appointment requests of which we close 5 deals.  The average value of those deals is $1,500. Thus we take in $7,500 (5 x $1,500 = $7,500).

• Not so fast. We spent $5,000 a month to buy those impressions (or those “clicks” if you prefer, or those email addresses, etc.).

• Thus you get 25 leads for $5,000. Using some applied physics with calculus we come up with $5,000 divided by 25 = $200. That is your Cost Per Lead.

• You closed five deals. So your Closing Ratio of 5 out of 25 is 20%

So what we are left with is $7,500 – $5,000 = $2,500 And that’s your ROI.

Right? Yes. In a perfect world. Except that $5K you spent isn’t the only cost you’ll have in it. Please also consider manpower, resources, time and effort, and expertise.

How do these things, often intangible, get calculated in? And remember, not every calculation on cost is as clean. To make it even more challenging, conversion rates get muddled and even outright miscalculated if your funnel is set up incorrectly or your goals aren’t measured properly.

Worst of all, it’s impossible to do a break-even analysis beforehand because you may not know what your actual leads or clicks or impressions are going to cost before you start running.

What we’re talking about here is the total Cost Per Acquisition which is always, ALWAYS greater than your Cost Per Lead.

Still you have to start somewhere. My recommendation is to begin with three manageable and reasonable questions:

• What is a lead worth to you?
  This can be the most difficult question of the whole process since the natural inclination is to say, “Well it depends upon what they buy!” But you must make a guess as to what an average sale is for you, or set a realistic target sale price.
• What are you willing to spend for a lead?
  And we get back to the reflexive answer, “Well, how much will it cost?” But you have to start with what your comfort level is and some kind of framework for reality. If you sell a .99 item, you should not spend $3 for a lead. Even if you believe that over the lifetime of that customer he or she could potentially spend $10. It’s never a sure thing.
• What do you need to add onto the lead cost to get a sense of what your Cost Per Acquisition is?

Again, try to be realistic. There are always outside costs. And even if you are doing the work in-house, someone still has to spend man hours on it.

Okay, so putting it all together, what does it all mean?

Here’s a guideline, but keep in mind, it’s just a general rule (because as we learned from the wise and great Obi Wan Kenobi, only a Sith speaks in absolutes):

Once you have your Cost Per Acquisition down, it should not be more than 20% of your final sale. Why? Because you could eat up your profit margins quickly and you will always have some sort level of waste in the constant battle for conversion optimization.

Guest Post Author: http://www.discovertec.com

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Step 4: Test

After all the effort people put into setting up programs and campaigns, nothing amazes us more than how seldom site owners or managers check to actually see if their whole process works. Emailed form results that disappear into cyber oblivion, missing images, or simple broken links are among the most common things we witness.

But these mistakes can be far worse.

I recall a client coming to us several years ago with a very nice healthcare supplement website he just had built. It was well designed and e-commerce equipped and he had product ready for fulfillment. He asked us to see if we could strengthen some of the marketing copy on his order pages as his orders just seemed to be “way down.”

We dove in to take a look. The site was organized and some of his product names were very clever. After spooling through several categories and pages, we decided to see how easy his purchase process was. And we liked his site so well, we thought, What the heck, even if we end up buying something just to test it out, it’s worth it. Some of us could certainly use that Ear Nibbler Female Pheromone! We zeroed in the product, chose our quantity, resisted the add-ons and upsell items, broke out the credit card, armed ourselves for purchase, and hit BUY NOW.

Only to stare in disbelief as an error page came up. FAIL.

Can you imagine? All the time and money that went into gathering that sale ended in error. And he didn’t just have one page like that, he had many. Needless to say, all the slick copy in the world wasn’t going to improve his sales. But the larger point is, while we’re not saying you have to be perfect, if you don’t test to see if your setup works, all you’re setting yourself up for is failure.

Step 5: Modify

In nearly every instance I’ve tested any setup process, be it for conversion rate optimization or otherwise, testing has revealed modifications or tweaks that need to be made.

It could be as simple as improving a headline to realizing that the email address a client was using to respond to inquiries, like buttgraph@name-hidden-to-protect-the-innocent.com, probably wasn’t the wisest choice.

While it may hurt to admit your mistake, you’re fine as long as you fix it.  In fact, if your process works perfect the first time, be suspicious!

Modifications continue long after you’ve launched as well. The process of “A/B” or multivariate testing has become almost an art form in some circles. In essence, you should continue to look for ways to improve your conversion rate – and in particular your landing pages – by trying out different images, different messages, different offers, different calls to action, different headlines, even different forms. But not all at once! I can tell you that if there is one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that you can never just guess what user behavior is going to be.

Step 6: Retest

And continuing along those lines: Never assume! Don’t take all your incredibly astute revisions for granted. Test them again. And when in doubt, test them some more. To drive home this point, I encourage you to visit a great website that chronicles the ongoing battle of the Gut vs. User Behavior Reality called Which Test Won? – http://whichtestwon.com/

Our final three steps will delve into understanding metrics and ROI… Stay Tuned!

Guest Post Author: http://www.discovertec.com

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Think of it like this: You’re trying to track a long-distance runner during a race, but you stop clocking him before he finishes.

So…what was his final time and finish position? Before you high five all of your colleagues and look back with pride on the fact that you had a runner, realize that with true conversion optimization, you should not only know what the finish order was, you should even be capable of measuring whether your runner slowed down for water along the way.

While this may seem obvious, in nearly every conversion optimization instance we’ve examined, site owners or managers had either no idea what to measure or were trying to assess only half of what was truly measurable.

Before you begin, make sure you are prepared. When it comes to leads, there can be many, many steps along the sales cycle before you have cash in your hand.

• Make a list of everything you would like to know – even if you’re not sure if it can be measured. Desired data you may wish to gather might include leads that offer name, address, and emails and information after the sale, such as the number of items purchased, how much was spent, and how long it took for the customer to buy.
• Be certain all notification points are set up both for you and the user – if a lead or sale comes in, who gets alerted? How are they identified? Do you have a code or a naming convention?
• Group, categorize, and organize data – if you don’t you can’t measure it. And you don’t have to have a fancy database to store it all in, but if you want to know if you get more prospects for blue widgets, yet you find you’re selling more yellow widgets instead, you’ve got to have some of sort of system in place.
• Determine what you consider to be an actual conversion – Is it a download? Is it a request for service or a free estimate? Is it a newsletter signup? Is it a contact page visit?

You MUST measure through to whatever point signals success for any of these things, and if possible, beyond.

Step 2: Set Up the Funnel

To build upon our runner illustration, you’ve got to set up the race course first. You want to clearly control where the runner starts, finishes and each checkpoint along the way.So when setting up The Funnel, you should identify all the components you’ll need. In the real world this equates to things like:

• Your initial offer or teaser
• Landing page(s)
• Confirmation/thank you page
• Auto response emails
• Form captures

ALL of these components must be identified and, whether you can do it yourself or you need help, they must then be configured. But it starts with thinking of every touch point along the way and making a diagram, flowchart, or even just a simple list from there.

Step 3:Create Your Landing Pages

Landing pages are essential to any effective campaign. Landing pages are where all the action takes place. And if you believe landing pages aren’t important, consider this: inbound marketing giant HubSpot conducts an entire webinar training class just for the creation of landing pages. In fact, we could spend this entire posting just on the finer points of what’s most important for each landing page.

And while there are best practices you can follow, keep in mind that landing pages are a moving target in today’s world. Unbounce has a great set of tips on everything you could ever think about landing pages and then some:

http://unbounce.com/101-landing-page-optimization-tips/#before-do

But if you really are unsure where to start, check out what your competition is doing. And if none of your competitors have got it figured out, just go to a site that has offers on it and try out their process and take notes.

Stay tuned! In our next installment, we’ll look at testing and tweaking.

Guest Post Author: http://www.discovertec.com

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