The following is a guest post by Ari Ozick, a leading authority on ecommerce link building:

With the indulgence of the Invesp Team, I’m going to take Conversion Optimization and show you how it can be applied to link building. If you’re doing any kind of outreach, link bait, or targeted under the table link buying, then this post will show you how to up both your contact rate and conversion rate on link acquisition, all by making sure you’re doing some very simple things with your home pages. My focus is primarily E-Commerce Link Building, so we’re going to focus primarily on sites selling something, and not on sites profiting from advertisements.

Continue reading How To Apply Conversion Optimization to Link Building

Posted in SEO

What do websites need?

Did you say “Traffic”?

Wrong answer!

Continue reading Searching for Traffic in all the Wrong Places

Posted in SEO

Let me say up front that I am usually useless at predicting how things will go. My past record has not been fantastic and I place the few “hits” on luck. But it’s that time of year to look back or forward, and it is kind of fun, so let’s look into our crystal balls shall we?

Continue reading Online Marketing Trends for 2009?

Posted in SEO

Talk to internet marketers, peruse the forums and read the blogs, and you will see search results as being one of the silver bullets to free traffic and therefore instant millions.

The problem is, this kind of focus can be counter-productive … Continue reading Why Search is Not Just About Traffic

Posted in SEO

This is a guest post courtesy of Linda Bustos, with Elastic Path.

When you think of keyword research, you likely associate it with search engine optimization and the importance of including keywords in various tags and body copy to appear higher in search results. But keyword research is essential to your entire online marketing strategy, and has applications beyond SEO, including: Information Architecture.

When you first set out to organize your site structure and decide on how to label your categories, you may have to make decisions between synonyms – especially for e-commerce sites. For example, you might have to choose between “athletic shoes,” “runners,” “running shoes,” “trainers” and “sneakers.” How do you make your best guess which is most popular? Head off to Google Trends and compare each term, and make sure you set which geographic market you operate in, as there can be regional differences in preferred terms:

Continue reading Beyond SEO: Applications of Keyword Research

Posted in Ecommerce, SEO

TopRank published a list of the top SEO blogs by RSS membership back in April of this year. And while RSS membership is a great indicator of how powerful a blog is, there are few other factors to measure the power and reach of a blog. So, for the purposes of this post, we will list the top SEO blogs based on several criteria:

Continue reading Top SEO blogs: The Ultimate Rank

Posted in SEO

**Thank you for all the wonderful comments and suggestions of analytics tools. This is an update of our last post with 5 more more great tools to add to your list.

Never undermine the importance of testing and analyzing your site. On the most basic level, analytics data will help ensure whether or not you’re on the right track. And if the data is reviewed and utilized on the site it will help you increase conversion rates. Who doesn’t use analytic tools these days? You’d be surprised. We have come across ecommerce site marketing VP’s that can barely tell us the number of visitors, conversion rates, or results and rankings for paid and unpaid traffic. Now, for those of you who are familiar with analytics data and tools, I thought this was a fun little blog that may pique your interest to what’s new out there.

We’ve worked with these 15 tools that can be found on Techlicous’s to help analyze and gain a better understanding of your site’s traffic.

Continue reading Top 20 Site Analytics Tools to Help Optimize Your Site

Posted in Conversion Optimization, SEO, Technology

Let’s face it. Everyone is trying to add the latest and greatest online marketing tools to their site. It is a way to generate traffic, get some link love and become well known within the online community. But I reached a point where I rarely used any new services because I felt that everyone is copying the same ideas. Well, for the last few weeks I have been using one of the most useful SEO software tools available. Sheerseo offers a service that I am sure will become one of the most popular services online.

I know that every online site spends quite a bit of time trying to improve their ranking for site keywords. Of course, one of the first things everyone does is figuring out where the site ranks for these keywords. That generally involved using different tools that will help place a keyword and check your site ranking through these tools.

The problem:

• Most small sites will target between 50-200 keywords. Larger sites, can target thousands of keywords. That means that you have to check hundreds of keywords for hundreds of pages.
• There was no way to track historical position for site for certain keywords. Most sites end up using a manual process of tracking site progress.

Basically, the process was very labor intensive.

The solution

Sheerseo solves each of these problems.

The site allows you to add up to 200 keywords to check for your site ranking: The interface to add the words is straight forward to use. The current number of keywords sheerseo tracks is 200 but I am sure they will be expanding this in the future.

•    You can run the query for either Google or Yahoo

•    It also allows you to view your progress

• Current & historical referrers
• Word density
• Indexed pages

Overall, I was very happy with the service. I am sure we will be hearing a lot about Sheerseo in the next months.

Posted in SEO

Many beginner SEOs are being misled about search terms by forums and blog posts focusing on traffic.

Yes, of course, traffic is important, but only the right traffic.

The standard advice is to find keywords that are searched often but there is lower competition for. Seems like reasonable advice, right? Actually this advice is too simplistic, it is missing a vital ingredient.

While you can rank and get some nice traffic flow from these terms, if there is little competition it probably means the term is harder to monetize.

Now there is a big difference between terms that you monetize by selling a product and terms that you monetize with Adsense or any other arbitrage play.

On my own blog I have several terms that I rank for to attract people to my content, from the generic “New Media Consultant” through to specific terms like “Blog Meme“. Each term functions in a different way. Conversions for me though are RSS signups, I know from analysis that I rarely get consultancy work from a first visit.

My search terms are research, informational, “interest”. They are not purchasing terms, people on a mission.

What is on your prospects mind? Which terms match your prospects mission? That is the key to knowing which terms to optimize for.

The Invesp site is mostly about a problem facing businesses, increasing conversion rates. Invesp prospects will be looking for reasons why their conversion rate is poor or looking for advice on boosting conversions.

By contrast take a look at one of my favourite clients who I always pick on, Cogniview. Their products are very much in the “on a mission” category. People don’t look for PDF to Excel conversion software without being very serious. They have a problem and need to fix it.

Don’t optimize for traffic, optimize for psychology. Find people who are in the right mode that matches your offer, buying mode, research mode, conversational mode. 

With the right optimization you can make more conversions with lower traffic, making your job much easier and your business way more profitable.

Posted in SEO

Traffic is the fuel of a web property. Without traffic you just have potential. No traffic, no sales, ad clicks, leads, feedback, community.

It is easy to understand why webmasters are obsessed with it.

Now as you know, there various sources of traffic, from free to way expensive. All have their place, and the less budget you have the more work you are likely to have to put in.

Small business operators seem to be getting the idea more recently. Larger businesses seem fixated on three tactics; Adwords, banners and SEO.

I am going to let you in on five “secret” sources of traffic. In fact they are common sense, but because common sense is rarely common practice they might seem like secret traffic sources to your clients …

1. Expired Domains - Old domains can be picked up when expired really rather cheaply. What many people do not realize is a lot of them have links pointing to them, or even garner some type-in hits. For a real snip of a price you can find some real bargains. Buy a whole bunch of them and funnel the search juice and hits to your main property.
2. Site Purchases - It’s not just expired domains that you can pick up on the cheap. Look out for sites for sale that have inbound links and steady traffic. Avoid the pumped and pimped sites from savvy sellers, what you want are the sites that can attract visits from a variety of sources naturally already but with a bit of tweaking can really perform. Again this traffic can be funneled, 301-redirected or just used as is.
3. OPT – Other Peoples Traffic. This is the heart of the Squidoo, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace etc tactics. Find a location that naturally attracts attention and leach off it. Another route is to build something attractive that friendly blogs will want to link to. I could even put guest posting under this heading!
4. Huge and Influential Lists - This is the oldest tactic in the book. It’s so old it makes people overlook it in favor of Social Media Marketing and any other recent buzzword. People forget, but you know it works, right? The key is how it is presented, and absolutely not spam. Call it a Joint Venture, an advertisement, a friendly mention, whatever, getting on a powerful list with a glowing endorsement can be the best converting traffic you have seen. The challenge is getting the right deal on the right list.
5. Hitching a Ride – Let someone else worry where the traffic is going to come from and just tag along for the ride. This is related to the last point in a way but it stands on its own. Think about the last big promotion in your niche. The PR, the advertising, the fanfare. While you might only be able to siphon off a small percentage of that attention, you will also pay little or nothing to get it. There are two versions of this tactic; partnering or freeloading. When you partner you actually give the main event some of your value, be it as a bonus, a prize or some other service. For example a big product launch might get a free pass to your seminar or ebook. When you freeload what you are doing is finding a bandwagon that is about to start rolling and jump on it. So you look for a story that is about to break big and you do all you can to suck down on some of that traffic.

Those are my lesser known traffic sources, what are yours? Share your secrets in the comments …

Posted in SEO