How do you actually convince someone to pull out their credit card and actually busy something from your website?

Anyone who knows the answer to that question, or even part of the answer is worth a million bucks. Unfortunately there ins’t any one answer and ‘the answer,’ such as it is, comes slowly and hard. And further, it is different for different types of sites.
Strategies for Education sites are going to be different from strategies for sites that sell machinery.

My personal strategy for promoting sites is the “learning library” approach where lots of free information is provided for browsers with a soft sell approach. This type of promotional strategy works well for education related sites, dating sites, some web and Internet related sites, for example SEO content sites, but not web design sites. Maybe more…

The learning library strategy means creating an online library of material that is related to your product or service. See my other posts on Anatomy of a Content Site, Broad Conent and Content Sites Sell

Conversion is the number of browsers on your site that do something that you want them to, such as signing up for a newsletter, purchasing a product, or inquring about your services. If you take the total number of visitors and divide by the number of ‘actions taken,’ then yo have the conversion number expressed as a percentage.

Increasing your conversion rate is hard work, but also one of the best things you can do for your site. Here are a few tips to get you going.

1. Install analytics
Analytics comes in 2 different types, PC programs that analyze log files, and web based programs. I like to use both because because I get a bigger picture of what is going on. For a web based program, Google Analytics is free and very effective. For a log file, analyzer, I recommend click tracks, which is more expensive, but well worth the cost.

With a log file analyzer, you can start analzing your traffic right away, with Google Analytics, you’ll have to wait a while to gather data.

Even before that, there are a few things you can do to get started.

1. Take the HOME button off the home page! When browsers land on your home page and see the HOME button, they quite understandably think they are on an interior page of the site, so they click on HOME to get to the home page. THis just reloads the page they are on. So, browsers have been on your site for 10 seconds and already you have confused them!

2. Edit your menus. As above with the homepage link, having a CONTACT US link on the contact page.

Think about your browsers and the different types of browsers that visit your site, and how you want them to navigate through the site. Sketch out the most desirable route through your site and then arrange the content and menu choices to ‘guide’ browsers through you most desirable route.

What are SEO Articles?
SEO Articles are web content that has a specified number of keywords. For example, an article, that may be part of a Learning Library or Knowlege Center on a website, may contain 17 repetitions of a particular keyword. For a 1000 word article, that is 1.7% keywords density.
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