In Part 1 of this article series, we looked at a local home security site that had fairly good rankings but whose conversion rate was lacking. (You can see the original copy here: http://www.copywritingcourse.com/topsecurity-original.pdf.) Here in the conclusion, you'll see how several changes helped maintain this company's good rankings while improving their site's lead generation abilities
It's been a myth for as long as the Internet has been in existence. Get good rankings and your site will be successful. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that has never been the case. What you get when you achieve good search engine rankings is a lot of traffic. That *can* be a wonderful thing, but it by no means guarantees even one sale.
You see, search engine rankings are not responsible for making sales. They are responsible for getting visitors to click to your site. If you (or your search engine optimizer) have done your job, you'll have descriptions in your search returns (or PPC ads) that bring in qualified visitors. But still. even with qualified visitors, the engines are not in a position to make sales at your site. That's the job your copy and usability elements handle.
Top Security, Inc. faced this problem. They had good search engine rankings. They were listed on the first page of most of the major engines. They had the traffic. Sales, however, were not where they wanted them to be. What was the cause? One look told me the copy was the culprit. (Take a look at the original copy here: http://www.copywritingcourse.com/topsecurity-original.pdf.)
Recently, in the news, there was a post about a job listing on Google's site. They are apparently looking for someone with experience in "identification, selection, and negotiation of dark fiber contracts." Does this mean that Google wants to become an ISP?
While that might be kind of neat - A Google flavored ISP (after all I would imagine their rates would be cheaper than anyone else) - I don't see this as their plan.
Dark fiber refers to all that fiber optic cable that was laid in the late 90's but never activated, or was used but subsequently turned off. It's the stuff that no one is using now.
But for what purpose would Google need miles of fiber? Well, there are many uses.
In the "That's cool but what's the use" category, a new entry from MSN.
In order to perform this experiment there are a few prerequisites; A news aggregator or a browser that supports reading feeds, or some other way of reading an XML or RSS feed. I use Firefox with Sage.
I will demonstrate how to do this using Firefox with Sage merely because I am most comfortable with it.
So, once you have Firefox and Sage installed, open Sage, and then what you need to do is go to MSN and perform a search. When you see the results, click on the feed discovery button in Sage (it's the magnifying glass). Within a few seconds you will see that you can get the same search results page served in XML. Highlight the feed and add it. Now if you go into Sage, and click on the feed you will see the exact same results as would be displayed on MSN search.
After the latest PR update at Google and MSN's beta search going live, there is one thing for certain in 2005: the world of search is in for some major changes. There has been growing speculation around the SEO world that reciprocal linking is a thing of the past. Rumors are abound that PR means less and less, if anything. Bill Gates came out of his cave to say that "Today's search is nothing" and that it won't be that way for long. There are quiet rumblings in the SEO back alleys of a new, state-of-the-art search engine currently indexing the internet. Websites are dropping off the face of the planet. And we're all left to sit here and put together the pieces. So what is in store for 2005?
We all know it's good practice to put in-context keywords into page titles, meta tags and alt tags. But here are a few places you may not have thought about.
Click fraud is becoming a major problem for online advertisers. If you advertise your web site on pay per click search engines such as Overture or Google AdWords, chances are that you pay way too much for your clicks.
So I changed search engine hats over the weekend. I became a user researching a product I wished to purchase. It was an electronic gadget so I was able to easily find lots of information on what I was looking for.
I was looking for a device which will allow you to "share" your Cable/Satellite/DVD signal with another TV but send the signal wirelessly. I know they make such things, because I remember seeing them in various flyers some time ago, but I wasn't sure what they were called, or who carried them.
Imagine my surprise when my first weak query on Google returned exactly the right thing in the first position. I think my query was something like "send signal to another TV" or something like that. Now I knew what it was I was looking for - an Audio Video transmitter/receiver that also happens to send the remote signals as well.
Do you know that according to WebSideStory, an analytics firm, in 2003 medium to large Web sites got an average of 13.6% of traffic from search engines? Do you realize the power in that one simple statement?
Search engine marketers trying to get new business from medium to large Web sites can ask for log files from potential clients. They can then determine the percentage of traffic from search engines for those potential clients. They can compare it to the average, and use that number to prove the need for their services as well as the importance of search engine marketing.
The same principle applies to SEOs trying to prove to the marketing or management departments that search engine marketing needs to be taken seriously.
If you're anything like me, you have a favourite search engine and you're loyal to it. You never use any others (which made this research difficult for yours truly), insist yours is the be-all and end-all and you even go so far as to deny any shortcomings it may have. But is your search engine truly the best? Inspired by a great article at the BBC News (BBC News: Search Wars), we decided to compare the major search engines. Here's what we found.
We chose the search term "real estate fiji" because it's a competitive industry and geographically specific. We also searched with the same phrase, misspelled to see if the search engine would suggest the correct spelling.