The SES in London is in full swing and SEO experts from around the world are strutting their stuff and sharing invaluable amounts of knowledge that promise to boost the state of the entire industry. Brian Eisenberg yesterday did an interesting talk on website conversion and our very own CEO blogged on www.stateofsearch.com about this informative presentation. Louis’ blog boasts 21 steps on how to improve website conversion. I’ve summarized the most important tips from these two experienced gentlemen, right here, for your own reading pleasure:

Here are a few top tips to ensure that your site achieves maximum ROI:

1. Effectively communicate your UNIQUE value to the client

Research shows that users take 7-8 seconds to analyze the landing page on your website. Ensure that EVERY landing page on your site effectively communicates your brand, your UNIQUE selling points and establishes instant creditability. Carry this brand identity throughout your site to ensure that your visitors do not lose faith at any stage of the checkout process, resulting in an increase in website conversion.

Whether you own an E-commerce site, an affiliate site or even a blog, it is important that you make the most of the numerous “selling seasons” that occur every year. In light of this, this blog post is aimed at optimizing your site for Valentines Day which is coming up in just a couple of weeks.

Now, I realize that you’ve only just removed the Christmas trees and snowflakes from your site as we move on from the Christmas selling season (if you haven’t taken your tree down by now, it’s bad luck), but that doesn’t mean that you can rest on your laurels for another 12 months until next Christmas. There are plenty selling seasons to focus on throughout the year – Valentine Day, Easter, Guy Fawkes, Independence day, Australia day, Thanksgiving and the list goes on depending on where in the world you are situated. It is massively important that you find a way to capitalize on these days and use them to your selling advantage.

I recently referred a colleague to an article written about duplicate content and why it is not good practice to regurgitate old content onto your website. My colleague read the article but struggled to make sense of it all as the article was just too technical for someone who is just getting started in SEO. So I had to go through the article with him and break it down into a more a more understandable format. This blog entry is a dummy version of what we discussed.

What is Duplicate Content?

In internet terms, duplicate content refers to blocks, pages or snippets of text that is identical or extremely similar to content on another page or website. Often this is an innocent mistake made by one of the parties involved, however webmasters do sometimes deliberately copy content from other sites in the hope of either getting the other site a duplicate content “penalty”, or simply regurgitating content to save time and money on acquiring well written copy. There is no exact formula or ratio to state what is and isn’t considered duplicate content, so be sure to just keep every page of content that you write as original as possible.

There have been a few announcements bouncing around lately that the love-to-hate Google Toolbar PageRank has gone to ranking heaven, but as we can see, this feature is still firmly in place and Google are adamant on the fact that the Toolbar PageRank is here to stay. The truth is that TBPR is not a favourite amongst many but it is a lot like a car crash – you don’t want to look at it but you just can’t help yourself. In normal Google character, instead of the constant denying of the death of their TBPR, they have decided to show their satisfaction with this little green bar and update their Toolbar PR application. What many individuals find surprising is that this new and improved update has come happily along only a month after the last one, whereas a few years ago the Toolbar was only being updated annually.

When I think of local search, I think of the old fashioned Yellow Pages Directory, but less turning of those thin pages that stick together and more of instant results. Many businesses feel that putting all of their marketing expenditure and effort into their website only will be enough to sell their products and services. They do know, however, that they are not the only Laundromat/butcher/toy store in the area, and this can prove problematic. Bigger brands that wish to sell their products and services to not only their own country but other continents will also face problems when approaching local listings of their business. Whether your business is big or small, local search will place you on the map, literally.

The key to local search is to stay competitive, think laterally and prioritise. Below are a few recourses on how to rank within local search in the countries you would like to target. These articles, written by industry experts, show how you can improve your local rankings.

I love to watch videos that I find in search results. Happy or sad, extremely funny or disturbing, I feel that watching these videos, whether they are circulating memes or rare clips, give you a short break from the world for a few minutes until you are rushed back to reality only to realise that you were probably doing something fairly constructive before you clicked on that particular link. I have heard that you can only concentrate on about 20 minutes of reading/studying/research until you need a break. On good days this number seems like a breeze but on bad days 20 minutes can feel like an eternity. Either way, videos can give one a visual break from endless pages of search content, but are people really using videos and using them properly in order to direct the public to their products and services?

CPA, CPC, CPM, CPL – until recently, these acronyms presented themselves to me like some mysterious code that needed to be cracked. (I will not even mention my lack of knowledge when it comes to coding itself). In my state of confusion and my ignorance in thinking that all these terms were pretty much the same thing, I decided to look them up and find out exactly how these terms can benefit us mere mortals who would be pleased with some extra traffic. As juvenile as it might seem for some, I am going to start at the beginning, so that some of us (me) can benefit from (understand) these terms and why using them might be an additional way (but definitely not the only way) to generate interest.

My own personal net addiction started at age ten. By ten years old, you’re bored of toys and imaginary games and want to start exploring the ‘real’ world in earnest, but living in the suburbs, your options are rather limited. Like many other youngsters, the net was my way to explore the world when the real thing wasn’t possible. More enticing, even, is the fact that the web allows youngsters to indulge in a world that is entirely fantastical but which presents a convincing and more pleasing reality, which explains why the younger generations are the driving force behind the internet revolution.

As we’ve grown, the internet has matched our every step. So much so that China now has hundreds of web addiction boot camps to (literally) beat the youth-based obsession. But what about the older generations — the generations who remember someone who died in the war (as in one of the world wars, not the gulf wars) and watched a plethora of new technologies develop from the sidelines? Are they completely excluded from the internet revolution? On the contrary, statistics reveal that over-50s also enjoy the odd indulgence in a web-type addiction.

So, the year is half way through which is as good a time as any to review the predictions that were made at the beginning of the year. There were predictions that SEO services, email marketing and social media were going to be the most popular forms of Internet marketing for 2009, and they were predicted to show the most growth.

So what has transpired through the 09?

Ad agencies and clients alike are suffering through the recession. A recent survey conducted by Reardon Smith Whittaker (RSW) entitled “Client-Agency Economic Outlook Survey” reveals that the economy has had a negative effect on 87% of ad agencies and 91% of their clients. The survey also revealed that during the first half of the year, 55% of clients decreased their spending by 6% or more. In addition, 35% of clients said that they expect to slash budgets by a further 6% during the second half of the year.

For those that may perhaps be unclear on the use of “stop words”, search engines (especially Google) do not take stop words into consideration when delivering results based on the users search query. There are exceptions to the rule, of course.

So how does this play a role in keyword research? Previously, Google’s External Keyword Tool delivered a fairly accurate set of results for your queries. Over the last couple of months, there have been minor updates to the engine, such as the Google Suggest feature that many of you will have seen when typing a query into Google (launched August 2008). Since then we have been noticing additional “incomplete” phrases that appear amongst the keyword results when performing keyword research using the Google External Tool. And when choosing the final keywords for SEO, people occasionally include these “incomplete” phrases in their final list owing to the high search volumes attached to them.