Earlier this year I made my 2010 predictions for search engines mainly Bing & Google challenging the conversions through search. Since then a lot has come to pass, the new Google layout was implemented and was shortly followed by the controversial “Mayday update” and finally Caffeine going live across all Google data centres.

The new Google layout gave rise to concerns of traffic decreases to websites both in through organic and paid results. Whether or not this was the result of the new layout or simply the adjustments Google made in how they crawl and rank websites and pages that occurred during the same period, was uncertain. Simply put, Google’s “copy” of the Bing layout is not working. As we all know in the internet marketing world, copy and paste solutions do not work and Bing is definitely doing something right in search to drive such large scale changes by Google in an effort to keep up in the search race.

The following is a Guest Post from ABC Copywriting based in Norwich, Norfolk, UK. You can also find Tom Albrighton on Twitter.

Imagine you’re creating a web page to promote one of your products or services. You have been given infinite resources and the chance to carry out an A/B test on two versions of the page. There’s just one restriction. Page A can only include images and graphics, no text. Page B can only include text, no images or graphics.

Page A would be tough to build. But with careful use of icons for buttons such as ‘buy now’, you could probably put together a decent page. With a product, you could show an attractive image – although services might be harder to depict. But how persuasive would your page be?

A large percentage of the online marketing companies out there are able to generate an increase in traffic to your website. The difference between a good online marketing agency and a great one is the ability to assist you in converting you visitors into paying customers. ROI is of course the primary objective when it comes to investing in an online marketing and this should be the joint goal of an online marketing manager and his client.

This (slightly lengthy) blog takes a look at some of the basics of conversion and how it can be monitored and optimized.

The definition of Web Conversion and Conversion rates:

This time of the month is always interesting, as our monthly reporting kicks in to evaluate how well we are doing for our clients. Pleased to say that by and large we’ve seen some great traffic growth and reduced cost per visit across the board with SEO once again outstripping PPC nicely. (Always enjoy the internal battle against the PPC department )

Anyway, lets get onto topic, while a lot of the sites we work with are experiencing great traffic growth a lot of them “dont have design budget right now” to aid in increasing conversions. Let me first clarify that we in no way want that design budget, far from it, but in my opinion it is one of the most overlooked areas of a website. Site owners are always obsessed with driving increased number of visitors to a website before adequately understanding what current visitors are doing once they get there. Conversion analysis is key!

Many of us in the search industry already know that rankings are not the be all and end all, yet there are still so many people out there who are fixated on keyword rankings or that trophy phrase. I’m sure we have all seen the occasional article or blog post along these lines in the past; however, this topic gained renewed vigor last week after a presentation by Bruce Clay in which he stated “ranking is dead”.

Many people disagree with Bruce Clay’s statement, however, he possibly just used the wrong words at the time. I am in full agreement with what I believe was the true meaning/intention behind what he said. Most of us know that rankings fluctuate on a daily basis; different data centres produce different results, local queries differ from country to country and finally there are all the advances in personalised search.