There are lots of techniques that can be adopted and below I’ve put down some of my favourite quick and easy ways that you can improve your sales pages straight away with little cost.

1.       Appeal to Skim Readers

That’s right people are lazy readers, congratulations on writing that 3,000 word epic blog post but if it’s hard to read people will switch off and go somewhere else. The simplest way to appeal to skim readers is

• Put Key points in bullets
• Use Sub headlines
• Introduce White Space

2.       Use Images & Graphics

Pictures appeal to the skim readers and a few well placed and well thought out images can make it easier for your readers to visualise what you are selling. Remember they are shopping online and don’t have the ability to have a physical relationship with the product they are buying.

3.       Increase Trust and Provide Proof

Your visitors will not believe your claims until you provide solid evidence to back up what you are saying. The vast majority of people are sceptical of big claims, especially online where the personal element of selling is not present. This can be easy to do on an ecommerce site for example you may want to include a section for user generated product reviews, look at the success of sites such as Amazon who encourage community product reviews.

Always ask your customers for feedback and testimonials to be published throughout your site. If it all possible get video testimonials from your clients these will build trust quicker and are easier to digest than even more words on the page.

Finally, offer a cast iron Guarantee, be bold offer a great guarantee and don’t promise anything you can’t afford or won’t keep.

4.       Write Amazing Titles that make your Life 500% Better

OK, OK I know that’s a terrible example of a title but you want something that will capture your audience’s attention and get them to keep reading. I highly recommend you head on over to Copybloggers guide to Write Magnetic Headlines and get some inspiration.

All of these tips should only take a few minutes each to implement on your pages and hopefully mean that people stay longer on your site and become customers.

Do you know of any quick and easy ways to increase your conversion rates? Just leave a comment below, and let others know your super smart CRO tips.

The dreaded no-index – all to often we discover that people’s websites are struggling to be found by Google due to a no-index tag left in the robots.txt web designers add a no-index attribute to a site or page when they are designing it so that the search engines don’t add the unfinished content to their index. All too often web designers forget or forget to tell the site owner to remove the no-index attributes from the robots.txt; so much so its the very first thing I check on any new on-page SEO contracts.

Do you trust your WordPress theme? –Be sure to check your theme on your WordPress site. I once heard a story about someone who underwent a website redesign and chose a brand new theme to use for her site. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that she discovered  that her website wasn’t being indexed properly. This was because the theme didn’t allow title tags on the page, so the crawlers were having a hard time indexing the site properly. This goes to show that no matter how pretty your theme is, if it ends up messing up your site in the process then it’s not worth using it.

Who is handling your SEO? – There are lots of businesses selling SEO Services these days be sure to check them out thoroughly. Ask for references and ask them lots of questions about how they plan on inporiving your SERP’s. Below is a great Halloween themed guide on Black Hat SEO Methods. Nothing can ruin your year like Google black listing you.  Be very careful of who you and your business trust to improve your Search rankings.

Happy Halloween please feel free to leave your SEO horror stories in the comments below…

Before you begin your PPC campaign you need to make sure of 2 key factors:

You have a well designed professional website: this will help you for two reasons, firstly it will help to improve your conversion rates as customers will trust your site and secondly it will improve your Google quality score. Google Adwords charge poorly designed websites more for their ads than their well designed and mobile web friendly counterparts.

You define a PPC advertising strategy for your business, set out your goals and make a commitment to run on your PPC campaign for at least 3 months, by budgeting and running a campaign for 12-13 weeks you will get lots of data to see which advertisements are converting well and whether or not you are getting a positive return on your advertising spend. By having some clear goals to start with you will be able to measure the success of your campaign.

Create a PPC Keyword List

Keyword research is very important when starting to plan your advertisements.

But, what are keywords? Keywords are the words or phrases your customers would use when searching in the search engines for your product or service. Start buy looking at the main products you offer on your website and write down as many synonyms and variations that you can think of.

For example if you were a Garden Buildings Retailer you might have keywords such as:

Sheds
Wooden Sheds
Metal Sheds
Garden Sheds
Wendy Houses
Child Playhouse
Summerhouses

You also want to add in brand terms e.g. Sony Television and transactional terms e.g. Buy Television as they can often be cheaper than more generic keyword phrases and they will convert visitors into customers better.

If you are struggling to think of keywords for your advertisements you can try using the Google Keyword Tool or my favourite research tool at the moment UberSuggest. Simply put a keyword into either of the tools and hit search. You can export the list of suggested keywords into a CSV file and also take a note of the number of searches per month. There is some debate as to whether or not these values are to be totally relied upon but they will show you which phrases are the most popular.

Now you probably have hundreds of keywords if not thousands on your list, I recommend that you start with no more than 50 keywords for your first PPC campaign. The keywords you choose want to have a good search volume, they do not want to be too generic i.e. Television and they do not want to be too specific e.g. places to find televisions online

Keyword research is an ongoing process but a great list will get you started in the right direction.

Writing Effective Ads

Every single time a person searches for something with Google all the advertisers that have chosen those keyword phrases are automatically entered in to an auction, for every keyword in your AdWords account you assign a maximum bid, which is the amount you are willing to pay per click.

However, the stronger your CTR on Google, the lower your bid needs to be in order to reach the higher ad positions. The current Google Adwords limits are:

It’s one thing to write an ad that gets clicks, but it’s another thing to write an ad that gets clicks for the right reasons. If you’re selling something that your competitors aren’t, emphasise that you have the product available to ship right away.

My top tips are:

1. Create attention grabbing headlines to get reader’s attentions or ask a question that will arouse curiosity from the readers
2. Create ads that get clicks by creating lines that promise readers benefits and grab their attention. Make statements as specific and believable as you can and be sure that your product can deliver this
3. Arouse curiosity by using questions or statements that makes the reader interested in your product or service

Setting up your Google Campaign

I recommend that you read the latest Google setup instructions so that you follow the correct process and do not fall foul of their Adwords Guidelines.

I hope this guide has been useful and if you have any hints or tips on Google Adwords and PPC for beginners please feel free to leave a comment below.

The most considerable and perhaps the most difficult part of website optimisation is building back-links to your site. One of the best ways you can build lots of links is by producing great quality content that may potentially go viral. This SEO technique is generally referred to as “link baiting”.

Trying to engineer the perfect piece of link bait to land you on the front page of Digg or get your article tweeted all over the Twitter-verse is the ultimate target. No, matter how well written your article is it won’t attract new visitors if the headline is poor.

I have come up with some popular headlines I have used over the years, and I am sure you might have some excellent suggestions too, so please leave a comment below.

1.      17 Amazing Websites about ________

2.      How I managed to increase my _____ by ____%

3.      9 Secrets to make your  _______ better

4.      The Truth about _____

5.      What to Ask Your _________ Before Hiring Them

6.      Why You Must Read ______

7.      7 Rules You Must Follow When___________

8.      The 3 Reasons I Hate  ______

I’ll publish some more great tips for generating excellent LinkBait for your site very soon.