A squeeze page is a landing page that is designed for two purposes: one, to give visitors to your site something of value – whether a newsletter, written content, videos, or other downloads – and, two, to get their email addresses in exchange. Squeeze pages, capture pages, lead capture pages…whatever the name, their intent is to help you generate quality leads. Now, how do you generate those squeeze pages?

Before you start, though, here are a few best practices to think about when you’re crafting your squeeze page:

• Be very selective in what information you solicit. Some forms require emails, names, name of first pet, favorite actor in a dramatic performance…it goes on and on. This creates a very high bounce rate. In general, the fewer the fields, the better. A caveat to that though: if you ask for more (but only what you need), you can get higher quality leads. It might be worth it, but you have to consider your goals and what a “high quality” lead is.
• Make sure it is very clean and simple and that you audience knows what you want it to do. What are they signing up for? Why? What’s the value to them?
• Include a benefit-driven headline.
• Provide a clear value.
• Craft a privacy policy to allay people’s fears that you will use their email address to spam them mercilessly or sell it to marketers so they can do the same.
• Select a few (real) testimonials to persuade readers of your value.

Ok; onto building them. There are a few different ways to do this:

1. Design it yourself. This is the hard option, and it involves code! This is extremely time-consuming and difficult for non-developers. If you want to try, you can find tutorials on YouTube to guide you through it.
2. Use a free or paid software program or template. There are sites like SqueezePageCreator that are completely free. While this is great for sites with small budgets, the templates can be generic. Another option is to find free or paid templates or to use plugins for your Wordpress or Joomla platform. This has the benefit of being quick and easy – and costing much less than hiring a designer or taking 50 hours from your work to make you own! CashRevelations has over 150 free pages that have been screened for quality and ease of use.

If you don’t have an effective squeeze page, or any squeeze page, create your own today. This is a valuable CRO tool and one that can help you generate high quality leads.

As smartphones and tablets are becoming increasingly more popular, it is important to remember that people typically are not replacing laptops with phones or phones with tablets. What they are doing, in many cases, is adding. They may work on a laptop; browse for product info on their iPhone; and make purchases from their tablet – while watching TV from their PC. This is why 2013 has been called the “Year of Responsive Website Design.” The goal is to ensure that users have a smooth and aesthetically-pleasing experience no matter what type of device they are on, and that it is consistent when they switch to another of their devices!

A fixed website is, in most cases, not going to fly any longer. There are exceptions, but in general switching to a responsive design will benefit you and your SEO and CRO efforts in a number of ways:

• If the content you are offering remains the same across platforms, responsive web design allows you to create one site that will accommodate mobile and computer users. This negates the possibility of penalisation for duplicate content, and you will be better positioned to accommodate visitors.
• I’ve landed on a site that is not responsive and doesn’t work with my smartphone. What should I do? Bounce, of course. Not only will you lose that visitor, Google will say, “Hey, this site is not giving people what they need. Let’s lower their rank.” A high mobile bounce rate can impact your overall bounce rate, lowering all of your rankings.
• Existing inbound links hold a lot of sway here, so if you leverage them, you can perform more favorably in mobile search results.
• Google recommends it. If they’re recommending it, they’re obviously going to be ranking these sites higher. Listen to Google if you want to rank in Google!
• Responsive web design allows for consistent user experience, a factor that Google also considers when ranking websites.

As searchers, we are finding information in a variety of ways, from a variety of places, on a variety of screens. One responsive site can accommodate for all of these users.

There is no question: you should be optimising your website for mobile devices. As more people switch, or at least supplement, their PC with a tablet or smartphone (or both), they use their PCs less. Further, spending increases with mobile devices. As a whole, people tend to shop on their smartphones (check prices, look for product info, and find vendors) and make purchases on their tablets. Businesses can’t afford to lose out on that type of traffic and sales opportunities. You could create a separate website for each platform – which would cost a fortune and drive you crazy. Or you could test your website with emulators to see how they appear on different browsers.

Here are the best emulators for testing your tablet and smartphone-optimised websites:

• Screenfly. This very popular emulator allows you to test your website on a variety of different device screens and at various resolutions. All you do is go to the website, enter your URL, and GO. Your website will appear, and you can select the platform on which you want to view it.
• Mobile Phone Emulator. Again, you can view your site across a variety of mobile phone platforms. You start by entering your screen size (of your computer, if that’s where you’re doing your testing) and then entering in the platform info from the drop menu on the right side of the screen.
• Mobile Moxie.  This is a good one for mobile phones. It allows you to compare your site across three phones, which can give you a good look at the landscape you’re creating.
• Tablet Emulator. Not surprisingly, this one allows you to see what your site looks like on a tablet. There are also options for Blackberry, iPad, Android, and iPhone emulators.
• MobiReady. This is a tool that offers more than an emulator – though that’s important too, and you can certainly use it exclusively for that. The drill is the same: enter your URL and GO. MobiReady goes a step beyond and offers a comprehensive test results page, showing you how it does on dotmobi compliance tests, and much more. There is even a markup test to help you sort out your semantic data.

These are free tools that will help you make necessary changes to your website to ensure they are mobile-ready.

The word of the year in terms of SEO and content is “authoritative.” With changes in the search world – including Knowledge Graph, Panda, and, indeed, user habits and preferences – it is incumbent upon websites and businesses to provide the very best quality to searchers. If not, they are simply going to go unnoticed. Google has to trust you; the searcher has to trust you. One way you can establish your authority (besides having fantastic, relevant content!) is to set up your Google Author Rank.

Google Author Rank is a key factor in increasing not only traffic but conversion rates. Set it up now by:

• If you don’t have one, set up a Google+ account. Through this, you will be able to set up Author Rank – and you’ll have access to other + goodies, like Circles.
• Go to your Google+ Profile and select Edit Profile (it is a blue tab on the top right of the screen).
• Scroll down to Contributor to. Click here and you’ll see a small window that allows you to list sites to which you contribute. These can be your website, blog, etc. Label the site or blog with its official name, and then paste the URLs into the box.
• Select who will see the Author Rank. You can choose to limit it to those within your circles or extended circles, but in a B2B situation, Public is your best option. Otherwise, what’s the point in optimising!
• Hit Save.
• If you are a contributor to multiple sites (Good for you!), go back and repeat the process for each site or blog.
• After you’ve done that, scroll up one item to Other Profiles. Here, you can add the pages that are about you. If, for instance, you have a YouTube channel, Twitter account, or Facebook page, this is the place to list them. Again, add them and Save.
• At the top of the screen, select Finish Editing. You can then View As to see how others will see the markup.
• Your next Google vanity search should reveal your Authorship markup, which will include your byline, how many Google+ Circles you are part of, a “More By Mr. X” link, and a short description for readers about you. You will also see, if you hoer to the right of your listing, that there is a double arrow. When you hover over this icon, the site to which you contribute will be displayed. This offers the searcher that much more information  – and hopefully entices him/her to click through.

There you have it. Taking just a few minutes of your time can yield great results and help you improve click-through and conversion rates. Own your content: Authorship helps it work that much harder and more effectively for you.

Like runners, website owners are always trying to cut their time. A few microseconds can mean the difference between winning the race and being left behind. The word “browse” tends to connote leisure and whiling away the day. In reality, though, we browsers are incredibly impatient. We must have the requested webpage now. We must have this image load now. We must this video stream now. It doesn’t matter if we’re doing research for school or work or just whiling the day away!  Preloading images can help boost speed and compete in the search race.

When you preload an image, you are putting it into the user’s computer memory. That way, it can be accessed more quickly when needed. This is important in terms of speed, and say, if you had a mouseover. You need the image to change without hesitation. So, how do you do it? With some web trickery. Let’s take a look.

If you have one image, you can use the code below to preload it. Paste the code into your document head:

<script>

if (document.images) {

img1 = new Image();

img1.src = “yourimagename.jpg”;

}

</script>

But you want more than one image on your page? All you have to do is add more image lines like so:

<script>

if (document.images) {

img1 = new Image();

img1.src = “yourimagename.jpg”;

img2 = new Image();

img2.src = “yourimagename2.jpg”;

}

</script>

And there you have it. Now those impatient browsers can get what they need and you can have an aesthetically pleasing site. Everyone wins!

WordPress powers about one-quarter of new active websites; it is an incredibly popular – and versatile – platform. One of the biggest benefits for users is the vast array of useful plugins that can be installed. There are many that can help you optimise your site – and optimise your optimisation efforts. Here is a look at our favorites:

• SEO Yoast. This is one of the most popular SEO plugins around – and it’s free! But besides the price, it’s got a lot going for it. It can act as your SEO tutor and give you suggestions for improvements, help you write meta-titles and descriptions, and check your rich snippets. Another Yoast product, “Yet Another Related Post” recommends related posts at the bottom of all your articles.
• Google Site Verification Plugin. Google needs to know you own the site before you can use your tools. It’s easy-peasy with this plugin.
• SEO Rank Reporter. Check out what the competition is up to. Track your rankings and compare them to your competition. You can set up alerts to give you the heads up when anything changes.
• All in One SEO Pack. A great plugin, this is easy to use and allows you to choose the meta tags that you want for each page or blog post. It also helps you optimise for search engines.
• W3 Total Cache. A great one for SEO – and CRO. It helps your pages load faster and keeps your site from crashing.

Installing a WordPress plugin is easy. Simply go to Plugins in your account and ADD NEW. You can search by category or type in the specific plugin you want. You can look at DETAILS if you want, and then INSTALL NOW. You will be asked to confirm. If you’ve not installed a plugin before, you’ll have to provide your FTP login credentials (which are available through your web server host).

PROCEED with the installation > ACTIVATE PLUGIN or RETURN TO PLUGIN INSTALLER for further instructions/actions. That should be it for the majority of plugins. Now you’re ready to do some serious WordPress work.

Google query operators are little tools that allow you to restrict your Google searches so you can find targeted information for your SEO campaigns. This is a great way to get at what you need without taking the long way around, so to speak. How do they work?

They work pretty easily, fortunately! Simply go to a fresh Google page and get to work. Say you want to look at a particular website for a target keyword. This is tremendously useful for SEO purposes. All you’d do is enter:

site:www.targetsite.com target keyword

So, let’s say we want to look at SEOFuel for the keyword “ecommerce.”  We’d enter: site:www.seofuel.co.uk ecommerce

And viola. We have results that show us “ecommerce” restricted to this site. Here are a few more that you’ll find useful (and for more still, check out SearchEngineLand’s list).

*Note: Google operators are case-sensitive!

You can even combine these operators to really zero in on the information you want. Check out GoogleGuide for some tips as there are some operators that cannot be combined.

A little Google finesse can help you access valuable information for your SEO campaigns; experiment with it and see what you can dig up.

Shoppers around the world spend billions online, and this is increasing as consumers grow more confident and comfortable with virtual buying options. This is wonderful news if you are Amazon – but what about the rest of us? What about smaller ecommerce sites? How can you get noticed and make it in the increasingly competitive online business world?

Some tips that ecommerce merchants can put into place include:

• Mobile convenience. By 2015 or so, about half of shopping sessions will be done on mobile devices. The problem is that soon, it won’t be enough to be mobile-compatible. Merchants will have to create mobile sites to accommodate for the needs of these users. The good news is that they’re investing in the right place: “third screen” users typically spend more than offline shoppers (and a bit more than desktop or laptop users as well).
• Watch your product descriptions. Google doesn’t like duplicate content, even if that content is manufacturers’ descriptions. Craft your own using original language; user-generated content is a great option. In a pinch, you can do a no-index metatag:

<meta content=”noindex”>

• Pay attention to your links. Don’t buy them from linkfarms, don’t use sites that do nothing but provide links, just don’t. It does make linkbuilding harder, but it also makes it easier to rank on Google – and easier to avoid penalties! Cultivate links from a variety of resources – articles, forums, blog posts, social media, etc. – and conduct periodic audits to ensure your links are “healthy” for your site.
• Content marketing will ultimately work better for you than traditional product marketing. Google doesn’t want the competition! Instead, they want content. You will rank better, have more authority, and generate those valuable links more easily.
• Run a lean, attractive ship. Make sure your site structure and navigation flows easily and quickly.  Pay attention to factors like load time (very, very important), a streamlined sales funnel, an uncluttered interface, and logical navigation.

Ecommerce is an exciting field, and when you put these tips into action, you can give yourself a competitive advantage, particularly when it comes to mobile.

Instant gratification is not good enough for us now; we need things before we know we want them (this is something Google does well!). Waiting is becoming foreign to our nature, at least insofar as our online lives go. Speed is a must for websites to convert visitors. Google experimented and slowed down its SERP from 100 to 400 milliseconds. This is less than half of a second, but it resulted in .2 to .6 percent fewer searches. The longer people were exposed to the slower conditions, the fewer searches they conducted. Speed matters. It matters to Google, and it matters to your site. Enabling gzip compression is one step in making it leaner and meaner.

First, what is gzip? It is a compression method that works by finding similar strings – such as whitespace, tags, etc., in a text file. It replaces those (temporarily) and makes the file smaller.  Smaller sites = faster page load times. About 90 percent of sites support gzip, and it can reduce response size by 70 percent.

• Your host may be compressing your HTML documents – it’s not likely, but it could be. You can use GIDZipTest to check.
• If it is not being compressed, you’ll need to know two things: what server you are running and how to access your web server configuration. If it’s Apache (like it is for 64 percent of active websites and the most heavily used in the UK), simply edit the .htaccess file and add:

# compress text, html, javascript, css, xml:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
# Or, compress certain file types by extension:
<files *.html>
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</files>

And that is it. You have enabled gzip and have reduced your load times. This is just one way to speed up your sites, and we’ll explore more in the coming weeks!

For effective SEO and CRO, you need to have a strong analytics platform in place and know how to make it work for you. There are several options from which to choose, including Mixpanel, Clicky, FoxMetrics, Kissmetrics, and Open Web Analytics. Google Analytics is the most popular – 57 percent of the 10,000 most popular websites use it – but while the platform is incredibly rich, it is also complex. Let’s break down the complexity and look at one feature that will help you with conversion rate optimisation: multi-channel funnels.

Multi-channel funnels show you how customers interact with your site in the 30-day period before they convert. You can see how various channels come together and result in conversion. As well as helping you optimise these channels, you will also be able to measure paid and organic search email, display, social network, and other channels. To start:

• Enable goals or e-commerce tracking.
• With MCF, you’ll have access to overview, assisted conversion, top conversion paths, time lag, and path length reports. In the assisted conversion and top paths reports, you can group the channels according to the default – which is fine for most sites – or create your own custom channels. The basic channels include direct, email, referral, paid ads, organic search, social network, and feed. You can add up to 25 custom channels, such as paid search vs. display.
• On the left side of the screen in your Analytics account, click on Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels.
• At the top of that screen, you’ll see Conversion Segments, with a list of default segments, including “All Conversions,” “Time Lag > 1 day,” etc.
• Below Conversion Segments, you’ll see a dropdown menu that allows you to select the types of conversions you want to look at, and then type. So, you could, for instance, look at all conversions influenced by AdWords or by referral or any of the other categories. You can also create custom segments, if you choose.

The information is only the start. What you do with that information really determines the value of MCF. Interact with the data and see how you can shore up problem points and develop strengths even more.