1. Build a subscriber list.

One of the first things you should do on your blog is set up an e-mail list for readers to subscribe to. This will increase the number of your subscribers and they will help ensure a steady rate of traffic to your site. Subscriber lists are also handy in case you wish to feature and sell a product, obtain user input about a given post, or test a new blog format/style. Best of all, subscribers do not disappear when Google or another search engine decides to shift its search algorithm; this traffic stream is constant because it tracks your blog directly. Also, if you and a fellow blogger both wish to advertise your products or content on each other’s platforms, you can do an ad swap. In essence, an ad swap occurs when two e-mail list owners decide to e-mail each other’s subscribers about their own offers. When this happens, each e-mail list owner has the opportunity to double his/her subscriber base while gaining additional sales and page views.

2. Recruit readers from other blogs and social media platforms.

Blog content, no matter how valuable, will not promote itself. To generate traffic to your blog, along with user comments and Twitter/Facebook posts, you need to visit other blogs and social media profile pages that deal with your blog’s subject matter. On these sites, be sure to post comments and reply to the comments targeted at you. Engage users in a friendly debate about what is being discussed, mentioning that your own blog content addresses this issue. As you generate traffic from these outside sources, those readers will become an invaluable resource for your blog by promoting its content, commenting on your posts, and acting as your personal marketing department.

3. Publish guest posts.

Much like your own blog, other blogs are always in need of fresh and interesting content. Most blog site owners will use your guest content in exchange for posting your site link on their web pages. If you know of any successful blogs that generate lots of user traffic, consider writing to their webmasters and asking if you can submit an article or tutorial to their site. By doing this, your own blog will likely benefit from the other blog’s traffic and user interest in your content.

4. Create some controversy.

If you wish to engage your readers, stir up some controversy by making an unexpected observation or stating a personal opinion. Respond to user comments promptly in order to keep the flow of conversation going and, if need be, publish a follow-up blog post. While controversial blog posts carry some risk of sensationalism (resulting in a loss of blog credibility), the publication of an occasional opinionated post can significantly increase user traffic and interest.

5. Take advantage of Facebook.

Pat Flynn, of the Smart Passive Income blog, writes how bloggers can take advantage of Facebook to generate traffic, build a relationship with their target audience, and establish themselves as an authority in their chosen fields. To this end, you can create a Facebook page that describes your blog and its content. Ideally, you should offer users a way to become fans of your page via a specially designed Facebook landing page. This landing page can also be outfitted with an opt-in form for your e-mail list. Getting users to become fans of your Facebook page can involve posting the Page link on your blog, advertising your blog through Google AdSense and Facebook ads, and incorporating the link within your forum and/or guest post signature.

6. Condense your content into an e-book.

If your blog has a lot of useful and educational content that is spread out over several web pages (or article sites), consider compiling all this content into a single e-book. This way, your readers can refer to a single resource for help with a particular concept or technique. An e-book is also a useful marketing incentive for getting users to sign up to your Facebook page or e-mail list. If your e-book provides incredible value for your users, you might even wish to sell it; doing so often helps drive demand for your content and generates site traffic as well.

7. Create a contest.

Contests are not only great traffic generators for blogs; they are also idea generators for future posts and products. For example, you might host a contest on your blog by asking users to submit feedback about how your site has helped them achieve their personal or business goals. The prize for the best contest entry could be a copy of your e-book. Alternately, you could offer an electronic gadget or gift card, thus engaging inactive as well as active site subscribers.

8. Share a personal experience- with a point.

Your readers are more likely to interact with your blog and return to it in the future if you engage them on a personal level, thus inspiring their loyalty to your blog “brand”. Every now and then, share a personal story that emphasizes the points made in your blog. You might also consider sharing some of your personal observations with your readers and asking for their feedback. Always remember that the initial purpose of the blog was to be a “web log” of personal experiences, allowing others to provide feedback and interact directly with the web log owner (1). Such interactivity distinguished the web log from a static website.

9. Write a pillar article.

Yaro Starak from the Entrepreneur’s Journey introduces the pillar article as “a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something (3).” The pillar article contains useful information that stays current for a long time, offers helpful advice, references and tips, and most importantly, generates traffic for your blog. Over time, your pillar article will also bring in search engine traffic due to users backlinking to it from their own websites. Most pillar articles are 500 words in length or more, but some pillar articles can span over 3,000 words. Most quality blog sites contain at least five pillar articles.

10. Integrate your content.

Members-only and paid subscription sites have the same problem that blog sites do: a lack of regular, high-quality content for their subscribers. By offering to integrate your content with the products presented by other blog owners, you have the chance of exposing your blog site to a large group of potential viewers and buyers. This can result in a tremendous increase in the number of subscribers on your own site.

(1)  Mutum, Dilip; Wang, Qing (2010).  “Consumer Generated Advertising in Blogs”. In Neal M. Burns, Terry Daugherty, Matthew S. Eastin. Handbook of Research on Digital Media and Advertising: User Generated Content Consumption. 1. IGI Global. pp. 248-261

Can quality content really drive sales or is it all hype? Consider the example of a local business, The Gents Place: when this place posted an article about the superior quality of one of its razors, that content quickly went viral. Within 24 hours of the article being posted, The Gents Place had generated $300 in sales revenue. Consider also the example of Delivra: when its director of marketing began publishing company blog posts and sharing them via email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, website traffic increased by 20%, inbound leads by 70%, and revenue by up to 40%.

When comScore conducted a study to determine what factor was most responsible for converting prospects into customers, it found that ad content accounted for 52% of sales changes. Ferris Stith, a PR and social media manager at PostcardMania, increased the number of her company’s sales leads tenfold by offering LinkedIn members free articles, case studies and white papers. Clearly, providing website users with quality content that both educates as well as informs can result in an increased number of sales leads and resulting customers. Additionally, quality content can result in an increase in organic web traffic, website rank and unique visitors.

For any business that is looking to increase sales leads and conversions via the addition of quality content, there are several factors to keep in mind. To begin with, quality content is located via SEO. Relevant keywords allow search engines to relate content to the business and vice versa. In fact, posting quality content is becoming the biggest (and most successful) SEO tactic of many businesses.

However, there is more to great content than just making sure that search engines are able to locate it. Engaging the audience with fresh, relevant, informative and even fun content is no small feat, requiring extensive research and time. This is especially the case when posting white papers, pillar articles and case studies. Furthermore, web and blog content must be posted regularly, a prime issue for any webmaster who is short on time and/or ideas.
There are no “hard and fast” rules for creating great content. However, the following eight tips can enable web pages and blog posts to consistently attract readers, generate user traffic, and build brand loyalty. These tips can also help increase sales leads and conversions, leading to an improved bottom line for the business.

1. Define one purpose for each web page.

Users who are searching for given web content typically think about one page at a time. To this end, every given web page on a website should have one clearly defined purpose. Defining one purpose for each page also creates pages that are better geared towards SEO.

2. Create a complete and honest title tag for each page.

Web page titles tell visitors what to expect in the content of that page. If the page title is too short, including only certain keywords, visitors will be left guessing the true meaning of that page. Because the goal is to increase the number of visitors who are truly interested in reading about the subject content of a page, one’s title must be as descriptive as possible.
Conversely, it is not a good idea to use misleading words in the title of a web page. For example, using words such as “The Best…”, “The Only…” and “The Greatest…” may initially lead visitors to click on the page. However, if the content does not accurately deliver on the promise of a Best of or Only of, that web page will quickly achieve a high bounce rate. This will effectively lower the quality of the website or blog.

3. Content should be “evergreen”.

Depending on what topic or product is described, it is imperative to keep content “evergreen”, or relevant to visitors who read it today, tomorrow, or even a year from now. To this end, one may need to update content from time to time, adding information or data, or just scrapping certain paragraphs or pages. Such content “overhaul” prevents a website or blog from becoming dated and irrelevant to visitors.

4. Content should provide value for the visitor.

Web page content should provide something of value for the visitor to gain insight and learn from. To this end, one can post tutorials, research studies or even personal experiences. Such qualiy content is often linked to, reposted on social media platforms, or otherwise recommended to other visitors. Considerable traffic and conversions may be generated as a result. On the other hand, one should not post content only to make a sale, since this single-minded focus can “turn off” visitors and even make them consider that content to be spam.

5. The content should be organized.

Website heatmaps have shown that most visitors do not read a page from start to finish; instead, they typically scan through the content first for relevancy and subject matter. Furthermore, more attention is paid to organized versus non-organized content. To this end, web content must be organized differently than content found in a novel or textbook. One should create a definitive title and sub-titles, emphasizing given text with numbered lists or bullet points. Content may even be written in the journalistic style of the “inverted pyramid”, where the point of the content is presented first, and then the details are elaborated upon in the subsequent text.

6. Refrain from using black hat techniques.

Many websites and blog owners consider keyword stuffing, link buying, and article spinning to be legitimate methods by which to gain high ranking on search engines like Google. Such methods can initially result in a gain in visitor traffic and conversions. However, these techniques inevitably backfire once a search engine like Google “sandboxes” the site, resulting in its virtual disappearance from the search results. However, even if a search engine does not crawl and discover the offending website or blog, visitors do note if given content is relying on black hat methods for traffic and sales. Once visitors realize that they are not on the right website, they leave.

7. Be truthful about affiliate links and insert them sparingly.

Many visitors are aware that webmasters insert affiliate program ID links into their pages to increase earnings. Many of these visitors also become frustrated when they click on a link that appears to go to another website page only to be directed to a sales landing page or Amazon. If affiliate links are inserted into a web page, it is a good idea to be truthful and label them accordingly. For example, one can include an affiliate link on a page and follow it with the label “affiliate link”, as shown below in the following examples:

• Travel to the Mayan pyramids (clicking this affiliate link will credit my account).
• This kitchen appliance does the job of three (affiliate link).

8. Include descriptions of exact page content in meta tags.

Meta description tags should include a description of the exact nature of the content, not just general keywords. Using only single keywords (e.g., airplanes) does not provide search engines with enough information to categorize web page content. This results in a web page or blog post not achieving optimal search engine placement. In fact, according to Google’s Webmaster Tools, meta descriptions should be at least 15 words long. Thus, including a full meta description such as “how to build a Citation airplane model” is far better than just inserting the keyword “airplane” into that area.

In this article we’ll teach you how to conduct a complete SEO Competition Analysis. We’ll start with a single keyword phrase, find the competitors for that keyword phrase, and then analyze the various search engine optimizations strategies of the corresponding top competitors.

By following the tactics outlined in this article you will know who your competitors are, what they are doing right and, more importantly, what they are not doing right. Knowing what they are doing right can help you catch up with them. Knowing what they are not doing right can help you beat them! That is because there are so many parameters leading to a well-positioned web site that even the smallest “win” for one of them can become a tiebreaker and put you ahead of a competitor.

For this tutorial, we will be using the SEO for Firefox plugin for data collection and analysis. This tool provides an array of vital SEO factors and data right on the search engine results page (SERP), significantly saving on research time.

What is SEO Competitive Analysis?

Let’s assume for a moment that you own a company in Orange, New Jersey that manufactures and sells widgets. When you use a search engine and type in any variation of the term “orange nj widgets”, you want your company’s web site to be the first one listed on the SERP.

If your company isn’t #1 on the SERP, why not? What do the higher ranked web sites have that yours doesn’t? Or better yet, what do the higher ranked web sites lack? The only way to find the answer to these questions is to conduct a SEO Competitive Analysis.

By taking that single keyword phrase- orange nj widgets- each competitor may be located and analyzed via the use of that keyword phrase. Special online tools can be used to analyze the SEO techniques each competitor has used. Doing this research often results in the discovery of gaps in the competitors’ techniques that can be exploited to place your web site ahead of its competitors in the SERPs.

Simply put, analyzing a competitor site consists of finding out the strategies used by that site to rank high for a particular keyword.
Competitor research utilizes a formal methodology that consists of 3 main steps. The first step involves the identification of one’s true competitors. The second step involves competitor analysis through the use of online tools that generate data about competitor on-site and off-site strengths/weaknesses. The third step involves the organization of the generated data into a matrix that is easy to read and manipulate.

What Keywords Convert Traffic to Sales?
There’s more to SEO than simply having a lot of traffic on your web site. Increased traffic may look good, but unless those visitors become customers, all you’re doing is wasting money for general optimization and extra bandwidth.

There is no reason to despair. The truly dedicated search engine optimizer can, to some degree, reverse-engineer some of the search engine ranking calculation algorithms with the help of the many free online SEO tools available. For the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll be using a free Firefox plugin called SEO for Firefox. This plugin is created and distributed by SEObook.com. The tool provides users with an array of useful SEO factors and data right on the SERP, greatly saving on time and effort.

To really squeeze the competition and make the most of your web presence, you’ll need to find out what keywords and phrases really matter, who your real competitors are, and why they’re winning in the SEO game. Let’s get started.

In order to begin your competitive analysis, you’ll need to understand which keywords on your web site actually convert to sales.

To locate your sales-generating keywords, you will need to obtain a list of all the keywords that your web site utilizes- those found in the content, titles, headings, the web site’s log files, and those located in your pay-per-click campaigns. By compiling all these keywords and comparing them to your online sales reports, you can find out just how each buyer found your web site.

Without some kind of Web analysis tool, this can be a very daunting task. Thankfully, there are some very useful and free online tools to help you. Google Analytics, for example, offers some wonderful tools for understanding which are the most valuable keywords on your web site. Even more importantly, these tools provide the list of keywords used by your visitors to find your site.

If you do not yet have access to the conversion rates for specific keywords, or if your web site is new, then you should continue using the keywords you selected as your primary keywords. These keywords should be the terms that best describe your line of products or services. For more information on how to select keywords for your site, read our in-depth keyword selection tutorial).

Who are your True Competitors?

With your list of keywords and key phrases in hand, you can begin to understand who your true competitors are on the Web. What does this mean? Simply put, just because a web site ranks highly using your chosen keywords, it doesn’t mean that it is a “true” competitor.

This is where we need to understand the difference between Broad Match and Phrase Match keyword searches. Broad Match searches occur when you type a keyword into a search engine query box (e.g. Google) without quotation marks. For example:

orange nj widgets

Phrase Match searches occur when you type the searched words with surrounding quotation marks, like this:

“orange nj widgets”

Broad matches are what you normally obtain when you type your keyword into a search engine. For example, when you do a broad match search for the words ‘orange nj widgets’, you will likely get a list of web sites which sell or make widgets in Orange, New Jersey. However, you’ll also obtain matches for web pages that merely use the words “orange”, “nj”, and “widgets” somewhere within their content. Such content could be describing a produce distributor in New Jersey or a widget producer in Orange County, California. Such web sites are not really your competitors; they are targeting a different market and coincidentally use the same or similar keywords.

To generate a more accurate list of your true competitors, you must use Phrase Match searches. To conduct a phrase match search, enter your keywords into the search engine with quotes around them, like this: “orange nj widgets”. This ensures that the only results shown by the search engine are pages that contain these words, and that the words are grouped in the same order as the order used in the search field.

When you perform a phrase match search, you will only find web sites that have this particular keyword in the specified order within their pages.
The sites ranking using the “phrase match” search type are more likely to be your true competitors because sites that mention your keyword in the same order have a natural ranking advantage.

When you perform a phrase match search of your keyword phrase, the top 10-15 results for that keyword can be considered your true competitors for that keyword. Record which web pages come up for each one of your keywords. This will give you an idea of who you are dealing with. Given that information, you’ll soon understand why some sites are consistently higher-ranked than your web site and what you can do to outrank one of them and take his place on the first SERP.

Conducting Competitive Analysis

Before you begin your competitive analysis, you’ll need to know what parameters each of the major search engines use in order to rank web sites. As stated previously, these ranking calculation algorithms used are secret- but only on the surface. With a little ingenuity you can start to discover some of the secrets the search engines are keeping.

The best place to start is at each search engine’s respective user-support page. This is the place where the search engine will provide a sample of what is being used to calculate search results. For Google, check out the Google Webmaster Guidelines page. For Yahoo!, try the Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines. For Bing, check out the Bing webmaster guidelines for successful indexing.

You’ll find during your analysis that the major factors that contribute to search ranking can be broken down into two main categories: on-site and off-site.

On-Site Factors
On-site factors are those parameters that are visible on your or your competitor’s web site. These factors include: Page Titles; Meta TAG Descriptions; Alt Tags; Content; Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3); Keyword Density; and many others.

Off-Site Factors
Off-site factors that influence search engine results are mostly related to inbound links, but can also include many other parameters. An off-site factor may include: Domain Name Age; Inbound Links; Internet “Buzz”; the quality/rank of web pages that are referencing your web site and vice versa; and many other less obvious factors. These are the factors that you’ll be discovering when you conduct your competitive analysis.

Tools
With a basic idea of what is being calculated by search engine algorithms, you can now test some hypotheses with the help of free Web-based analytical tools such as the one we referenced at the beginning of this article- the SEO for Firefox plugin. This tool is immensely useful; it provides quick access to a variety of on-site and off-site parameters that are critical for search engine ranking.

For example, when you enter keywords into each respective search engine query field, the SEO for Firefox plugin will display all the critical off-site ranking parameters, including:

– Number of BackLinks
– Yahoo! Directory (yes/no)
– Last Date Indexed by Google
– Alexa Ranking
– Traffic Volume
– Age of the Domain
– Number of .GOV and .EDU BackLinks
– Twitter Links
– Del.icio.us Links
– Digg Links
– Wikipedia Pages
– Whois Profile
– IP Information
– and More

These statistical parameters appear below each search engine result.

Here is an example of what you would see if you used the SEO for Firefox plugin. Typing in the keyword “Outdoor Lighting”, the first generated result contained the following data:

For each parameter, the data result, if available is displayed as a number or string of characters (e.g., 312 or “Nov 1 2009”). If there is a question mark, it means that in your plugin options, the data for this parameter was not set to be automatically displayed. You may click on the question mark in order to retrieve the corresponding value. The fetch process is dynamic, it will get and display the requested data without any page reload.

Each of these data items are invaluable when you are attempting to establish which off-site factors make one web site more valuable than another. For example, if you notice that a high-ranking competitor’s web site has no .EDU backlinks, then you could use this information to your advantage. By acquiring just one .EDU backlink on your own web site, you gain an advantage over that opponent, which may be just enough to place you ahead of this competitor.

While every ranking factor is important, we do not know the weight assigned to each of them in the algorithms used by search engines. However, these data do help you to discover which aspects of your web site you should be developing in order to have it outrank your competitors’ sites.

If, say, many of the highest ranked competitor sites use a domain name that is more than five years old, this may indicates that the domain age may play an important role in the site rank calculation for that particular keyword.

To work around this, take a look at the top 15 results on the SERP that are relatively new, or which do not even have a domain age displayed because the site was recently made public. By looking at these sites that have attained a high ranking, you can find out what other factors, aside from age, have given them this advantage and discover the one you can exploit to outrank them.

For example, let’s say that one of the web sites is quite new and highly ranked. Upon analysis, you find out that this site has an extremely high number of Twitter and Digg links, but it is not listed in the Yahoo! directory. Rather than trying to compete in an area where your competitor’s site is strong- namely, backlinks- attack the site’s known weakness, which is its lack of Yahoo! directory membership. By paying just $299 per year in order to be listed on the Yahoo! directory, you may be able to jump ahead of that competitor.

Likewise, you may discover that, while a web site’s home page is very well optimized and consistently maintains a high rank, its internal pages located on second and even third level are only minimally optimized. This gives you an opportunity to conduct broad optimization of your own web site in order to take your competitor’s place in the search engine results.

Putting It All Together

Naturally, it’s exciting to locate weaknesses in web sites that had previously appeared untouchable with regard to site ranking. However, knowing competitor web site weaknesses, and effectively taking advantage of those weaknesses, are two different matters altogether. This is why you need to sit down and create a chart of all the critical competitor ranking statistics, so that you can better understand what to do in your own SEO process. This will help you effectively squeeze out your competitors’ sites from the top positions of the SERP.

Using spreadsheets, we will now show you how you can create a catalog of your data, making it easy to read and understand. In this way, you can easily start to analyze your competitors.

Start by opening a clean spreadsheet. For the purposes of this article we’re going to be using Microsoft Excel. For every keyword phrase create a new tab in the spreadsheet document and name it after the keyword that is being analyzed.

Create as many rows as there are competitors displayed in the top 10 results of the SERP for the chosen keyword. In this example, that keyword is “orange nj widgets”. Provide each row with the domain name and URL of the competing web page.

Next, create 16 columns with the following titles: Search Engine Ranking rankings(SER); Page Rank(PR); Domain Name Age(DA); Page Backlinks(BLP); Domain Backlinks(BLD); Page Backlinks from .EDU(BLE); Page Backlinks from .GOV(BLG); Yahoo Directory membership(YD); DMOZ Directory membership(MOZ); Keyword in Page Title(KPT); Keyword in URL(KURL); Keyword in META Tag description(KMD); Keyword in header tags(KHT); Keyword in ALT Tags(KAT); Keyword Density(KD); Google Cache Page(GC); and Miscellaneous.

Now you’re ready to begin filling in your data points. See below for more information about the meaning of these factors and where to find each piece of information.

– (SER) Search Engine Rankings – The actual position of a web site on the SERP. SER is provided in the first data field by the SEO for Firefox plugin.

– (PR) Page Rank: – Based on a logarithmic 1-10 scale, the PR is used by Google to rank a web site’s value. The more valuable that Google finds your web site to be, the higher the PR that will be assigned. For example, the New York Times web site, which has millions of page views per day, as well as fresh content and numerous backlinks, has a PR of 9.

– (DA) Domain Name Age – This is the age of the domain name, according to the first registered date in the WHOIS records.

– (BLP) Page Backlinks – (Y! Page Links) – This is the total number of external links (also known as inbound links) directing the user to a specific page URL. This number does not include any links originating from any other pages of the same domain.

– (BLD) Domain Backlinks – (Y! Links) – This is the total number of external links pointing to any page on that domain. That would include deeply nested pages. It does not include any links originating from any other page of the same domain.

A note on Backlinks:
Backlinks are essential to any well-optimized web site, and are defined as the number of external links leading to a web site. These links provide search engines with an indication of how well known the web site is. And, much like Mom always said, search engines judge web sites by the company that they keep. That is why web sites with inbound links from sites with high PR, or from educational or government web sites, will tend to rank better.

– (BLE) Backlinks from .EDU – (Y! .edu Page Links) – This is the number of page backinks originating from .EDU domains

– (BLG) Page Backlinks from .GOV (**) – This is the number of page backinks originating from.GOV domains

(**)SEO for Firefox does not provide this value. You can find this number by going through the Yahoo! URL: http://siteexplorer.seach.yahoo.com.

For example, if the page URL is www.domain_name.com/page.html, type in the following:

link:http://www.domain_name.com, with the site name being domain_name.com, domain_name.gov, domain_name.govt, domain_name.fgov, or domain_name.gouv

Yahoo! will then display all the inbound links to that page that are coming from .gov, .govt, .fgov, or .gouv domains.

A note on external links from .EDU and .GOV domains :
The .EDU backlinks are inbound links from educational web sites like those of colleges, schools, and academic organizations. .GOV backlinks are inbound links from official government web sites. These two types of backlinks are regarded as more valuable than other backlinks because they are difficult to obtain.

– (YD) Yahoo Directory membership – (dir.yahoo.com) – This factor indicates whether the site is listed in the Yahoo directory. If the variable “dir.yahoo.com” returned by the SEO Firefox plugin is greater than 0, then the site is a member of the Yahoo directory. This factor is important for search engine rankings because a listing in the Yahoo! directory indicates that the web site owner is dedicated to the web site and did not hesitate to make a sizeable investment ($299/year) in subscribing to this directory.

– (MOZ) DMOZ Directory membership (dmoz) – The DMOZ Directory is “the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web”. This directory is indexed by topic and is easily searchable. If the value of “dmoz” is greater than 0, then the site belongs to the DMOZ directory.

– (KPT) Keyword in Page Title – Is the keyword under analysis included in the competitor’s page title?

– (KURL) Keyword in URL – Is the keyword analyzed included in the competitor’s page URL?

– (KMD) Keyword in META Tag description – Is the keyword under analysis included in the competitor’s Page Meta tag description?

– (KHT) Keyword in header tags – Is the keyword under analysis included in any Header tag (H1, H2, H3) on the competitor’s content page?

– (KAT) Keyword in ALT Tags – Is the keyword under analysis included in any image ALT* tag on the competitor page?
(ALT Tags are the keywords that appear when image display has been disabled, when a viewer activates text-to-voice applications, or when the mouse rolls over an image).

– (KD) Keyword Density – Keyword density is the frequency that a specific keyword appears on a web page. This information can be gleaned in one of two ways. One way is to count the total number of times a keyword appears in the text of the page and then divide that by the number of total words on the page. The result is the percentage – or density – of the page that is made up of the target keyword. Another way is to use a free keyword density analyzer like the one found at keyworddensity.com.

– (GCP) Google Cache Page – (Google Cache Date) – This is the number of days since Google last re-indexed the competitor page listed in the SERP. A low number is a positive sign for the site listed; however, you should not rely on this variable too much.

– Miscellaneous – This is where you can put the rest of the material provided by the SEO for Firefox plugin. You can create additional columns to place the off-site factors that are neither intentional optimization by the competitor nor the variety of random optimization created by the site’s visitors – i.e., social media inbound links.

Other examples may include:

Twitter Links: 234
Del.icio.us Links: 5,000
Digg Favorites: 128

Some other items you may want to include are the following:

– Majestic SEO Data – Yes/No – This information provides the number of sub-domains, pages, internal/external links, and other valuable information about a specific web site. The presence of this information not only means that a site is well established, but the information itself provides a valuable insight into site structure. If it is available, print out this information and keep it with the spreadsheet.

– Whois Record – This information – which provides the geographic location of the Web site owner/host – can be useful in analyzing whether or not geographical factors impact search rankings.

Are there other factors that you suspect of influencing search rankings? Include this information here and you can compare the data against the high- and low-ranked competitors to analyze the value of your hypotheses. Just be sure to include quantifiable data and be sure to maintain consistency throughout your analysis.

Once you’ve completed this process for every competitor, you can repeat it for another keyword, or you can move on to data analysis.

Data Analysis

Now that you have all the data collected for each competitor, you may begin comparing and contrasting your results. This is where critical thinking comes into play. Start with the first optimization factor you charted and compare it across every competitor. How does each competitor differ? Do higher ranking web sites have a significantly different level of that factor?

Next, find what each competitor’s weakness is. In your spreadsheet, use a fill color for each competitor’s cell for that factor. For every optimization factor where a competitor is weak, mark that cell green. For factors where a competitor is strong, mark that cell red.

Continue this process until you get through each factor and each competitor. When you’re done, you should have a fairly complete picture of what makes your competitors succeed or fail with regards to search engine optimization efforts.

See the picture below for an example of how this might look. Shown below is an example of what you might see if you were to choose the 14 most important optimization factors and do an SEO competition analysis for the keyword “outdoor lighting”.

Putting the Analysis to Work

After conducting this analysis you will have two vital pieces of information:

1. You will know what optimization factors matter to search engines.
2. With the Green/Red color codes, you can quickly and visually detect area of your competitors’ matrix that can be used to optimize your site and potentially outrank one or more of the competitor listed.

In very rare cases, this matrix may be marked all in RED. If faced with such a situation, you will need to make a decision: is this keyword worth the extra work, or should you move on to a different keyword? By “choosing your battles” wisely, you may save yourself much work and a lot of precious time.

To further evaluate how well optimized a competitor really is, you need to analyze the value of the competitor site’s backlinks. Using free tools on such sites as www.backlinkwatch.com and www.seomoz.org will provide you with lists of inbound links as well as the PR of the sites from which these links are originating. What you will most likely discover is that many of the competitors that have a high number of backlinks, have received these links from low PR sites (1 or 0). If this is the case, then there is still hope for your site to outrank this competitor’s site for that particular keyword. However, if all of the first 10-12 competitor sites have backlinks from high PR sites, then you will need to work on acquiring many quality inbound links. To learn more about inbound links, please read our in-depth off-site optimization tutorial.

Determine just where the weaknesses of your competitors are located, and optimize your own web site in those areas. Over time, you will begin to see your web site climbing the rungs of the search engine results ladder. By proxy, you should also start seeing more revenue being generated as a result of this optimization.

Keep Doing It

The most important thing to remember when all is said and done is: the price of good SEO is constant vigilance. Search engine algorithms change regularly, and what generated a high ranking for a web site one day may not improve its ranking the next. That is why it is important to maintain a regular schedule for performing periodic search engine optimization competitive analysis.

Learn more about Search Engine Optimization.

1. Subscriber retention per broadcast

Subscriber retention is a measure of loyalty to the website, business, etc. Do a significant number of your subscribers opt-out of the email list after a broadcast? If yes, this indicates that there is an underlying issue with the emails, website, service, or something else altogether. Try testing both text and HTML-generated emails by forwarding them to your own account. Use different browsers to open and view the emails, as well as to click-through to your website. In many cases, web browser incompatibility with email formats leads subscribers to opt-out of the list.
If the issue doesn’t lie in emailing technology, conduct subscriber surveys to gauge how your recipients perceive your email messages as well as your website and its products. Perhaps they find your emails informative but your products overpriced. Alternately, you may not be providing enough value in your emails to justify opening and reading them. Obtaining subscriber advice and feedback can be imperative to your future sales campaigns.

2. Conversions resulting from email

Is your email campaign really leading to sales conversions? If you are counting on your emails to drive sales, find out just how many of them resulted in that effect. This can be accomplished by understanding what happens after subscribers click on your email’s call-to-action link and go to its landing page. Whitepaper downloads, webinar registrations, and online purchases all help resolve the question of whether subscribers are active on and involved with your website.
Using different optimization strategies can help increase sales even further. Conduct post-click surveys to determine what potential customers are thinking as they move through your sales funnel. Using multivariate or A/B testing to find out if different landing page designs, promotional offers, and product densities have an effect on consumer behavior.

3. Revenue per subscriber

Knowing how much revenue is being generated by each of your email list subscribers is vital to determining the value of your sales conversion process and how much you should be spending on your sales campaigns and ads. For example, there is no point in spending $25/prospect if each prospect generates only $10 in revenue. Subscriber revenue can be estimated by first finding out how many subscribers you have. Then, looking over your earnings for the past year, add up the number of direct (generated directly from e-mail click-throughs) and promotional sales (generated from an e-mail promotion or offer code) that you have had. Calculate revenue per subscriber by dividing revenue (R) from direct and promotional sales by the number of subscribers (S).

4. Repeat customers

Retail Active found that repeat customers spend an average of 33% more than first-time customers. Repeat customers also provide a 107% higher referral rate than non-customers. Thus, if repeat customers make up a majority of your site’s current subscribers, you are likely to see higher conversions and sales.
You can grow your repeat customer base by using certain email marketing techniques. Start a customer loyalty program on your website that awards points for every dollar spent. Then, notify your customers via email about their total points earned and how close they are to receiving a free item. Likewise, you can solicit the subscribers in your email list with product sales, store contests, etc. Finally, keep track of what your customers are buying and offer future discounts on those products.

5. Comment number and quality

When you send out an email that links to your blog post, do your subscribers immediately leave a series of comments on your site or does that web page languish in obscurity? Active subscribers are more likely to take part in your content creation efforts and provide feedback than inactive subscribers. This gets other content viewers involved and helps initiate useful exchanges of information.
If your emails are failing to engage your subscribers, try making a bold or controversial statement. Alternately, challenge your readers to do something outside of their comfort zone. Personal stories and experiences, tutorials and multi-part emails are also good techniques for “activating” your subscribers.

6. Subscriber posts

One measure of email marketing success is when your subscribers write you about posting their own (non-advertising) content on your blog or website. The posting of subscriber content indicates that subscribers are comfortable with your website, have probably read and reread its pages, and know it quite thoroughly.
How can you encourage your subscribers to start posting content to your site? Providing an incentive to post is always a good start; you might offer a copy of your e-book, a product discount, or free publicity to those subscribers who wish to add to your content. If such incentives don’t work, you may need to dig deeper and pay for subscriber-produced content. The good news with paid-for content is that you can be picky about its quality and require certain edits from the author.

7. Customer lifetime value

There are many ways to measure the success of an email campaign: clicks, visits, bounce rates and conversions. Likewise, you can measure your success by calculating your campaign’s CTR (click-through rate), conversion rate, or its CPA (cost per aquisition). However, there is another parameter that may be a more useful measurement of success: the Customer life time value (LTV). According to Avinash Kaushik (3), assessing customer LTV is preferable to simply generating sales metrics because customer LTV often leads to sales profits over the course of several years, while click-through sales last only until checkout. LTV customers bring real value to a business via product up and cross-sells, periodic purchases, higher purchase amounts, and referrals. By calculating the customer LTV of your email campaign, you are better able to learn of its long-term value.

One good example of crowdsourcing is LG’s “Design the Future” competition. Through a partnership with crowdSpring, LG is holding a public contest for its next mobile phone design. The winner of this contest will be paid $20,000 while other contestants will receive smaller prizes, such as LG phones. The competition has resulted in significant free publicity for LG, as evidenced by the plethora of articles that appear on the search engine results page when one inputs the keywords “LG contest”.

Genius Crowds is another example of a site that takes advantage of crowdsourcing to come up with product inventions. Every two to three months Genius Crowds presents its members with a product category in need of inventions. Members then submit their invention ideas or vote/comment on the ideas that have already been submitted. Most members of this site are awarded status points and gift cards for their ideas and participation on the site; a lucky few are distributed royalties for the products that they help design.

Crowdsourcing offers numerous advantages for your ecommerce business, including the following:

Significant cost savings
Crowdsourcing costs significantly less time and money than setting up an R&D department or hiring consultants. This point is illustrated by the case of Claudia Menashe, who needed stock photographs of sick people for the National Health Museum (1). Even at a nonprofit rate, her costs would’ve ranged from $100 to $150 per photograph if purchased from a professional photographer. However, through an online crowdsource website called iStockPhoto, she paid about $1 for each purchased photograph. Because iStockPhoto has thousands of amateur and professional photographers vying for buyers, prices are set competitively low. Most of these photographers are also not making their living exclusively through photography, so they can afford to receive much less than what a professional photographer would require just to break even.

No or very little overhead
Compensation for crowdsource member-generated ideas and/or commodities can be limited only to those ideas or commodities that are developed. Unlike employees, crowdsource members do not need to be trained for their tasks, retained after the project end date, or provided with work benefits and severance pay. Even the task of crowdsourcing itself can be outsourced; online crowdsource sites can be hired to perform the tasks of advertising the project and gathering interested members.

Free marketing
When presented via social media tools such as Twitter or Facebook, crowdsourcing can become a free and wonderful marketing tool for your ecommerce business. The crowdsourcing project can be used to create awareness about your ecommerce site as well as your products and brand name. Crowdsourcing can also be used for reputation management; for example, if there have been several complaints about one of your products, you can ask crowd members to suggest improvements.

Customer loyalty
Lane Bryant, a purveyor of plus-size women’s clothing, utilizes crowdsourcing to engage its Facebook fans and gain new followers. However, its crowdsourcing approach is not what you would expect; for example, the site asks its fans what color they feel like today. Based on the answers to that question, Lane Bryant’s Facebook manager creates a customized coupon. Such unexpected crowdsourcing approaches have earned Lane Bryant over half a million “Likes” on Facebook. In essence, crowdsourcing engages customers and helps establish their loyalty to your brand. In exchange, you provide customers with a reason to maintain that engagement and loyalty, whether it be through exclusive product information, special discounts, early-bird sale access, etc.

Talent seeks you
When you hire employees or contractors, you must make the initial effort of placing a job posting, scheduling interviews, and deciding which candidate will do the best job. When it comes to crowdsourcing, the best and most talented individuals come to you. Throughout your crowdsourcing project(s), you learn which individuals are best suited to your business and its goals.

Instant hiring/outsourcing potential
The best and brightest members of your crowds can be retained for future crowdsourcing projects or even hired/contracted outright. By researching your crowd members and learning about their strengths, you gain access to a pool of competent professionals that can help your ecommerce business with its future needs. Having such access again reduces your business costs and overhead.

Of course, crowdsourcing does have its detractions. Some of these include the following:

Questionable ownership
Crowdsource sites typically provide terms of service that members must understand and agree to before they can participate in the site. In most cases, these terms of service include a statement about the soliciting business owning the proposed ideas, products and other collateral. Even so, crowdsourcing members do contest with and sue businesses that use their ideas or products. Even if crowd members do not object to the use of their information, a competitor can easily “lift” that information and develop it. Once such duplication is discovered, one or both parties will need to retract their crowdsource-originated items from the marketplace.

Paying more does not improve quality
Some talented crowdsource members will work hard for pennies on the dollar; meanwhile, their not-so-talented cohorts will demand a high price for mediocre results. This is inevitable with any business but it is more prevalent with crowdsourcing because the group consists of a mixture of individuals. In contrast, outsourced and/or hired labor is more carefully screened, and paying more for its services typically results in higher quality ideas and/or products.

Deadweight members
On many crowdsourcing platforms, one or two crowd members will be very productive with ideas and/or suggestions while the other members will merely mimic what has already been presented. If the crowdsourcing platform compensates members based on their level of participation, those deadweight members will receive maximum compensation for minimum effort. Alternately, due to the short-term nature of crowdsourcing projects, members may simply be unaware of or unwilling to learn about all the idea/product specifications that your business requires. This again results in an unproductive crowdsourcing effort.

Wasted timeWhen you hire a few talented professionals to run an advertising campaign or social media effort, it is easy to make quick changes to the platform by simply telling your team your revised specifications. However, when your ecommerce business is dealing with hundreds if not thousands of crowdsource members, it becomes harder to convey your message and make sure everyone understands it. Change inevitably takes more time to implement, which in the business world, equals wasted time. Since time is money, wasted time also equals wasted money.

Bad reputation/marketing risk
Disgruntled crowdsource members can start posting bad reviews about you, your ecommerce business or your products. Disputes arising between crowdsource members can lead to lawsuits against your developed ideas and/or products. Because your marketing plan has been left out in the public eye, almost anyone can gain access to it and tarnish your image (especially if you publish a blatant error or faux-pas). For example, Tim Ferriss garnered a lengthy negative comment and subsequent review of his book cover design contest. Reputation management (or, if need be, salvaging) can be quite a challenge when it comes to the crowdsource platform.

In summary, crowdsourcing can be a useful method for your ecommerce business to start generating ideas and deducing which of these ideas have merit. By harnessing the “power of the masses”, you find out what your customers and the public at large are looking for in your business. The benefits of such an approach are numerous and come at a low cost. Conversely, crowdsourcing also has its detractions, including questionable intellectual rights, lack of member productivity, and the risk of gaining a bad reputation.

The process of finding just the right keywords for your web site consists of selecting words or combinations of words that will most likely be used by search engines to index your web site. Likewise, those words should also be used by potential customers to find your site through a search engine.

The #1 goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is for a web site to be listed in the top (preferably 10) results of the SERP. In this tutorial, we look more closely at the critical first step: finding the right keywords. Once they are selected, keywords will need to be integrated into the content of your web pages and used in other strategic places like page titles and URLs. In this way, your web site will be indexed under those keywords.

Step1: Building your start-up keyword list

The first thing you need to do during the keyword selection process is come up with a top-level keyword list.

Many different methods can be used to produce that first list of keywords. Some individuals prefer to start with core terms that refer to their specific business or industry. Others prefer to come up with the words that they think a visitor would type into a search engine to locate a particular web site. Both methods are valid and work well.

The key objective here is to think about your business in terms of words, themes, core terms and subject matter. To facilitate the brainstorming process, you could:

• Write down a description of your website, its purpose and its scope.
• Read your competitors’ web sites and scan for interesting words or themes.
• Think about what visitors would be trying to accomplish by visiting your site.
• Consider which Yahoo categories your site would be listed under.
• Think about location: is geography important to your business? If so, you’ll want to include the city or region name in some of your keywords.

For example, if your web site sells lighting products, your initial list could include the following keywords:

– ceiling lights
– outdoor lighting
– LED lighting
– deck lighting
– recessed lighting
– bathroom lighting
– modern lighting
– contemporary lighting
– lighting fixtures
– pendant lighting
– battery-powered lighting

Every keyword should be unique and should be no longer than two or three words. By unique, we mean that a keyword or phrase should not include an identical (redundant) keyword or key phrase. For instance, in the above list, “outdoor wall lighting” wouldn’t work because it includes the key phrase “outdoor lighting”, which is already listed.

Stay away from single-word keywords. While they generate the highest search volume, they also lead to the lowest amount of targeted traffic. Statistics indicate that people input more than a single word when conducting a search engine query. Multiple-word queries have the best chance of generating quality, targeted traffic to your site.

Unless you plan on writing new content and adding new products to your web site, use keywords that relate only to your current line of products and services. If you’re unsure about a given keyword, add it; it can always be removed later on. If a keyword is obviously unrelated to anything on your site, eliminate it.

Wrap up the keyword finding process by enlisting the help of a free keywords suggestion tool, like Google’s AdWords Keywords Tool or L3xicon. Fee-based tools like WordTracker and KeyWord Discovery are also available, and are very effective. Online keyword tools will undoubtedly come up with core terms you already have, but they’ll also come up with many that you do not.

Finally, try typing each keyword you’ve come up with into a major search engine like Google. Visit each of the sites listed on the first page of search results. If these sites rank highly with regards to your input keywords, they might also have additional keywords that are worth investigating. These keywords may be located in the web site’s keyword or META description tags and/or page content. When you notice your chosen keywords being also used on competitors’ web sites, it should serve as a confirmation that you have made some good keyword choices.

Step2 : Finding search phrases

The next step in the keyword selection process is finding search phrases. Search phrases differ from the keywords you’ve already chosen for your start-up list: they include one of the chosen keywords or core terms, but as a variation. For example, if one of your keywords is “outdoor lighting”, then “outdoor wall lighting” would qualify as a search phrase.

The best method for finding all possible search phrases, thus obtaining the most comprehensive list possible, is by using tools such as Google AdWords, WordTracker, or Keyword Discovery. Such tools use synonym dictionaries and are best suited for discovering all possible variations of your original keyword(s). For best results, pick every start-up keyword and submit it to the tool. Don’t forget to use singular and plural variations (e.g., “lighting fixture” and “lighting fixtures”) when searching.

Each start-up keyword you input into the tool will return its own unique set of search phrases. Although it is possible for a search to return several hundred variations of a keyword, the average is usually around 150 terms. However, not all of the search phrases generated will be relevant, so don’t waste too much time analyzing every single one. At this point, do a quick phrase cleanup and eliminate the most obvious, nonsensical ones like “peerless lego lighting fixtures” or “outdoor bedroom lighting fixtures”. In other words, get rid of phrases that no one would ever use.

If you get too many search phrases returned – or too few – follow these simple rules In the case where no results are generated, consider eliminating the start-up keyword altogether. For five or fewer results, combine these results with the original start-up keyword to identify additional core terms.

If you obtain over 250 results, you should split your start up keyword. For instance, when the core term “outdoor lighting” is searched, the term “wall” is included repeatedly in its huge list of variations (e.g., “outdoor wall lighting fixture”, “commercial outdoor wall lighting”). Therefore, the keyword “outdoor wall lighting” may be used as a new start-up keyword. Next, you would start the search for the core term “outdoor lighting” again, excluding the word “wall”.

Step3 : Narrowing Down your Chosen Search Phrases

After completing the search for your industry-related search phrases, it’s time to sort them and select the ones that will be the most valuable for your site – then eliminate the rest.

So, what makes a search phrase valuable, you ask? Many different criteria come into play when determining the value of a search phrase. The most important are the competition for that search phrase, its volume of search queries as well as its conversion rate.

Keyword Competition
Competition for a keyword can be simply defined as the total number of web pages already being indexed for a particular keyword. This number can be found on the first line of a SERP. For instance, if you search for “lighting” on Google, the top of the results page indicates that this keyword appears on 138 million different pages. See the screen shot displayed below:

The number shown in the above picture – 138,000,000 – is just one of the parameter used to define the competition for a keyword and should only be used as an indicator of keyword use frequency. Many other parameters, as well as on-site and off-site factors, should also be considered when determining the level of competition for a given keyword. However, at this stage in the keyword selection process, keyword competition should not be used directly to narrow down the search phrase list. Instead, keyword size, traffic volume, and conversion rate should be utilized to complete your filtering process.

Traffic Volume
To obtain traffic volume information, you may use the Google AdWords (traffic estimator) tool. This tool provides an approximate number of search queries performed for a given keyword during the most recent month. It also lets you export all the results to a CSV file that can be used and analyzed in an Excel spreadsheet. In fact, if you haven’t already done so, you should keep all of your keywords on a spreadsheet so that they can be easily filtered according to various criteria. In addition to the Google AdWords tool, you can also use WordTracker or the Keyword Discovery tool to get traffic volume information.

After integrating the AdWords Search Volume information into your spreadsheet, sort the data based on the average number of search queries received daily. Keep the keywords that have been actively searched for; it would be pointless to rank highly for keywords that are not frequently used or typed into search engine queries- you would receive no additional traffic to your web site. If it appears that no one is searching for a given term, discard it from your list. Even if your strategy is to use as many keywords as possible – i.e., a long tail keywords strategy – those keywords need to have at least a minimal amount of traffic volume.

What is the minimum acceptable traffic volume? There is no hard and fast rule, but any keyword that receives 80 or fewer searches per day should be eliminated.

When using the Google AdWords tool to obtain traffic volume information, you’ll find three different types of search traffic information being presented: the broad match, the phrase match, and the exact match search traffic (you can find detailed explanations of these terms in our Marketing FAQ). The broad match refers to a match of the given keywords without regard to their order or arrangement. In other words, “outdoor wall lighting” and “outdoor lighting wall” would have the same broad match search traffic volume. The picture below shows an example of the broad match results for the keyword “outdoor lighting” as well as related search phrases for that keyword.

In case you’re wondering, the “broad match” category should be the base criterion used when narrowing down your search phrases. This is because using the “phrase match” option results in a loss of those users who might type in the keyword phrase a different way. Most likely, someone who types “outdoor wall lighting” is searching for a product similar to that of someone typing “outdoor lighting wall”. These two individuals are just conducting their searches a bit differently. By selecting the broad match option, you are creating the opportunity for the biggest possible traffic gains.

In instances when keyword order is important -such as with a brand name, or a very specific product- the “phrase match” category should be used. This is the only exception to using the “broad match” option.

One final consideration about volume concerns the ratio “Broad Match/Phrase Match”. This ratio gives you a clear indication of how many users are typing in your chosen search phrases in the order you’re most interested in. If the ratio is less than 15%, it means that most people are typing the search phrase in a different way. For optimal results, consider inputting permutations of these words in order to find terms with a ratio of at least 15%.

It may not be easy to let go of an attractive looking keyword, but if research shows more people are typing the words of a key phrase in a different order, you have to give priority to the more popular word combination.

Conversion Rate
Look over your keyword list and highlight the keywords that have the least potential for enhancing your web site’s conversion rate. In essence, good keyword selection involves the selection of words that can attract targeted and purchase-driven traffic. Other keywords are important too, but those that can generate a high conversion rate must be given top priority.

To locate conversion-related keywords, look for those keywords that are the most directly related to the products or services you are trying to sell. Now, if someone performed a search using those specific keywords/key phrases, that person would most likely convert to a buyer if your site had the corresponding product available for sale. So, while ranking highly for keywords that are very general may increase your traffic volume, that traffic won’t be targeted and will result in low conversion rates. Single word keywords are the best example of this problem; they’ll get you visitors, but those visitors will not be interested in what you have to sell. For this reason, single word keywords should usually be avoided.

As you can tell by now, generating traffic volume is not really the primary goal of keyword selection; however, generating quality traffic is. If you’re wondering how you can determine whether a keyword will lead to a high conversion rate, there is a very simple rule you can follow. When considering a particular search phrase, make sure that when someone performs a search query and finds your site that way, your site provides exactly what that search phrase describes.

Broad or general keywords are just as valuable as more specific and targeted ones. The important thing is to pursue a high ranking for targeted keywords first. Once you achieve a respectable ranking for more specific keywords, it will be easier to build up authority for broader terms as well. For instance, if your site ranks high for keywords like “outdoor wall lighting”, “outdoor lighting fixtures”, and “outdoor lighting lamps”, it will become easier for your site to also rank high for broader keywords like “outdoor lighting”.

How do you give priority to a particular keyword in order to boost its rankings first? The answer is to use that keyword more often during your on-site and off-site optimization steps. For more information, please refer to our In-depth SEO On-Site Optimization Tutorial as well as our In-depth SEO Off-Site Optimization Tutorial articles.

Step4 : Organizing your List of Keywords

This organization step prepares your keywords so that they can be integrated into your web pages. Therefore, optimization can also be looked upon as part of your marketing strategy. The idea here is to group your keywords into logical sets so that their future integration into your web site will be more effective.

To begin with, create an inventory of all of your web pages. Disregard items like the product pages, the site’s privacy policy, disclaimers, and other legal documents. Instead, gather your first and second level pages- namely, the pages that make up your main category and subcategories.

After listing all of your pages, create a column in your keyword spreadsheet called “page name” or “page title”. This column will contain your keyword groups. You may now begin assigning search phrases to each of your page names or titles. Each group, also known as a page name, should receive about 10 keywords. The exact number of assigned keywords will depend on the content size of each individual page.

Make sure that all the keywords listed within a group relate to one another. For example, if your group or page name is “Outdoor Lighting”, then the keywords “outdoor wall lighting” and “kitchen wall lighting” would not relate well. However, they could work well together under the group or page title “Wall Lighting”.

The ultimate goal of this entire process is to index your pages under your chosen keywords; therefore, organizing your keywords into groups helps determine which keywords should be used on each specific page. Doing this properly will facilitate proper indexing by the major search engines, increasing your web site’s ranking.

After completing the keyword grouping phase, you will want to select a keyword from the group to be used as the main keyword. Likewise, you will want to maintain and use the other keywords in the content of these pages. The main keyword is usually the word expected to generate the most traffic, or the word that is most closely related to the content theme of the page. This main keyword should definitely be used in the page’s title. Other keywords may be integrated into the content of the page.

When writing content that is based on your chosen keywords, be sure to keep the content flow natural and not “spammy”. Don’t force keyword usage, which is otherwise known as keyword stuffing. If you cannot come up with a reasonable way for using a particular keyword on a page, then try using that keyword on a different page.

1. Involve your shoppers

You may already have a Facebook page for your ecommerce site, complete with a “Like” button that enables visitors to endorse your page. To involve your fans even further, consider providing periodic updates on new products, sales, coupons, etc. Encourage seasoned buyers to post product reviews. Provide a link back to your ecommerce site so that your fans can go immediately to buy your advertised products.

On the other end of the scale, be sure to place a “Like” button on your ecommerce site as well. Visitors to your website who “Like” your site are literally endorsing your products. Since there is a 68% increased chance of a consumer buying a product that is endorsed by a Facebook friend (1), the “Like” button can actually be quite useful for increasing sales conversions on your site.

2. Implement a QR code

A quick response (QR) code is a two dimensional bar code that encodes data on both its horizontal and vertical planes. This enables the code to contain significantly more information than a standard bar code. For the most part, QR codes are uniquely targeted at smartphone users who, in 2011, numbered over 82.2 million in the U.S. alone. Using a smartphone, a consumer can scan a QR code and be taken immediately to an ecommerce website or learn about an upcoming event. Retailers can scan a QR code from a smartphone and apply the encoded promotional discount or coupon.

When it comes to ecommerce applications, you can use a QR code to take the consumer to your sales landing or product page. If you wish to enhance your social media presence, you could direct consumers to your Facebook or Twitter account and offer them a free product sample once they “Like” or “Follow” your page. If you wish to gain email subscribers, you can encourage consumers to sign up for your online newsletter in exchange for a white paper or software download.

One of the biggest advantages of the QR code is that it can be used for online and offline applications. Merchants have been known to place QR codes not only on Facebook and Twitter but also on flyers, storefronts, T-shirts and hats. QR codes are even appearing on business cards, offering a convenient way to scan and retain a merchant’s contact information if the business card is lost or thrown away.

3. Make your website tablet/smartphone-friendly

Today’s on-the-go consumers are often viewing your ecommerce site via tablets and smartphones. At least 30% of tablet and 25% of smartphone owners have used their devices to shop online. Because both of these items have a reduced screen size, your ecommerce site needs to be optimized to a more limited format.

While the screen size of tablets is almost the same as that of laptop computers, they will often not support Flash-based programs. Furthermore, tablets typically have touchscreens instead of a mouse, meaning that your website users will lose mouse-hover capability. Images, text size, Javascript and custom scroll bars can pose issues for both tablet and smartphone screens. To address these issues, you could build a custom ecommerce website or app for such mobile devices. Alternately, you could utilize basic HTML and program your website to adapt to mobile device formats.

4. Enhance your online reputation

With online consumers having a plethora of ecommerce sites to choose from, ecommerce merchants must find new and better ways of increasing sales conversions. Many ecommerce merchants have accomplished this goal through online reputation management, which is the practice of maintaining credibility and expertise in one’s niche area.

Online reputation management can be accomplished in a number of ways. You can obtain third-party verification through businesses like the Better Business Bureau (BBB), Geo Safe or even Paypal. If there are any professional organizations related to your business, you could join them and provide this information on your site. Also, listing your actual contact information and phone number(s) will enable consumers to feel safer when doing business with you.

To enhance your perceived expertise, post at least five (or more) “pillar” articles about your products and/or their use on your website (8). Consider posting authoritative content on article directories such as eZine Articles. Also, find blog sites within your niche area and offer to write guest blog posts for these sites in return for a backlink to your ecommerce site. Creating and posting such quality content will help increase your online reputation as well as traffic to your ecommerce site.

Once your content is posted, don’t forget to provide social media links to it via Facebook “Like” buttons or Twitter posts. Solicit comments and advice from your readers on your published content. In this way, you (again) involve your shoppers in your ecommerce shopping experience.

5. Learn to handle online dispute resolution

According to LoyaltyOne’s COLLOQUY report, 84% of Canadian and 75% of American consumers will tell family and friends about a bad consumer experience. With social shopping, it’s even easier to write a bad product or site review and have that report go viral, leading to a loss in customer loyalty and sales conversions. Since many consumers read consumer reviews and reports about products prior to making a purchase, effective online dispute resolution is critical for your ecommerce site.

To combat customer disputes, you may wish to purchase a third party resolution program (e.g., SquareTrade) that will act as a mediator between you and online consumers. Alternately, you will need to pay due diligence to consumer issues and complaints, addressing them promptly and providing online follow-ups when they are posted to your ecommerce site.

1. Promo code boxes drive customers away

When presented with a promo code box towards the end of their purchase, many consumers “in the know” will leave your website to locate affiliates that advertise merchant promo codes. These affiliate sites often redirect the customer to a link that then steals your online sale. Remedy this issue by including your promo code within your affiliate link or promotion email, allowing it to be “carried” into the URL parameter of the customer’s session on your site. At checkout, only the customers who were provided with a promo code will see the promo code box. Alternately, you can even simplify this process by having the promo code automatically applied during checkout.

2. Free online shipping trumps a big discount

Even if free shipping saves the consumer a mere $6.99 and the product discount is $10, that consumer will invariably choose free shipping. In fact, in 2004, it is estimated that 52% of online shopping cart abandonment was triggered by shipping and handling fees. To entice your customers to buy now, consider offering free shipping after an order threshold is reached. Deciding what that threshold should be is tricky; a very low threshold may cut into your profits, while a threshold that’s too high often leads to large orders and consequently few repeat customers.

3. Slow downloads reduce online sales

Almost half of the online consumers surveyed by Forrester Research claimed that they would abandon a website if it did not load in fewer than two seconds. Also, customers who spend over $1,500 per year online are even less patient than those customers that spend under $1,500. As an online retailer, you can avoid losing potential customers to long download times by optimizing your website and being cautious when adding video and/or animation. Also, be sure to test your website across different operating systems, browsers, screen resolutions and mobile applications.

4. Emails are marked as spam

Customers as well as their email servers can mistakenly mark your email as spam, resulting in your email or IP address being blacklisted by servers. The main reasons for a retailer’s email being marked as spam include the use of images or text instead of images and text, a header that is over 100 pixels, a suspicious landing page URL and overuse of “spammy” words like “free” and “prize”. Email recipients who are not interested in your offer may also mark your email as spam without being aware of this action’s negative consequences. To avoid this issue, keep your emails simple, dated, and without too many animations, images or videos. Also, avoid sending emails too often or without the recipient’s initial permission.

5. “Will” is overrated

Online consumers are more likely to purchase a product if exposed to it in the present moment. It is for this reason that retailers display cookware or cosmetics by giving free cooking demonstrations or makeovers, respectively. The more customers can connect with the product now, the more likely they are to buy it. Therefore, kill the word “will” in your brand descriptions. Instead of stating “This furnace will save money on your energy bills”, thus making a vague promise of what might happen in the future, say “This furnace saves money on your energy bills”.

6. Call-to-action buttons go unnoticed or are ignored

Online consumers are so inundated with online ads, images and videos that they often miss the end point of advertising: the call to action (CTA). A small CTA button may not be noticed; conversely, a large button may be ignored because it looks too much like a banner ad. To draw attention to the CTA, create a large button that has an irregular shape or unusual color/text. Testing several different iterations of “Buy” or “Add to Cart” CTA buttons best determines which of these are noticed by your customers.

7. Consumer eyes need direction

Eye-tracking studies have shown that consumers follow a model’s eyes when viewing an online ad. This can affect how long consumers look at the ad and its CTA, if at all. To determine if your website conversion rates and/or order revenue can be improved by eye placement, try testing ads that have a model looking directly at the consumer versus the product versus the CTA.

8. Discounts are discounted

Online consumers are less likely to believe an advertised discount of “20-70% off” than “Up to 50% off”. Why? In a lottery where the range in prize money is $1 to $1 million, consumers know that they are more likely to win $1 than the $1 million. The same rationale holds true for product discounts, with consumer pessimism focused more on the smaller number than the larger one. By providing only one discount value as the focus, you ensure a more optimistic outlook from your customers.

9. Less is more

In some cases, slogans about saving money actually encourage consumers to spend more, while slogans about luxury spending result in a more frugal transaction. This reverse psychology of consumer spending was noted in a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research. When study participants were exposed to brands associated with saving money, they spent less; however, when exposed only to the brand slogans, which also made statements about saving money, they spent almost 100% more. Indeed, the spendthrift mindset of the online consumer may be one of the underlying motives for Patagonia’s counterintuitive “Buy Less” campaign.

10. Seeing an ad multiple times increases sales

Indochino, a purveyor of men’s suits, continually increased its ad impression frequency per unique visitor until it reached 20+ impressions per day (13). Indochino’s ad revenue and ROI also increased after every ad impression increase, with no complaints noted. While targeting and retargeting the same customer with the online ads may seem excessive, it does help “cement” the product/brand in the customer’s mind, thus driving sales.

Creating demand by creating an audience

Creating an audience is critical to successful e-book marketing for reasons beyond the monetary. First of all, your audience can provide valuable critique and insight about your subject matter, the topics presented, and even your writing style. Having such “editors” on hand means that major errors can be corrected prior to e-book release. Likewise, if you survey your audience members, you can find out what they hope to gain from your e-book and what they want the e-book to discuss in its virtual pages. Having a ready audience, especially prior to publication, also means that you have potential buyers looking over your final draft and suggesting changes and/or corrections to it. E-book publishing becomes more of a team rather than lone effort.

While having an audience both before and after your e-book release is invaluable, creating such an audience takes time and effort. Setting up a blog, initiating an e-mail marketing campaign, posting guest blog posts, and gaining followers and friends via social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are all great methods for ensuring a loyal (and profitable) fan base for your e-book; however, these methods cannot be implemented overnight. Unfortunately, when e-book authors do not utilize any of the following marketing techniques (either before or after e-book launch), they end up spending more money later on for PPC and PPA ads and other marketing strategies. This is because they are offering their product to a “cold” audience that has probably never before heard of the authors’ names or affiliations. Likewise, because online search engines cannot find results on the authors’ names or subject matters, (organic) search engine traffic to the e-book sales landing page is minimal.

Instead of assuming that people will just love your e-book the minute it’s published, consider implementing the marketing techniques listed below to create an audience that is anticipating your book and on which you can count on for preliminary sales. Some of these techniques, such as starting a blog, can be implemented months, if not years, in advance of your e-book release to help build your audience. Other techniques, such as guest blog posting, will help establish your subject matter credibility and improve name recognition among the audiences of other blogs. Through e-mail marketing, you can alert your fans of your e-book’s upcoming release, offer sample chapters, and even provide a product discount.

Once your e-book is released, continued marketing via the techniques discussed below will help ensure that the demand for your work does not wane; in fact, maintaining demand can be useful for when you decide to follow up your e-book with backend products such as tutorials, lessons, software, or even a second e-book. Your audience can even be utilized as an impromptu affiliate sales force to further promote and sell your e-book. In essence, there is no limit to the benefits you can reap from having an audience prior to and after the publication of your e-book.

Your blog as a marketing tool

A blog is an excellent way to generate e-book publicity via unique SEO content that places your site at the top of the SERP’s. Book sections can be offered as “teasers” that initiate discussions and debates, all the while giving you valuable feedback. These teasers can eventually lead your visitors to a sales landing page. Your blog can even provide special incentives for visitors who purchase your e-book; for example, Tim Ferriss’ book, The 4-Hour Workweek, provides book buyers with a unique code for a hidden forum located on his blog by the same name. Other incentives might include an additional unpublished chapter, access to software, or a free e-course. Last but not least, a blog allows you to capture visitor e-mail addresses, which in turn allow you to initiate an e-mail marketing campaign for your e-book. Most site visitors will not purchase your e-book outright and will typically want to get to know you via continued blog posts. E-mail marketing allows you to send your latest blog posts, or any other material you deem appropriate, to your subscribers. This helps establish visitor trust as well as a growing interest in what you have to offer in your e-book. Eventually, you can start including a link to your sales landing page in your e-mails. The end result is higher e-book sales.

Expanding your reach with articles

Article marketing is another method by which you can garner interest in your e-book. Articles that are submitted to directories such as Ezinearticles, Knol and SubmitYourArticle provide valuable information about and exposure to your e-book. While the articles themselves must be objective and not contain any sales references, there is one area where you are allowed to market yourself: the resource box. In the resource box, you can include pertinent information about yourself and the product that you are trying to sell, include your website or sales landing page URL and your author bio. Be sure to state that your posted article content was excerpted from your e-book. To provide exposure for your other posted articles, you may wish to forego linking back to your sales landing page in favor of those other articles instead.
On a related note, you may also consider posting regular online content to writing community sites such as Yahoo!’s Associated Content, HubPages, Examiner and Squidoo. The main advantage of these community sites is that, as their name indicates, they are supported by an actual community of writers and/or subscribers. If your articles are well-written and focused on a subject matter that is popular with a given community, traffic to and sales on your e-book’s landing page can increase exponentially. Furthermore, affiliate websites/blogs in your niche could contact you about additional writing opportunities, which of course would translate to more exposure for your e-book.

Guest posts: gaining the interest of other subscriber groups

Writing content for another site is a great way to find new readers and increase traffic to your own blog. Ideally, you should write guest posts for larger and higher PR blogs. Start by contacting some of the smaller to midsized blogs first, though, and gain some experience at pitching at least three article ideas. Include an outline or bulleted list of the key points you wish to make. Doing so will increase your chances of landing a link on these sites. Additionally, most webmasters e-mail new blog posts to their subscribers; having your post e-mailed to a completely new subscriber group can help you acquire some of those subscribers for your own site.

Once you have written several blog posts for the smaller blogs, start pitching your writing ideas to the biggest sites in your particular niche. Reference the articles that you have posted to the smaller blogs as a kind of blogging resume. While it may seem intimidating to contact blog sites that receive 300,000 or more page views per month, consider what that kind of traffic would mean for your own website/blog and your resulting e-book sales. In order to increase awareness and sales of your own e-book, you must be willing to step outside of your comfort zone and take a few risks.

E-book social media marketing

Using social media as a marketing tool has become almost a necessity for many individuals and businesses in order to gain traffic, generate product awareness, and collect user feedback. Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn have unquestionably changed the way that information is disseminated online, with one of the key changes being that posted content can go viral. In other words, any social media user has now become a potential broadcaster. As a result, even if a marketing message is sent to only a small number of subscribers, it can quickly reach a large general audience. Another way in which social media has changed the dissemination of online information is by making every user a potential publisher. Thus, marketing messages that used to be posted as monologues have become dialogues between marketers and subscribers, with the general audience fully capable of also jumping in on the action and posting comments or questions.

You can use social media to your advantage when marketing your e-book by posting informational content about your subject matter. Outright sales marketing is a no-no in the social media landscape; however, giving away helpful advice, freebies, third-party resource information, etc., helps build a community of followers around your profile. This community can help make your content go viral and provide you with valuable feedback. In due time, it can also start clicking on your e-book sales landing page and generating income.

Leveraging your e-book sales through affiliate marketing

You need not be alone in your e-book marketing efforts; there are plenty of affiliate marketers who would be more than happy to help market and sell your e-book for a small profit (i.e., commission). Many of these affiliate marketers have high PR websites/blogs that generate tremendous traffic, and more than a few are also trying to sell their own e-books. Many of these affiliates could even be composed of your current audience or customers who have purchased your e-book. Through ad networks like AdSense, Kontera, Clickbank and Chitika, you can have other website owners and bloggers display your e-book ad (and its associated sales landing page) to their subscribers and random visitors, increasing your potential sales.

If you would prefer to target successful websites and blogs individually, that can also be arranged through one-on-one correspondences. While more time-consuming, such an approach has the advantage of you knowing exactly which affiliates are advertising your e-book and what their sales pitches consist of. This helps control for unintentional branding of your e-book (e.g., having your e-book on paying off a mortgage early be solicited on a website advertising reverse mortgages). If you target only high PR websites and blogs, such an approach may also help raise your own website’s/blog’s PR through the valuable backlinks that these sites give you.

Making sure your blog contains quality content that provides value to the reader, that the posts are witty and engaging, that a unique light is cast on a particular subject matter, etc., can place incredible pressure on you. This is especially true if you are posting daily content to your blog. In many cases, the pressure to constantly produce quality blog content leads to “blogger burnout” and blog abandonment.

To better handle the task of posting daily (or even weekly) content to your blog, consider employing the following techniques. These techniques not only help you create better posts but they also help you become a better writer. Equally as important, by incorporating the following techniques into your daily blogging routine, you’ll end up saving a lot of time, effort and angst while blogging.

Plan your posts ahead of time

Finding a topic to write about can waste a lot of valuable time. Instead of using up an hour or more per day to brainstorm, dedicate a few hours at the beginning of the week or month to blog idea generation. Keep a record of these ideas as well as their associated references.

How many blog post ideas should you generate in one brainstorming session? Ideally, you will want anywhere from 20 to 30 possible posts complete with titles, summaries and references. Once these post ideas have been generated, put them aside for a day or two, then pull up the list again. Add subcategories to those blog post ideas that look promising while deleting the ones that don’t. Perform an online search on each blog topic to find additional content and/or subject matter perspectives.

Don’t just blindly rehash the news

The purpose of having a blog is to provide a unique spin on current events, topics, etc. Even if they may not agree with it, visitors to your blog site want to hear what you have to say. Having your own voice come through in your posts certainly makes the posts more personable and memorable, helping build an online audience that returns again and again to obtain updates on your message.

If your site is about how to do something (e.g., how to invest), visitors will definitely be interested in knowing how you yourself did that particular something and what was the outcome. This is especially true if you are involved in an ongoing process such as building a business, creating a product, etc. Likewise, a blog that is dedicated towards the attainment of a goal also benefits from a personal perspective.

Invite others

Think of your blog site as a talk show. You wouldn’t want your talk show to be centered solely around you and your message, right? The best talk shows provide the audience with many guest speakers and a range of perspectives. In light of this, invite guest bloggers to post quality blog content to your site in order to provide some balance to it. Conduct online interviews and debates. When posting content that you yourself generated, consider spicing it up with quotes from fellow bloggers who deal with that subject matter on a daily basis. Even a few supporting links from other blogs can boost your credibility. Links that refer to other posts on your site also help create quality blog content, increase page views, and enhance the level of visitor interaction with your blog.

One side benefit of having other parties post to your blog is that it saves you from always being responsible for generating content. Furthermore, a guest blogger or interviewee will probably mention something about the experience on his/her own website or blog. Such a mention can draw targeted traffic to your own blog, resulting in increased page views, product sales, or additional guest posts.

Give them more than words

It is well known that the human brain responds to and learns from visual stimuli as well as print media. Some individuals actually incorporate visual information far better than written information. In light of such knowledge, populating your blog with only words reduces the chances of its message being delivered to every member of your audience. Take advantage of visual aids such as pictures and diagrams to better drive home your stated points. Use original photos if at all possible; this reduces the risk of copyright issues and gives your blog posts more originality.

If you really want to break away from the crowd, consider giving your readers not only a visual but an auditory experience as well. Think about posting video and/or audio content to your blog site via YouTube videos or video podcasts (i.e., vodcasts). Posting such content is not as difficult as it seems: In the case of podcasts, the web software (e.g., Podcast Generator) required to create them is often free and available online. The final and not-to-be-overlooked benefit of creating visual media is that videos and podcasts help generate targeted traffic to your blog site.

Provide a take-home message

Posting quality blog content requires more than just providing your readers with witty banter. At the end of the day, what message do you want your blog site visitors to take away and remember? Alternately, what action item would you like for people to get started on?

Visitors to your blog are spending their valuable time reading your posts and perusing your web pages. If they leave your site without remembering anything useful, it is unlikely that they will return. This doesn’t imply that your blog posts are filled with fluff; rather, what this means is that your blog posts would benefit from having a goal-orientated outline. This outline would be created prior to you putting a single word down on your blog post, and this outline would also include several areas where you would iterate and then reiterate your message to your readers. Since most psychological studies indicate that individuals must read or hear a message at least three times before committing it to memory, your blog post outline should include at least three areas where you present your message to site visitors.

Don’t forget to crunch the numbers

Posting quality blog content on your website is only one-half of the successful blogging equation; finding out which posts are garnering traffic versus the ones that receive no visits is also imperative. To do this, set up a Google Analytics account for your site. Doing so allows you to track your blog site’s visitors and which pages they are reading (and for how long). Likewise, you can find out your site’s traffic sources (e.g., search engine, referral site), entrance keywords, and even its in-page analytics (views per individual web page).

Tracking the number of “Likes”, “Shares”, Diggs, bookmarks and tweets that your posts receive provides a useful indicator of the popularity of your blog. With the recent introduction of Google +1 (Google’s own social network), you can also receive notifications about the number of users who +1’d (i.e., recommended) your blog pages, whether directly on the pages themselves or through a search result listing. More importantly, users who click on the +1 button to recommend your site can be measured by the impact of their behavior on your site.

For example, you may wish to track if users who click on the +1 button on your blog improve your site’s CTR or PR goal.  With the use of the +1 reporting in Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics and the Google’s Social Engagement Tracking software, you can check your site’s Search Impact Report to find out if pages that have the +1 button receive more clicks or backlinks than those that don’t. With Google’s Audience Report, you can also obtain geographic and demographic information on users who have +1’d your site and better tailor your message to target those audience members. Google also offers Social Plugin Analytics, which relays information on how users share your content in addition to clicking on the +1 button; in other words, the Plugin compiles all social action information such as Facebook “Likes”, Reddit links, tweets, etc..

To summarize:

Posting quality blog content doesn’t happen overnight. However, there are many strategies available to ensure that your content doesn’t languish in the blogosphere. Involving your readers, personalizing your content, as well as providing a clear take-home message all help make your blog stand out. Analyzing your strategies via analytics tools allows you to capitalize on the techniques that work versus those that don’t make much of a difference.