There are various SEO / PPC / Online Marketing firms our there. Many are start-ups looking to jump on the bandwagon and make a quick buck, whilst others are run by people who have been “in the game” for a long time. I run a small business in Sydney Australia offering called SEO Professionals and although the name would make you think I only offer search engine optimisation, I also offer PPC and online marketing services to my clients.

One of the topics that’s high on my list of importance when dealing with clients is conversion rates. Ultimately, no matter how much traffic you get, it’s the conversion rate that’s going to make or break your business. Conversion rates also happen to be the easiest element to control as most if not all of it will be under your control.

What I mean by this is, if your website is receiving 500 visitors a day from Keyword A, then there are 2 obvious ways to increase revenue from these 500 people:

1: Work on optimising the page and SEO to improve the rank of Keyword A, get more visitors, sell more.
2: Work on testing the landing page for Keyword A, get the same number of visitors, sell more.

To me the latter option makes much more sense because not only will you discover a better converting design or sales text for Keyword A, but you most likely will be able to apply your findings across other pages of your website, meaning that you’ve instantly improved conversion rates on multiple pages.

Also, when testing various landing pages and analysing conversion rate increases, always work on the actual percentage increase from the base value to get a true measure of success. Increasing conversion rates from 1% to 2% isn’t a 1% increase…. it’s 100%! Even going from 5% to 6% is a 20% increase, which is huge.

Back on the SEO side of things, because of the infancy of the industry for now, and the various levels of SEO that can be conducted on a website, becoming an SEO reseller might be a great option for someone just starting out. Being an SEO reseller means that you work on behalf of other businesses who might not have the internal capacity to run their own SEO department. Remember, any business with a website could do with SEO and so that means there are various opportunities that exist amongst firms like web development companies etc.

While we were developing a website for a client based on Wordpress CMS, we needed to add several custom fields but for Wordpress categories. Since Wordpress doesn’t have native support for adding custom fields to categories we needed a plugin. I googled couple of hours trying to find the plugin but had no luck so we decided to develop it.

At this stage it’s has vary basic functionality. You can define infinite key=>value pairs for each category and also supports WYSIWYG editor if you need (x)HTML. We plan to implement image upload, in case you need to “attach” images or icons within your categories, in feature versions. It can be used also to define custom title, description and keywords tags for example.

Download plugin

INSTALLATION

1. 1. Unpack/upload the “category-fields” directory “wp-content/plugins/”.
2. 2. Activate the plugin from the Admin interface; “Plugins”.
3. 3. Go to “Options -> Category Fields” and create custom fields as necessary.

USAGE

1. Returns an array of key->value pairs for current ($cat) category

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   <?php $cat_custom = get_cat_fields($cat); print_r ($cat_custom); ?>

2. Display single value for key_name for current ($cat) category

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   <?php echo get_cat_fields($cat, 'key_name'); ?>

Supports Wordpress 2.3+

Well it’s not often that you get a chance to perhaps just with a bit of luck, come up with a new acronym! (Not another one you say!).

When I do SEO on an existing site, I will often do a deep analysis of the current traffic stats and keyword ranks. What I’m looking for is a keyword that is bringing in a decent amount of traffic but not ranking well. It makes sense that these keywords, when worked on can bring in a lot more traffic by ranking hopefully at #1.

So how do we prioritise these keywords? How do we know that keyword A has more potential than keyword B? Drum roll……. and enter the “PTI Value”! The Potential Traffic Increase Value is worked out as follows:

PTI Value = Current number of organic visitors per month for keyword multiplied by the ratios given in this link which is a statistical analysis on some AOL data which was accidently leaked out. Subtract from this total the current number of visitors per month since we are measuring the potential increase, not the total. When all is done, just rank them all in the orderof largest to smallest and you have what you need.

Example:

Keyword A - 150 visitors a month, ranked 3rd

Keyword B - 80 visitors a month, ranked 7th

Keyword C - 400 visitors a month, ranked 1st

Keyword D - 250 visitors a month, ranked 2nd

PTI Keyword A: 150 * 4.9 - 150 =585

PTI Keyword B: 80 * 12.3 - 80 = 904

PTI Keyword C: 400 * 1 - 400= 0

PTI Keyword D: 250 * 3.5 - 250 = 525

So we can see here that by working on Keyword B, should it get to number 1 it will bring in the most additional traffic. Keyword C is obviously a zero value because it’s already ranked 1st which means you can’t expect any more traffic than the amount people are searching.

This value is simply a guide on how to prioritize keywords to work on. Of course you want all of them to rank 1st, this just helps you focus on the most important ones.

You need to also consider the strength and number of competitors above you for each of these keywords. For example, Keyword B has 6 competitors above it compared to Keyword D which has only 1. But if the end goal is to get to 1st then you have to beat them all anyway.

The real power comes with additional information such as conversion rates and other monetary data related to each keyword. In the example above, even though working on Keyword B may bring in the most additional amount of visitors, Keyword A might be the one that’s converting the most or bringing the most “meaningful” visitors to your site.

I was pretty disturbed when my colleague sent me this link just for fun. Guess what, it wasn’t fun at all :O . To see what I’m talking about you have to be logged in to your Gmail account while viewing this page.

According to Fernando from beford.org, this is 4th vulnerability he found so far on Google services and because it affects huge number of users he decided to publish it. This exploit can be used to attack Search, Blogspot, Groups and Gmail.

Last couple of days were particularly interesting as different users reported various hole’s and vulnerabilities of Google services and some published ones you can find on Hackademix.net.

I must say that this isn’t something I was expecting to see from Google. I’m using Gmail account as my primary email and after this, I’m seriously considering not to use it anymore. Also all of you, who share the same opinion as me, should check for anti XSS protection NoScript.

After 15 relaxing days on beaches of Halkidiki, Greece, I’m back again and in front of my computer stuffed with work . Bottom picture will describe it better then words how I enjoyed my vacation in Greece…

Anyway, we are preparing new interesting articles and tutorials, free wordpress themes and more. Stay tuned