With all the changes in Google AdWords and the increased competition these days, organic SEO looks more and more attractive to most of us.

The key is for your website optimization to out-perform your competition, without over spending with an online marketing consultant (or without taking up too much of your time if you’re going the do-it-yourself route).

Remember, affordable Search Engine Optimization is about increasing quality traffic, then

• converting
• that traffic to a sale or a sales lead.

If you miss these points I describe below, your SEO goals of increased conversions will tank, even if you have a Number 1 Google Ranking.

I often notice these missed areas when I’m Coaching a business owner about their Web site and their need to increase sales and sales leads.

So, here are 3 points for you to review that I hope will help your SEO goals of increased conversions.

What’s Above the Fold Counts Most, so Consider Monitor Resolutions

Living in the world of TV remote controls and browser back buttons, we have to capture our website visitors’ attention ASAP. Our visitors aren’t going to give us much time before making a decision to stay or to leave our website.

As much as this subject is discussed these days, it’s amazing the number of sites I review that have critical information missing from “above the fold”, in that area visible before your visitors scroll down.

This is the area to briefly summarize what people can do on your site and make your best case for your guests staying on your website and not clicking away. This may also be the area to place your contact information.

Keep in mind that what’s above the fold on your monitor will likely be different from what’s above the fold on the monitor for someone visiting your website. Browser resolution is set differently for various computers.

For instance, on my website, I know the top resolution of my visitors is 1280 by 1024 (53%) and the second most popular resolution is 1024 by 768 (37%). I get this information from my site’s analytics script, although not all analytics programs provide this critical information.

Since I make sure my site looks great for these 90% of my visitors and make sure I communicate reasons to stay on my site above the fold (my value proposition), I draw more people into my site, encouraging them to scroll down.

Remember to cross test your site with recent versions of the most popular Web browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and maybe even Google’s new Chrome.

These steps raise my conversion rate and they will raise yours, too. And increasing traffic and conversions is the whole point of affordable search engine optimization, whether using an online marketing consultant or d-i-y, right?

So, don’t miss this important step.

Carefully Select Your Type Size and Font and Remember that White Space is Your Friend

I’m astounded by the improper text choices made by so many website owners today. Is there really any good reason to make people squint at your website, struggling to get the information they need?

Consider reviewing The Easy to Read Standard at Information Architects (you can Google it). I would encourage you to review the size of your text, the white space between your letters and words and between your paragraphs and headings.

Designers often believe whitespace is your enemy; if you want people to understand your message and stay on your website, whitespace is in fact your friend.

Also consider that fonts with serifs are easier to read than fonts without serifs.

If you want to successfully convey your message to as many of your site visitors as possible, then make it as easy for them as you can. When we’re talking about increasing conversions, it’s all about the numbers and appealing to the largest number of people possible.

Use Opt-in Email or Blog Postings to Maximize Your Sales

All website owners would like for people to buy from their website the first time they visit. But is that realistic?

Consider these statics from the National Sales Executive Association:

• 2% of sales are made on the 1st contact;
• 3% of sales are made on the 2nd contact;
• 5% of sales are made on the 3rd contact;
• 10% of sales are made on the 4th contact (and)
• 80% of sales are made on the 5th – 12th contact.

For most businesses, if you don’t offer an opt-in contact, like a regular email newsletter or blog postings, you’re missing out on most of your potential sales!

When setting up an opt-in Internet marketing campaign, you should offer incentives to subscribe. To entice people to opt-in, you can offer:

• special pricing for email list members
• a first look at new products
• ability for customer to select subjects and emails they receive (controlling the frequency of contact by choosing which of your lists to be on)
• promise not to share email or other personal info with other companies

Using opt-in contact allows you to significantly increase conversions by introducing yourself over time to your potential customers, in a soft-sell manner.

Website optimization is important; the goal is increased Internet traffic, sales and sales leads. But whether you’ve hired an online marketing consultant or you’re doing the process yourself, Affordable search engine optimization by itself doesn’t accomplish those last points of increased sales and sales leads.

You’ve got to remember to design your website to alleviate visitors natural apprehensions and make buying from you as easy as possible.

Properly mapping out the above the fold area of your Web pages, using appropriate size text, using adequate whitespace and offering an opt-in process to nurture your buyers will all help you accomplish the real goals you have with SEO and website optimization: increased sales and more sales leads.

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Many times, when you sign up for a free giveaway or purchase an item, you are taken to an OTO (One Time Offer) page, where you’ll be given the opportunity to purchase a “never to be seen again, one time offer,” which is a product that has been discounted for one time only during this one particular transaction. In this transaction scenario, you have two choices: either buy the product now at the special discounted price, or continue on without buying the product and lose access to the special pricing opportunity. However, you can usually buy the product later, but at a higher price.

Normally, these types of offers drive me crazy because there are usually 3-4 “one time offers” bundled together. When you decline one, another one pops up. Sometimes it feels as though the one time offers will never end! However, after watching several videos recently as veteran Internet marketers touted the benefits of the OTO, I wondered if I might be able to use these in my business without being slimy.

Here’s how I decided to implement this strategy:

1. Determine the offer. One “one time offer” is quite sufficient for my needs at this point, so I looked through my inventory of products and made a decision on what to offer as a one time unique deal.
2. Name the price. Your OTO needs to offer enough of a price reduction to make it truly attractive to your prospect. In many cases, that means a savings of 40-60% off of the regular pricing.
3. Outline the order of the offer. In many cases, the OTO is attached to another purchase. You’ll need to determine if your shopping cart can be configured to handle such an offer. In my case, the most natural place for this one time offer is on my ezine subscription thank you page. I have 2 thank you pages created when someone subscribes to my ezine. The first gives instructions on how to opt into the list. The second, called a “confirmation success page,” gives the visitor access to my free giveaway, or client attraction device, once the visitor has confirmed her email address and opted into my list. For simplicity, I decided to keep my confirmation success page intact, and tie the OTO to my opt-in thank you page.
4. Craft your copy. On your ezine thank you page, give your subscriber instructions on how to get on your list, and below, create your OTO that fully describes what you have available, why it’s a great deal, and the special price that you’re offering. I also use some OTO graphics that I purchased inexpensively to help me get the message across. Be sure that you give your prospect the option of opting out of this offer.
5. Test your conversions. You can test your conversions in many ways — by changing headlines, graphics, or even at the point you are making the offer. For me, the conversion calculation was pretty simple — was it making me sales? I don’t have the figures yet, as I’ve just started this process, but I’ll keep you updated on how I do.

How much money are you leaving on the table by not using one time offers? Give it a shot, and test to see if it increases your sales.

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Online Business Coach and Internet Marketing Strategist Gabor Olah helps baby boomers create profitable online businesses that they love. Would you like to learn the specific Internet marketing strategies that get results? Discover how to increase your visibility and get found online by claiming your FREE gift, $1K A Day Formula, at ==> $1Kadayformula.com

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Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.

Permission

Confirming that the people who ask for your information have actually requested to be on your list is the number one step in the battle for deliverability. You should be using a process called confirmed opt-in or verified opt-in to send a unique link to the attempted subscriber when they request information. Before adding the person to your list they must click that unique link verifying that they are indeed the same person that owns the email address and requested to subscribe.

Subscriber Addresses

When requesting website visitors to opt-in ask for their “real” or “primary” email address instead of a free email address like Yahoo or Hotmail. Free emails tend to be throw away accounts and typically have a shorter lifetime than a primary ISP address.

List Maintenance

Always promptly remove undeliverable addresses that bounce when sending email to them. An address that bounces with a permanent error 2-3 times in a 30 day period should be removed from the list. ISP’s track what percentage of your newsletters bounce and will block them if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.

Message Format

Usage of HTML messages to allow for text formatting, multiple columns, images, and brand recognition is growing in popularity and is widely supported by most email client software. Most spam is also HTML formatted and thus differentiating between requested email and spam HTML messages can be difficult. A 2004 study by AWeber .com shows that plain text messages are undeliverable 1.15% of the time and HTML only messages were undeliverable 2.3%. If
sending HTML it is important to always send a plain text alternative message, also called text/HTML multi-part mime format.

Content

Many ISP’s filter based on the content that appears within the message text.

Website URL:

Research potential newsletter advertisers before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter issues. If they have used their website URL to send spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter could cause the entire message to be filtered.

Words/phrases:

Choose your language carefully when crafting messages. Avoid hot button topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography. If you do need to use words that might be filtered, don’t attempt to obfuscate words with extra characters or odd spelling, you’ll just make your messages appear more spam like.

Images:

Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly, if at all. Commonly used open rate tracking technology uses images to calculate opens. You may choose to disable open rate tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content.

Attachments:

With viruses running rampant and spreading thru the usage of malicious email attachments many users are wary of attached documents. It’s often better to link to files via a website URL to reduce recipient fear of attachments and reduce the overall message size.

CAN-SPAM Compliance

The January 2004 Federal CAN-SPAM law introduced a number of rules regarding the delivery of email. It’s important you have your legal counsel review your practices and ensure you are in compliance. The two most important rules include having a valid postal mail address listed in all commercial messages and a working unsubscribe link that is promptly honoured to remove the subscriber from future messages.

Reputation

Reputation services are often used by large ISP’s as a way to vet email senders regarding their email practices and policies. Businesses listed with these services are then given less stringent filtering or no filtering at all. Several reputation services are:

• http://www.isipp.com/iadb.php
• http://www.bondedsender.com
• http://www.habeas.com

Relationships & White listing

Contact with major ISP’s and email providers is essential in letting them know about your requested subscriber email. Many large providers such as AOL and Yahoo have specific white listing programs and postmaster website areas to ensure your email is delivered as long as you meet their policies and procedures in handling your opt-in list.

Email deliverability is about ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to the intended recipient. While no single tip will enable you to get 100% of your email delivered each one utilized as a group can go a long way to reaching that goal.

Don’t think email marketing is now too hard as more autoresponders insist on double opt in. You can still market effectively to your customers only you hve to be a bir more creative.

Personally, I welcome email marketing becoming harder because the more effort that has to be put in will make those ‘lazy’ or wannabes simply drop out. Into that gap the inventive professional approach to email marketing will thrive.

I want to show you the impact of the new rules and how to deal with them and let’s start with the double opt in.

If you use any of the major shopping cart providers like 1shoppingcart (ISC), they now have, mandatory double opt in and they did this because of being blacklisted by SPAMHaus organisation. This was caused by one selfish, unethical person using ISC’s ‘Tell a Friend’ script to send out thousands of Spam messages. The consequence was that email sent via 1SC servers was being classified as Spam by many ISP’s. 1SC agreed to make all email sign ups double opt in so as overcome this problem. What does this mean to you?

Double opt in means that anyone joining your list is sent an email asking them to confirm that it really was them that signed up and they want to join. This method produces a better and more responsive list BUT reduces the numbers. Take your pick because there are a few different reasons for this, including forgetting to confirm, changing their mind, or not really understanding what they are being asked to do. What can you do?

I am a firm believer in telling your customers and prospects EXACTLY what to do. On my website I have a video of me telling people exactly how to confirm that they want to subscribe to our lists. The video allows me to actually show them what to do, and how to do it and anyone signing up to my list is directed to a web page where I show them the exact email they’ll receive and how to click on the link.

This is simple…but very powerful and by using it on several of my lists I have achieved a confirmation rate of over 90% – and that’s virtually unheard of.

5 key tactics to use now Your aim is to get your email through and read by your customers and prospects. Yes it may be getting harder, but these tactics will help you win out over your competitors:

1) Brand your emails so they stand out from the crowd Give your emails a brand name or title so as soon as people see that name they know who it’s from and what to expect.

For example, one list I have with my partner Neil Travers is the Junior Soccer Coach Newsletter ‘Tip of the Week’. Now that doesn’t really have impact so we went to ‘Junior Soccer Coach – Inside Tactics’ and further refined it to ‘Inside Tactics’ and that is now our ‘brand’ name for the free tip of the week.

2) Send out a reminder for all of your emails. Your first email is your regular email and you must follow up with another one that briefly reminds them of what you have just sent or to direct them to read a copy online or on your Blog.

That second email must give them a REASON to go and find/read your earlier email. How? Give them a teaser of the information your newsletter contained, maybe a free gift or how it can help them…use the biggest benefit.

3) Always, always, run your messages through a SPAM checker It’s essential because it will tell you if your email is likely to be classified as spam or not. If it is spam, then you will know which words you need to change.

4) Your subscribers need to be kept in touch with regularly. I receive better responses to my promotions when I am regularly emailing people in that niche.

Coincidence? No, because more contact with your list means you are building a relationship with them, and so they are much more likely to buy from you.

5) Build smaller targeted lists Smaller, targeted, lists are by far more responsive to you and your offers. I would rather have 250 highly focused names on a specific topic than 5000 names on a generic one.

I want people who are positively interested in my specific niche. Your first sub list should be of buyers, people who have already bought from you, and then people who have bought from you more than once. Build sub lists of topics within your particular niche, as your next step.

For example; in our football newsletter we might ask subscribers to email us for more information about a specific topic such as under 7’s or girls football. We would add these people to a sub list with its own autoresponder series. Then target these prospects with specific offers relating to their enquiry.

Use these 5 tips to help you make your email marketing more effective, and to ensure it gets through to your customers and prospects.