When designing a web page many decisions need to be made. One of the most important thing to get right is how your visitors are going to get in contact with you. This is particularly important if your looking to obtain sales enquires from your website. Many web developers may say that having a contact us page with a phone number and an e-mail address will do the job just fine. However in my experience this rarely works.

I’d thought I’d post my tips based on my experience.

1) Most People prefer filling forms than writing e-mails.

2) If your web developer tells you its difficult to do a form or that forms aren’t necessary - get a new developer.

3) E-mail addresses posted on websites are harvested for spammers, by spammers.

4) Long forms are a complete turn-off. Thing how much info do I need from this person. Most of the time a Name and Phone number will be enough. All other information can be collected on the follow up call.

5) Ask your visitors to contact you. Use a call to action like “contact us NOW for you FREE quote on 0800 555 888 or online”

6) Put forms and contact information on every page - not just the contact us page

7) Use a free phone number. More people respond to free phone numbers than any other type of number - FACT!.

8) Offer something for FREE. FREE things could be include an assessment of their current situation or a custom report just for them. Of course these can be part of your sales proposal.

9) Put your phone number clearly on every page - top right corner works well.

10) Follow up all your enquiries as quickly as possible. Leads go cold very quickly.

Please contact us if you’d like assistance with marketing of your site.

Original post on alexdigital.com.

Welcome to Part 3 of my Guide to Google Adwords. I finally managed to find some time to write this part. In part two we talked about keyword research, now we move on to Adwords Advert design.

Ad Copy Design & Structure

Google Adwords Adverts are similar in many ways to the small adverts you find in Newspapers, Magazines and in Shop Windows

Google PageRank or PR as its otherwise known is a term that’s frequently used when talking about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) but what does it actually mean and how important is it when using SEO to market your site?

PageRank according to Google :

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

Wikipedia says:

PageRank is a patented method to assign a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).

PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name Page-Rank [Vise and Malseed, 2005]) and Sergey Brin as part of a research project about a new kind of search engine. The project started in 1995 and led to a functional prototype, named Google, in 1998. Shortly after, Page and Brin founded Google Inc., the company behind the Google search engine.

So to summarise its your pages popularity on the web based on the number of quality inward links your page has.

I wanted some more information on how important page rank was so I did some futher research. Below is a summary of the most important points I found.

Internal Links

Most webmasters think that its only External Inbound links that have any effect on PageRank. This is not however the whole truth. Internal links within your sites structure are also equally important !

I discovered that your PageRank has a maximum value that is calculated from both your External Links and your Internal Links. This means that you can increase you maximum page rank by adding more pages to your site! This sounds great doesn’t it ? However be warned. New pages must contain fresh relevant content not simply content copied from elsewhere on the site. This could set alarm bells ringing at Google as this practice known as "Cookie Cutting" (not sure why) is classed as Spam. If you a detected as using any spamming techniques you risk your pages and possibly your entire site being removed from the Google index..

Outbound Links

Outbound links are links from your site to other places on the Internet. Whilst this can be a bad idea from a visitor conversion point of view as they are essentially an exit from your site they can also leak PageRank. It is therefore essential that when linking to other sites you ensure the link is reciprocated.

This begs the questions - "Which page should I place my External Links?". If they cause your PageRank to literally drain away you probably don’t want them on your highest ranking pages. Or do you ? It appears there is no way of knowing but the general rule seems to suggest you should place your external links on your lowest ranking page.

Inbound Links

Inbound Links are like injections of PageRank from other sites on the Internet. Anyone involved in SEO or Internet Marketing will tell you how important it is to ask for and swap links with other high ranking sites.

But where should we ask for the link to ? Should we accept links from everyone?

The answer to the first question is quite simple. You inbound link should point to the page you want to achieve the highest rank usually your homepage as that way the internal pages should gain a good rank through internal linking. A point to note is that Search Engine Spiders see www.site.com, http://site.com and www.site.com/ as three separate pages it is therefore vital that you standardise your domain and how you ask for you links.

The answer to the second is probably yes. Google is aware that webmasters don’t have any control over other peoples websites therefore it would be unreasonable to punish them. So carry on collecting as many links as you can but keep in mind that quality is more important than quantity,.

A final word of warning on Inbound Links. Avoid Link Farms and some paid for links as these can have a disastrous effect on your sites Rank and could possibly lead to you being removed from the Google Index.

I hope this gave you an overview into PageRank. I’m sure i’ll be coming back to this subject soon so keep informed via our RSS feed.

One of the most important components of your Adwords Campaign is the keyword lists your use to promote your ads. Your keyword list is going to give you the power over your competition and as most people spend very little time on their keywords you can work this to your advantage.

Adwords Best Practice number 2:

Research, Research, Research.

The extra time you spend planning your campaign will pay dividends in the future by providing targeted visitors at a fraction of the price.

3 Steps to Great Keyword Research.

Step 1 : Brainstorming.

This step is the ONLY step most people carry out and even then they don’t spend the time it needs. Get a pen & paper and try to think of all the words people may use to search for your product and service.

For example one of our clients sells sweets online. During brainstorming some of the ideas we came up with were “sweets”, “traditional sweets”, “old fashioned sweets” and “jars of sweets”.  

Don’t stop at the general terms however. By breaking it down even more you can break it down to categories e.g. “Sugar Free Sweets” and “Chocolate Sweets” or even down to product “Sherbert Lemons” etc.

Once you get going you should be able to think of a healthy looking list full of variations.

Step 2 : Keyword Tools.

Brainstorming is a great start but you need to carry out research to find out exactly how many people are using certain terms and more importantly how much competition is attached to your terms (more on this in future articles).

The Google Keywords tool can be accessed from with your AdWords account and you can find the Yahoo! Search Marketing tool here:

http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/

One of the best research tools available is Wordtracker. Wordtracker not only shows you the number of people searching but also offer data regarding growth, competion and much more. I would recommend you invest in Wordtracker if you’re serious about Internet Marketing and PPC.

Wordtracker - Take your Free Trial

Get all these tools in your Internet Marketers Toolbox.

Step 3  : Beating the Competition

There are many tactics to get 1 UP over your competition. One of the most common is spelling mistakes. By bidding on spelling mistakes you can achieve clicks for far less than the correctly spelt terms that all your Competition is bidding on. People do make typos all the time while browsing.

We’ll go through all the tactics in future posts. Keep working on your keyword research and you’ll get a refined list of words that really works for you and your business.

Keep informed via RSS as number 3 will be here soon.

A lot of our clients originally approach us because they are already running a Google Adwords Campaign, but without success. They are usually paying far too much for far too little, or in some cases nothing at all !

I can normally predict what their account will look like before I even log in and take a look. Most accounts contain 1 adgroup, with a selection of keywords which in turn are linked to a single advert. Put simply this type of campaign is far to broad.

This leads us to one of the most important best practices.

Focus Your Campaign

The first question you should ask yourself before even setting up your adwords account is.