Further to our Video Testimonial with Google, are very own Account Director, Ian Howie, has been interviewed by Google for their Best Practise Case Study series. In the interview he talks about our experiences using Google’s Website Optimiser and Google’s CPA bid management solution.

Website Optimiser allows you test multiple variations of a page and measure which combinations of elements (Headline, Images, Copy, etc…) converts visitors best, as well as allowing you to do traditional A/B testing. At 1upSearch towers we’ve been busy using this great tool to increase conversion rates for a number of our clients with great success. Remember PCC is 50% getting people to the Landing Page and 50% what they do next when they get there.

We have also been using Google’s CPA (Cost per Conversion) Bid management Solution. We have tested it against other products on the market and found that the Google tool beats them all. It really does save you money - because it works out the best position to put you in - rather than just keep you in the more expensive slot on the page.

Why is Google doing all of this? Over at Mountain View they are smart enough to know that as soon as anything better comes along we are all going to up and leave. So it is in Google’s best interests to give us PPC people the best tools to do the job and get a good R.O.I.. Look at what happened to Overture, once the Kings of PPC, they was scrapped because of a little upstart called Google AdWords.

Microsoft are also working are on CPA and conversion tools - it is going to an interesting battle.

- Read The Full Case Study as a downloadable PDF file.

- Check Out Ian’s Twitter Feed.

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.

The del.icio.us web site is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003, but since it came part of Yahoo! in December 2005 it has gotten a lot bigger. It has been suggested that the site was sold for somewhere between $15-30 million US dollars

It is mouth-watering using del.icio.us and at the same time its is also turning back the clock to the early days of Yahoo. In the early days of the internet, around 1996, Yahoo was an online directory with the editors reviewing sites for free. Yahoo is now a portal with a directory where you can get a listing for free or for a fee.

Why pay people to review site when you can get people to vote for sites? This concept is not new - that’s what the Open Directory does. However the open directory is Web 1.0 slow and run by, and in the nicest possible way, geeks. del.icio.us is Web 2.0 fun, fast(er) and Firefox based

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.

I’ve often wondered when investigating how many inward links our clients have why Google always shows less than MSN & Yahoo. You can check how many links a site has by using a link: command.

e.g. link:www.bbc.co.uk

Yahoo uses a linkdomain: command.

If you run the commands on all 3 search engines you’ll probably find quite a difference in the results. I decided to do a little research to find out what was going on..

If Googles main criteria for a good search result is links isn’t it a little weird that it doesn’t index all your precious inward links?

It turns out that Google purposely doesn’t list all links pointing to a particular page. They do this because they feel by giving webmasters this information they may be able to use it to manipulate search results. This implies that Google still know they’re there and includes them while calculating page rank.

Another discovery is that Google unlike the others only shows the links to a particular page so running a “link:” on your domain will only includes sites point at the homepage. The others show all links to all pages.

So keep an eye on your inward links but don’t be disappointed if they don’t all show up in Google. They’re probably being counted, just not being acknowledged.

Have you ever wondered why Firefox doesn