One of the best ways to do this is to learn from the  principles of a true expert - Dr Robert Cialdini. He wrote an outstanding book called ‘Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion that reveals six weapons of influence that can be used to great affect, even in the online world. The basic premise of his book is that in our increasingly complex and pressured world, we often make decisions by falling back on his six instinctive patterns - and that many smart marketers and sales people make use of these patterns to influence and convince their potential customers with great results.

Therefore, I thought I would tranlsate Robert Cialdini’s six great principles to the online world with some examples, hopefully helping you understand how you can influence your website visitors better, thus converting more of them and keeping them coming back for more (without them even realizing how you are influencing them so well!)

Let’s get started - here are his six ‘weapons of influence’ adapted by me so you can take advantage of these on your websites:

1: Reciprocity- Cialdini’s first principle states that people tend to return a favor once you give them one - therefore you can capitalize on this. In the online world, this basically equates to giving them something for free on your website:

• a free white paper or ebook that helps your visitors understand your industry or product better, or offers tips and advice.
• free shipping offers for your visitors (like on purchases above $25).
• a free time-limited or featured-limited trial of your product or service.

Once you do this, Cialdini’s principle states that people will be much more likely to return the favor, by purchasing something from you, or coming back for more. And if you get their email in exchange for your ‘free’ favor, you can even contact them if they don’t come back.

2: Commitment and consistency- His second principle states people tend be true to their previous behaviour and like to remain consistent with this. To apply this principal on your websites to influence more visitors you should try doing these:

• Don’t go changing things too often on your website - you will alienate your most committed and most valuable visitors.
• When your visitors make a purchase, automatically send them a coupon for a discount on a future purchase.
• Send automated emails to your registered users reminding them of new features or special offers on your website.

If you apply any of these principles online, Cialdini would say that your visitors would be far more likely to keep returning to your website to maintain their consistency and commitment.

3: Social proof - For this particularly powerful but simple principle, Cialdini believes that people will be far more likely to do something if they see many others also doing it. This can be applied online in the following ways:

• encourage visitors to create customer reviews on your products or services and make these a key feature on your related pages (amazon.com do a particularly great job of this).
• get as many testimonials from existing customers/clients and prominently place on your website (ideally place them in their own section too).
• create a Facebook fan page and intergrate it into your website so visitors can see how many Facebook users like your site.

4: Authority- Cialdini’s next principle states that people tend to obey authority figures. This can be applied online by the using following on your website:

• get testimonials and reviews from celebrities and experts and then prominently place them on your website. To increase the effects of this, get these from relevant experts like doctors, lawyers, cops or teachers, and show them in their relevant uniform or work attire.
• prominently place credibility badges on your website like better business bureau (BBB) logos, hacker safe badges and security seals. Placing these near points of purchase or shopping cart ads will have extra influence.

5: Liking - His next principle states that people are easily persuaded by other people that they like and states the Tupperware phenomenon as the perfect illustration. Here are some ways that you can apply this principle online:

• encourage social sharing of your content by embedding share links, particularly for Facebook and Twitter (TellaFriend.com works great).
• create special promotions that give discounts to visitors who get their friends to join up or purchase on your website.
• create viral marketing related offerings that encourage visitors to share content with their friends (think ElfYourself.com).

6: Scarcity- Cialdini’s last principle states that perceived scarcity generates demand, regardless of how good the thing actually is or whether we really need it. Here are some ideas for how to take advantage of scarcity for your website:

• make use of ‘limited time only’ web specials and discounts. Reinforce this each day by stating how many days are remaining for the offer.
• make it obvious what the visitor will lose by not buying or signing up, particularly how much money they will lose  - this adds to the power of the scarcity principle.
• if possible, make limited quantities available on your site when launching new products (think of the iPhone success, even with lack of initial supply).

Hopefully you found my online adapted principles of Robert Cialdini very interesting and thought provoking. And if you haven’t read ‘Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion‘ I strongly recommend that ANYONE in online marketing or web analytics/optimization read this. Its extraordinarily eye-opening - I definitely found huge value in this and adapting its principles to the online world.

- Loop11.com  This tool is website usability testing on steroids, and allows you to determine your website visitor’s user satisfaction by asking them questions and getting them to complete tasks - essential to understand when trying optimize your website. Basically, you set up tasks for key goals on your website, and invite your visitors (via popup or email) to participate and try and complete them. An example task might be ’Find the key benefits of using our premium product’. You can then review task completion reports and come to a better understanding of task completion rate - and fix any problematic tasks users find.

Its pretty cheap too - just $350 per test and is much cheaper than traditional usability testing. And for an even more feature-rich tool in a similar vein, try using UserZoom.com which is even better, like allowing for getting written responses to tasks, but it is more expensive though.

- CodeBaby.com Nope, this has nothing to do with website development - its actually a fantastic tool for creating an interactive online spokesperson to help your website visitors find what they are looking for. This technology has been around in basic form for a few years now, but this is the best implementation I have ever seen. It allows you to customize the conversation script and its related links on each page of your website to really fine tune the help the CodeBaby offers for your website visitors. I particularly like how you can add call to action buttons for your key website goals right below your online spokesperson, so that it gives your visitors something to click on (and means users don’t even need their sound on to interact). A very clever tool indeed, and will no doubt help increase your conversion rates.

- CrossBrowserTesting.com Do you know what your website looks like on all the different combinations of browsers, different screen (resolution) sizes and different operating systems? Probably not, because the number of combinations you would have to test are mind boggling, and chances are your website might be broken in a common combination that you haven’t looked at before, thus decreasing your conversion rates without you knowing. This tool automates this checking process, and allows you to easily see if your site looks weird or breaks on different combinations, for example Mac users using FireFox 2.5 on a screen size of 1680X1200. Very cheap, at just $20 for the basic monthly plan, and is a great tool to help optimize your website performance for your visitors.

- AttentionWizard.com You only get a vital few seconds to try and engage your website visitors when they first arrive on your website. But how can you be sure their eyes  are focusing on what you want them to focus on? For example, are one of your images too distracing, or is your call to action button too small? This great new tool allows you to get a much better understanding of your visitors eye flow and what they are drawn to, and therefore discover possible issues with your website and its landing pages. It uses a proprietary eye pattern algorithm and works on live websites and even design mockups - you just upload the screenshot and it gives you an instant prediction. The best thing is that you can upload one screenshot free per day, and its pretty cheap to upload more per day ($10-25 per screenshot). Definitely money very well spent to help understand and improve your website.

- UserTesting.com This great tool is another essential for gaining true visitor insight and finding possible issues with your website. Similar to Loop11 and UserZoom in the sense that you create tasks for your visitors to try and complete, but this goes a great step further. It actually allows you to cherry pick your website testers based on their demographics or website habits, and records their interaction with your website and their attempts at completing your website key tasks - mouse clicks, voice commentary and all. It’s also very cheap - if you get a minimum of three users to test, prices are as low as $29 per user. Go ahead and spend $90 bucks on this tool to get 3 great videos of user’s interactions with your website, and their task completion experiences - its truly eye opening and will be one of the best $90 you ever spent on your website to help improve it.

Hopefully you discovered a few tools that you hadn’t heard of before - ideally your site should be making use of all these tools to make the biggest impact regarding your website optimization efforts. Oh, and I promise not to leave it so long before writing a new blog post!

So what’s the best way for me to give quick short tips to everyone that will help you optimize and improve your website? Via Twitter! So, starting tomorrow (26th Feb) I am going to be giving quick website optimization nuggets & insights everyday via my Twitter for the next 30 days (and maybe longer). All for free!

All you need to do to get these daily tips is to follow me on Twitter (#richpage). I will also periodically update this post with the actual tips that I am sending out, and these will form a big long list of quick website optimization nuggets. Hope you all find these very useful!

Here are my latest daily website optimization tips:

Tip: On your homepage, limit the amount of competing calls to action. Pick your 3 most important. Anymore and you will confuse your visitor.

Tip: In your analytics tool, find your top 10 organic search entry pages. Optimize these pages: great traffic & bang for optimization buck.

Tip: Create & prominently show your website’s unique value propositon - i.e. why should your visitor use your site instead of competitors.

Tip: Don’t presume you know what your site visitors are clicking on. Use heat maps & click maps on your pages: results can be surprising.

Tip: Slow loading pages are a conversion rate killer. Run Yahoo’s great ‘YSlow’ tool to determine what is slow on your site and then fix.

Tip: Engage your visitors better by showing different messaging for new & repeat visitors, like on my blog. Great tool: http://bit.ly/j4e3

Tip: Don’t make your visitors have to think what is clickable. Use blue for link colors or underline, don’t just rely on hover underline.

Tip: Test removing the leaderboard banner from your homepage only. This will likely get more visitors clicking through & reduce bounce rate.

Tip: Usability testing is a must, but doesn’t have to be expensive. Get good feedback using usertesting.com from 3 users, just $29 each.

Tip: Use campaign tracking codes (even on tweets) to measure your acquistion sources success & impact on conversions http://bit.ly/Kcrju

Tim contacted me last month to see if I was interested in helping him out updating and writing new chapters for the second edition of his book - the first edition of the book sold so well (over 20,000 copies) that his publisher wanted him to do a 2nd edition done already.

I naturally  jumped at the chance to work with such a passionate website optimizer, and have already begun work on the book. The second edition is going to be updated and improved, and will feature much more new content relating to the optimization non-ecommerce websites, and also all the latest testing strategies and tips.  Tim has also just chosen another co-author to help us wordsmith and update some of the content - Maura Ginty, who has a great background in web content and editorial strategy.

For those of you unfamiliar with the first edition of ’Landing Page Optimization’ book, it received rave reviews when it was first published in early 2008. It’s an essential guide for anyone (particularly online marketing folks) looking to understand how to improve the conversion rates of their websites and landing pages, and is full of great advice and tips for effective website testing. Tim is also CEO and president of SiteTuners.com who specialize in landing page optimization and testing services.

So needless to say, I’m very honored to be helping write this new book, and am very excited! We are also going to be making use of Twitter to ‘crowd-source’ this book, by asking our followers about their website optimization opinions, and best and worst website examples. So follow and stay tuned to Tim Ash’s Twitter and my Twitter for the latest on how you can get involved in the creation of this new book!

Here are the main reasons why I think we are going to have an SEO apocalypse sooner than most people might think…

1 - Increased personalization usage in search results. This has already started to happen - try searching for something when you are logged in to Google. You will often have different search results now, based on what you have search for before - and often different to other logged in users search results too. And Google are going to continue to increase the level of search results personalization, as a way of improving user satisfaction and to differentiate themselves from other search engines like Bing, who don’t have anywhere near as much user search data to be able to offer this. This will therefore mean increased fragmentation when it comes to trying to rank well for keywords - and will give SEO firms less power and influence, and more power to the actual search engine users.  

2 - Increased focus on bounce rate and website user engagement to determine search rankings. Very much like how search quality in Google Adwords works currently, I predict that pretty soon this is also going to start applying to regular organic search rankings. In other words, if you are getting lots of clicks on your search engine ranking, but many people are leaving your website immediately upon arrival because of a bad site (users not finding what they want or poor navigation etc), Google will learn this over time and lower the ranking of your site. Google will therefore effectively promote the rankings of the sites who offer a better user experience.

3- Google introducing site result filtering preferences. Don’t like results appearing from About.com or Yahoo Answers in your Google rankings? In the future I guarantee you will be able to easily set preferences in Google to not serve results from that site, or any other sites you don’t like. And unfortunately the site you may be trying to perform SEO on may be removed from a user’s search engine results by this new feature - potentially for reasons outside of your control as an SEO expert. What happens if a user removes your site from their results because they had a bad customer experience or your product prices were too expensive? You get penalized in the search engines by the user, and there will be nothing SEO experts would be able to do about it. I predict this feature will happen pretty soon… I even mocked up below how it might look in the Google preferences section:

4 - Increased search engine focus on real-time search engine results. This one has already started, albeit in a botched way - Google have begun to understand the importance that users are now much more time sensitive in their need for information by introducing Twitter search results. Even though in my opinion they failed at this first attempt (often with highly irrelevant results), they will get this right, expand usage of this, and will no doubt start to give even more ranking boosts to sites with content that has become updated within the minute (rather than with a day or so as it seems like it is today). This will make it even more complex to rank well for keywords, with increased importance placed on non-traditional websites for information like Twitter and Facebook. Which leads me to my next point…

5 - Increased usage of non-traditional websites to find information online. Twitter and Facebook are smart. They want to gather real time information on their hundreds of thousands of members, and ultimately make it searchable, and thus become even more indispensible for people to use - thus increasing pageviews and ad revenue. Yes, Facebook and Twitter really are just new Googles in disguise. Only just last month, while out in Hollywood, the traffic was even worse than usual. Where did I think to search for reasons why the traffic was so bad? Twitter - I typed in ‘bad hollywood traffic’ into Twitter search, and sure enough found the answer within seconds - it was because of a Christmas parade. I didn’t even think to search Google because their data isn’t real time enough, and they don’t have armies of people experiencing life in order to tap into like Twitter and Facebook have. And mark my words, pretty soon you will start to see Facebook get into the search field - subtly at first. And then watch out Google. And performing SEO on Facebook and people’s wall updates? That’s going to be VERY tough.

6 - As a resulft of the above issues, SEO will become even harder, and thus even more  competitive and cut throat. And this is already beginning to occur with search engine rankings - increasingly, you not only have to excel in SEO for your websites, but you also have to monitor and track what your competitors are doing. For example, it’s no longer as important to be #1 in Google if you can become #2 with a better link bait result title that is more compelling for the visitor to click on. Therefore, it will its getting much harder to perform effective traditional SEO because of increasingly sophisticated non-regular SEO techniques like this.

So there we have it. And don’t get me wrong. I’m not writing this because I am trying to brainwash you to try a different type of non-SEO website optimization that I preach and offer services for on this site. I love SEO, I just don’t see a particularly rosy future for it. And when other mediums like TV-based internet finally become mainstream (already starting to finally become a reality) its going to spell big trouble for the SEO industry.

Your thoughts? I would love to hear everyone’s opinion on the future of SEO - post below!

1: The Art of the Landing Page: 7 Tips For Increasing Conversions
A great guest blog post by landing page optimization expert Tim Ash, offering some excellent, clear, concise, and actionable tips for helping to improve website conversion rates.

2: 6 Tips for Improving High Bounce/Low Conversion Web Pages 
Avinash Kaushik offers some great unique ideas for optimizing websites, including entry analysis, mismatched calls to action and first impressions. Also, don’t forget about Avinash’s great new web analytics 2.0 book  that just came out, an essential read to help understand your website and its visitors.

3: Conversion Optimization: When & Where to Address Customer Anxiety
Unfortunately, website visitors are still anxious when it comes to parting with their credit card details online. And many websites do a pretty poor job of reducing anxiety, therefore contributing to poor conversion rates. Linda Bustos does a great job discussing.

4: 5 Steps to Twitter Success - Twitter Optimization Series Overview
2009 was the year when Twitter became a powerhouse for driving and converting traffic to your website. Tad Chef over at SEOptimize did a great post early in the year revealing 5 steps to improve your success at using Twitter.

5: Is CAPTCHA Eating Your Conversions?
Thanks to spambots and malaware attacks, in 2009 it also become harder than ever for users to register for something online, or even often just submitting a button. Anil Batra covers this interesting subject and its effect on conversion rates.

6: Optimizing Website & Landing Page Copy – A 10 Step Process
Having poor copy and calls to action on your website is one of the biggest causes of low conversion rates on websites. Brian Eisenberg did a fantastic post all about how to optimize your website text, full of great actionable tips.

7: How to Improve your Homepage (in 10 Easy Steps)
Your homepage is one of your most important parts of your website, and often many website owners and marketers do a poor job of converting their homepage visitors, particularly first time visitors. One of my best posts of the year I like to think…

8: Conversion Makeover: LandsEnd.com – Part 2
One of my favorite things about this website optimization blog post by Brian Eisenberg is that it follows a visitors actions from Google, all the way through to the LandsEnd.com and potential purchase, and talks about the importance of having a visitor follow a good ’scent’ to improve conversions.

9: 22 More-Unusual Ideas to Test & Help Improve Your Website
Often many books and blogs talk about ideas for website testing - but I find that many of them always discuss the same types of tests, so I came up with a list of more unusual things to test and help improve your website.

10: Your Baby Is Ugly
I saved the best for last - surely one of the best posts ever if you ask me. Tim Ash really hits home something that website designers or anyone else related to making websites needs to know - understanding the harsh reality that your website actually sucks and needs help.

So there we have it - another year goes by, and 10 blog posts to help improve your website in 2010! Feel free to reply and mention your favorite other blog posts of the year too!

In particular, many people asked me for additional in-depth help to improve their website. As a result of this, I am pleased to announce my new premium website optimization service which is specifically designed for those looking for a more in-depth analysis for helping improve and optimize their website.

With this premium service I go a step further than my basic optimization service by actually analyzing your website traffic metrics in your analytics tool to find insights to help optimize your website, and also include a 30-minute phone consultation to discuss my findings with you. Here are the full details on this new service:

Whats Included in My Premium Website Optimization Service:
Based on major insights I gain from analyzing your web analytics traffic data and a website usability overview, you will receive the following:

1: A personalized 10-page report containing fully actionable insights geared to increase your website conversion rates and to improve visitor engagement. Report contents:

• A 2-3 page website improvement overview.
• Major website usability issues on your website and how to remedy them.

• Recommendations to improve your website’s worst performing pages (for example pages with high bounce/exit rates, forms and pages with low conversion rates, and pages with usability issues).

• Your websites top performing pages for goal conversion and user engagement, and what you can learn from them and apply to other pages.

• Traffic source analysis,  revealing your top and worst performing sources and what sources to optimize, and recommendations for other potentially high performing traffic sources.

2: A 30 minute phone consultation to discuss my report and its findings, to help clarify points raised and to answer any questions you may have.

What is the cost of this premium website optimization service?
The cost of this premium service is $599 - much lower than similar priced services by other companies. This includes 8-10 hours of my analysis time and the 30-minute phone consultation with you.

What is needed in order to start this service?
1: The main goals of your website (for example to increase sales/generate leads).
2: Login details to your web analytics tool (to perform part of analysis).

What type of website is this service most ideal for?
This service is ideal for small-to-medium business websites - in particular ecommerce sites, media sites, and lead generation websites, and also for large scale blogs. For smaller websites or personal websites, check out my other more basic service.

What makes me the expert?
I have been helping improve websites for nearly 10 years - both large fortune 500 websites and small business websites. I also am a certified landing page optimization expert. On my blog I have also been discussing website optimization techniques and tips for a long time.

How the process work/how to get started:

• Firstly, complete the form below and submit your website URL and the 3 main goals of your website.
• I will then contact you to arrange payment via PayPal and to get login details to your analytics tool needed to perform this analysis.
• I will then begin this optimization service and send you the personalized report within 7 days.
• After you have read the report, we will then schedule the 30 minute call to review and discuss the findings and answer any questions you have.

Start improving your website and get started now - simply enter your details below to start the ball rolling - I will then contact you for the next steps.

Still undecided? Learn more about website optimization in my free ebook!

Or if you are looking for a more basic, cheaper optimization service, check out my ‘10 Things to Improve Your Website for $149′ service that might suit you better.

Fill in these details to contact me and get started with this premium service:

But unfortunately many of these service websites are just glorified online brochures and make many mistakes when it comes to having a well optimized website that satisfies and converts its visitors into sales or leads. So I thought I would put together some tips to help improve these very popular and upcoming type of service websites…

Tips to Improve Service Sites and Generate More Sales from Your Visitors:

1: Don’t use a ‘cool’ flash intro page or flash animation on your home page.
These animations are common place on service website, but usually only serve to inflate the ego of the website owner or company and do very little for the actual user. They usually take too long to load and can make the visitor abandon your site early, and often plain just get in the way of what the user is actually looking for on your website. Avoid!

2: Always state your value proposition of your business to your visitors.
Service websites often make the mistake that the visitors will immediately understand and know why a visitor should use them rather than a competitor. Don’t just claim you are the best - state the top reasons why a visitor should use you - cheapest in town, guaranteed, most customers, service specialties etc.

3: Improve your website lead generation to get more sales.
Don’t just simply rely on using an email link on your website that just opens up an email in the visitors email tool (this will also guarantee you get spammed by spam email bots too). Instead use a dedicated contact us page, with a contact form, that has fields so you can get more useful information from the user, like name, phone, service requested etc. Better yet, offer some incentive to contact you, like coupons, or a free white paper. And if you really want to get advanced, then you could use auto responder email system like aweber to automatically send emails at set points after a user has contacted you.

4: Use the power of testimonials on your website.
One of the easiest and best ways to help increase the amount of sales or leads your website generates is by listing a good selection of testimonials prominently on your site - even on your home page, with a visible link to see more. I would actually go out of your way to encourage these testimonials from your recent customers - without them your website certainly won’t convert as well.

5:  Offer a way for visitors to search your website.
If visitors can’t find what they are looking for on your site by clicking around a few times, then they are more than likely going to leave and go back to Google and visit one of your competitor sites instead. One way of preventing this is by offering an internal site search - its a very quick and easy way for visitors to to see if you have information on what they are looking for. This is particularly important if you offer many different types of services.

6: Create coupons for visitors to print out and mention on phone or bring in.
Creating exclusive printable coupons that are only available on your website not only provides your customers with cheaper services, but also gives you a great way of knowing how many sales your website is generating offline - by looking at the amount of web coupons used, you can see exactly how many sales are due to your website. Give it a shot!

7: Try using a web chat service to generate more leads and sales.
Don’t just rely on getting people to call the phone number on your website or emailing you from your website. By offering a web chat option (like BoldChat), this gives visitors an alternate way of talking to you online, that is less committal and less intrusive. It also provides a great way to reach out to visitors who seem to be pondering or stuck on certain parts of your website.

And lastly don’t forget: don’t just focus on search engine optimization.
Even though its very important to generate traffic to your website via effective search engine optimization, if your actual website isn’t optimized and doesn’t meet your visitors needs, then you will be wasting the money you are spending on getting the visitors there in first place because your visitors will leave and go to one of your competitors instead.

So there we have it - some great tips for website owners in the service industry. But of course your success will vary on exactly what type of website you have, and your exact goals. Remember I can help to personally optimize and improve your website to generate more sales and leads for you too.

Luckily, our friends over at SiteTuners.com are about to launch a great new free tool that bridges this website testing gap, and also ‘ups the website testing stakes’ with a tool that actually predicts your visitors click and eye flow, all without even needing a live website!

Their new tool, currently in free private beta, is called AttentionWizard and actually predicts what your visitors will pay attention to and what they are likely to ignore. Its going to be very simple - you simply submit a screenshot of the page you want evaluated and it makes instant predictions based on advanced artificial intelligence algorithms.  This tool will be VERY useful for helping to identify problematic areas of landing pages and to help increase converstion rates. There will be a free version, and also a paid premium version with extra features.

Here is a screenshot of Attention Wizard in action on the old SiteTuners.com homepage. Looks pretty amazing right?

I know I am very excited to test out this game changing website optimization tool! If you are interested in more details I suggest you sign up for the updates or the private beta . Hopefully this will be launched by the end of the year!

Therefore, I decided to create a list of more unusual things that you could test to try and help improve your website - depending on the type of website you have of course. Just like coming up with the unusual test of what would happen when you combined Diet Coke and Mentos… unexpected, but pretty impactful! So lets get started with the test ideas…

1. Test adding drop down menus instead of regular flat navigation menus to improve navigation  (doing this will allow users to get a better sense of what your website offers, without having to click around unnecessarily).
2. Test creating a ’first time user’  page and adding prominent link on your home page (first time users are often neglected, but often form a high percentage of visitors to websites).
3. Test adding a live web chat tool like BoldChat to help your visitors in real time (this helps reduce the amount of confused visitors on your site).
4. Test adding a tag line to just below your logo to help clarify your sites value proposotion  (don’t just presume a visitor will know what your website is about - creating a tagline will help).
5. Test making more use of bullet points rather than long paragraphs on product or service pages to improve scanability (because remember that web users like to scan instead of read long sentences).
6. Test removing the leaderboard banner ad on your home page in order to reduce ad irrations  (seeing banner ads in prominent places can often make visitors leave prematurely).
7. Test removing the ‘email confirmation’ field on your forms to increase conversions  (users often just cut and paste into this field anyway, removing may increase form completion rate) .
8. Test making registration non-mandatory before user can make a purchase (while it might seem like a good idea, making registration mandatory can greatly reduce conversion rates).
9. Test downgrading any of your flash animations into static images, particularly on home page (this is likely to make your pages load quicker and not frustrate users as much).
10. Test increasing your font size by one point to increase readability (you will be surprised how many websites’ text size alienates visitors without the site owner realizing it).
11. Test underlining all of your text links to make it obvious what is clickable (this is always the source of much debate - but just test it - your conversion rates might increase - too often its hard for visitors to know what is a link and what isn’t).
12. Remove some on the more unnecessary links on your pages to reduce confusion (studies have shown that too many choices of links can often confuse visitors and make them leave prematurely).
13. Test the color of your checkout or submit buttons to increase conversions (colors often can convey negative unintended meaning).
14. Test using an email autoresponder tool like aweber.com for post-purchase or signup emails, particularly to include thanks, next steps or tips (this often assures and helps your new clients/customers).
15. Test moving your site search box into the top right of every page to aid user navigation (if a user can’t find what they want, internal search is often looked for next - so should be prominent).
16. Test prominently adding your sites value proposition above the fold on your homepage (always let your visitors know whats in it for them by using your site).
17. Test adding first name personalization to the body copy of any newsletter lists or emails you send to clients (remember someones name is the most important word to them).
18. Test renaming some of your navigation tabs to make them more logical and understandable to users (when builing your site, you may not have spent long on naming the items - revisit and improve them).
19. Test adding related links to the end of your articles to increase user engagement and click rates (these reduce the chance of the visitor leaving your site prematurely).
20. Test adding a site feedback tool like Kampyle.com on every page to gain ideas and feedback  (listen to your visitors - they have great ideas!)
21. Test only having up to 3 major calls to action on your home page to remove potential confusion (again, the more choices you offer visitors, the more confusion your site will cause).
22. Test moving your site security seals into the site header to increase conversions (dont just move into the body - try the header - particularly important for ecommerce sites).

So there we have it! Hopefully you can take advantage of some these good ideas for you to help test and improve your website - no matter what kind of website you have. And feel free to add your own more unusual things to test on websites - simply comment below to add your ideas…