Many of you are asking me for website optimization tips to help improve your website. Yet I know how busy everyone is. And I know everyone wants to scan things and doesn’t want to read a lot at once. And everyone wants simple nuggets that you can take action on.

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

I’m excited to announce that I’m going to be a co-author for a great website optimization book – its the 2nd edition of Tim Ash‘s great ‘Landing Page Optimization’ book!

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!

SEO. You have to love it - trying to outrank your competitors for top keywords. But lets face it. It’s morphing and changing by the week. Not only are search engine algorithms becoming increasingly complex and hard to consistently rank for, but SEO competition has reached near-breaking point and is harder to compete than ever before. And if you ask me, this all paints an ugly future for SEO specialists and firms, who are soon likely to begin struggling to effectively search engine optimize websites - and thus potentially a future without SEO as we know it today.

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!

Wow – 2009 – another year went by so fast again! There were many great website optimization blog posts last year from some great experts around the web, so I thought I would put together a list of my favorite website optimization posts from 2009 that you should all read to help improve your website in 2010! So let’s get started… Continue Reading »