Conversion Rate Experts

One of the excellent seminars I was able to attend whilst at Affiliates 4 U (A4U expo) was Conversion Rate Expert’s How we grew the sales of SEOmoz by 170% . Interesting mostly because they were taking a landing page that had been deeply optimised by a number of ‘experts’ already and were still able to get enormous uplifts.

Actually, I phrased that first sentence entirely the wrong way. The only reason I attended A4U expo was to meet CRE and see a little of their magic in practice. I’ve been a hug fan of their site ever since reading their excellent Google Website Optimizer 101 which not only gives their assessment of Google’s Website Optimiser (“it turns your website into a ruthless money-making machine” — don’t you just love a little landing page copy with your morning coffee?) but also 108 handy hints for using this tool. At A4Uexpo, I was able to meet Karl Blanks, Ben Jesson and Stephen Pavlovich and chat to them a little about how they went to work.

One of the key take-aways of the seminar was that although GWO and other mulitvariate tools are absolutely fantastic ways of sifting through your website for nuggets of gold, much more important by far is the methodology by which you choose where to look.

Technorati Tags: conversion rate optimisation, conversionrate, conversionrateoptimisation, CRO, google, multivariate testing, website optimiser

Juicy link building

I saw Christopher Cemper’s presentation on juicy link building at Affiliates 4 U Expo in Amsterdam and I was very impressed. Some of the highlights:

• Ignore page rank
• Focus on natural link building the way that users would do it, from trusted and relevant domains

Particularly the one struck me as interesting. Two things Christopher highlighted as being red flags to Google’s spam fighting bull:

• Using the best possible anchor text and keeping this same across multiple new links that go live around the same time
• Having no nofollows in your links

The non-intuitive guidance that flows from this is that if you want Google to pay attention to the many links from trusted and relevant domains, you need add in some ‘fibre’ to the Googlebot diet. This fibre is what makes your link building relatively indistiguishable from the common-or-garden users who would be writing about and linking to your site. Crazily, this means that once you have found and persuaded trusted and relevant domains to link to you you actually need to ask some of them to use a nofollow or use anchor text for which you have no chance of being found in Google (like click here ).