In the online marketing environment, marketers are continuously striving to increase visitors to their website. Do your SEO efforts end at driving traffic to the website? Of course not! Increasing visitors to your website is challenging, but keeping visitors engaged on your website is equally challenging. If visitors come to your website and leaves within few seconds, it is a waste of your SEO efforts as you are unable to convert your visitors into customers. So, businesses need to focus on boosting conversions and landing page optimization is an important to achieve conversions.

Landing pages of a website need to be strategically planned and created. Here are few must know tricks for optimizing landing pages –

·       Keep the landing pages clean, clear and precise. Putting too much information on landing pages can distract the visitors and confuse them. Strategically plan your Call to Action buttons depending on what you would like your visitor to do. Make you Call to Action buttons easily visible and use short, action oriented words.

·        Give a compelling headline that will immediately catch visitor’s attention. Make sure the headline is understandable, so that visitors find it relevant to what they are looking for.

·      Do not overlook the need of keywords on the landing page. Keywords are not only important for driving traffic to the website, but you need to ensure that keywords are seamlessly integrated with content on the landing page. Pay special attention to keyword density as keywords must not appear forced or out-of-context.

·     Remember, homepage is not the only landing page of your website. Many businesses make the mistake of optimizing only the homepage, but even the inner product or services pages are landing pages. So, first make a list of landing pages for your website and focus on optimizing them.

·         Landing pages make the first impression of your business on your visitors, so try to establish trust and recognition. One of the ways is to clearly display your contact details like location, address, phone number on the landing page. Also, display your social media presence.

From keywords to social sharing buttons, optimize your landing pages to increase conversions, and increase leads and sales.

Analytic tools provide an insight into the technical performance of a website and help in bringing improvements to the website. But merely setting up analytics on the website does not guarantee success as you should be able to make proper interpretations from the available data. It has been seen that businesses set up analytics but fail to dig and utilize information provided by the tool. Also, analytics tools like Google Analytics provide insight into technical performance of the website, but to measure effectiveness of the marketing campaigns, marketers need to analyze the metrics properly.

Here are few key metric provided that by Google Analytics that every business must watch out for –

• Content – This metric allows you to analyze which content on your website is popular with the visitors. Once you get an idea of what content your visitors like to read, you can develop more effective content strategy and improve content on other pages of the website. Content has the power of developing strong user engagement hence this metrics should not be overlooked.
• Organic Search Traffic – In the Traffic Sources section of Google Analytics dashboard, you get an insight into whether your traffic is from organic search, paid campaign or direct type in. You should focus on Organic Search traffic as it will give you an idea of the keyword phrases that brought visitors to your website. Increasing organic visitors is a great way of increasing traffic to a website without increasing your paid advertising.
• Bounce Rate – Businesses should focus on retaining visitors to their website, and keeping them engaged. Hence, Bounce Rate metric is very important. Bounce rate of a web page gives percentage of users who left immediately after landing on that particular web page. If the bounce rate of a page is high, it indicates that the web page does not offer what visitors are looking for. So, you need to optimize content for that web page.
• Exit Pages – Just like the landing pages of visitors are important to know from where visitors are entering your website, you also need to know the pages from where visitors are leaving the website. So, you should watch out for the Exit Pages metric. If the visitors are exiting from the Thank You or Order completion pages, it means those visitors were converted to customers. If visitors exit from any other page, it indicates that you need to optimize those pages.

Google Analytics metrics and reports are very important for businesses. So, they should have sound understanding of these metrics and how they can be improved. 

What is a meta tag? Well, it is a special HTML tag that gives information about a web page.   Meta tags are part of Head section of the website and describe content of the web page. They are used in HTML or XHTML documents, and lie between opening and closing tags of the code. There are several elements that influence successful search engine placement for a website, and meta tags is one of them. Meta tags can be used to highlight important keywords and build page relevancy to search terms. Though meta tags are traditional SEO technique and has been in use for a long time, it is still effective in influencing search engine rankings. There are multiple meta tags with different elements that can be used throughout a web page. It includes title, keywords, description and robot tags. But, mainly title and description are considered and displayed by search engines during listing of results.

A simple example of Meta tag –

<head>

<title>Not a Meta Tag, but required anyway </title>

<meta name="description" content="Awesome Description Here"> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8">

</head>

Benefits of using meta tags

• They provide information about the web page, especially which keywords represent the web page.
• Normal HTML tags change the appearance of the web page, but meta tags allow adding keywords to web page without affecting its appearance.
• Several search engines use meta tag information to index and organize websites.
• Meta tags appear in search results, especially if it contains keyword that user searched for. It helps in building relevancy and attracting attention of user.
• Improve Click-through-rates CTR

Tips to Optimize Use of Meta Tags

• Choose your meta tags (keywords and description) carefully. Also, include them in a natural way rather than simply stuffing keywords.
• Try to keep each meta tag within character limit. For page title, character limit is 70 characters, meta description character limit is 160 characters and for meta keywords, it should not be more than 10 keyword phrases.
• Use your most important keyword followed by the company name in the title.
• Develop your meta description like a short advertisement that will encourage people to view your page. Meta description is visible in the SERP, so it should be meaningful, appealing and gives accurate description of your website.
• Fill as many meta tags as possible. While title, keywords and description are very important, other tags like Robots meta tag also influences ranking.
• Make sure the meta description includes a CTA (Call-to-Action). It influences click-through-rate and natural search traffic.

Keywords! One of the most heard and most sought after terms in Search Engine Optimization. While choosing right keywords can make your campaign successful, wrong choice of keywords can completely ruin marketing campaigns. Wrong set of keywords or unplanned keywords can bring unqualified traffic to the website. 

What are Keywords?

Keywords are phrases or words that a user types in a Search Engine to find information he is seeking. Not just for search term, keywords also play an important role in indexing, cataloging and ranking of websites by bots. So, keywords are an integral part of SEO campaigns and need to be used with other on page optimization factors.

Search engines use robots or bots to analyze blogs, web pages and any other form of content available online. Then, these web pages are organized, using complex algorithms, according to their relevance to particular search terms. 

What does Keyword Research Involve?

Keyword research involves understanding different phrases that users might type into search engines. While doing keyword research, you must be able to peer into mind of the searcher and figure out their intention behind the search. So, every title you choose or content you write needs to have relevant keywords so it can be ranked for those keywords. Thus, with keyword research you can ensure that the website gets maximum exposure on search engines and maximize audience reach.

Keyword research basically consists of –

• Finding search terms
• Understanding how these search terms influence competition and traffic.

It is important to know different types of their keywords like long tail keywords, broad keywords, phrase match and exact match keywords.

Benefits of Keyword Research

Keyword research helps in understanding demand for keywords and keyword referrals. Some keyword tools also predict cost involved in running paid campaigns for those keywords. 

There are several benefits of keyword research –

• Bring qualified traffic to the website
• Lowers bounce rate of website
• Optimize website for keywords
• Increase search engine ranking
• Improve traffic to website
• Understand search behavior
• Develop effective marketing campaigns

Thus, keyword research is basically market research and getting better understanding of the customers. It is not possible to optimize a web page or lead traffic to a website unless you know which words and phrases are important to the website.