To bring traffic to a web site, there are a few components involved. Most importantly, original, well written content and relevant images. Both these components play a crucial role in building site traffic. With the advancement of Web 2.0 technologies, image optimization has gained significant relevancy.

Search majors such as Google and Yahoo! have redefined their search strategies to include images in their search databases and provide end users with the best search results.

A conventional search, therefore, may bring results with images such as photos, maps or product images relevant to the search keyword. For this reason, it has become increasingly important for businesses to include images in their Web sites and optimize them using appropriate tools.

The important task in image optimization is to convert the image file to compressed formats so that they are accommodated in the HTML files of the Web site. There are different image slicing and resolution reduction tools that work wonders for different types of images.

Some of the popular image slicing tools are Smush.it, Web Resizer, GIF Bot, RIOT, and PNGOUT. With the help of these tools, you can reduce the size of the image file and save significant space in the server. The small file size will also result in quick loading of the Web site, making the Web browsing an effortless experience for your users.

Images play crucial role in Web site marketing. The power of images as a marketing tool is much higher compared to a text content. An image creates an impression in the eyes of a customer within seconds. With this, it becomes important for each Web site to add relevant picture information in their press releases, articles, blogs, or even the Web site content itself.

An SEO Consultant can recommend using social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace as an effective image optimization tool because search engines rank these sites higher in the search process.

Simply having images on a site will not do much good for traffic building. The images have to be properly tagged and named. The image file name and the description have to match the image exactly. To ensure visibility in search engines, the file names have to comprise of the most competitive keywords so the images get tagged quickly in the search results.

Building customer trust online is a combination of good branding, good design, and good content. A website needs all three components to be successful in creating a climate of trust that encourages sales.

Branding is about finding a specific idea that you stand for, finding a way to own that idea in a credible way, and ultimately building a total trust that you will always deliver.

Branding for Success

Maybe you think only big businesses need to be branded, but I’d challenge that thought by telling you this – As soon as you open your doors for business (either physically or metaphorically) you become a brand in the eyes of everyone who sees you or buys from you. The only choice you have is to become either a negative brand, undifferentiated brand, or a powerful, motivating brand.

Good branding on a website immediately lets a visitor know what you can do for them. In other words, don’t brand your business by a generic term like “gardening.” Instead, brand your business by showing the uniqueness of what you offer with a benefit statement, “Container gardening for unhappy apartment dwellers who want to be surrounded by nature.”

With Internet branding, you want to present your brand so customers can interact with your message and interact with your site. On the Internet, your prospects have total control of what they see, read, and hear. That’s why traditional advertising doesn’t work on the Net.

Design Considerations

Visitors are interacting with your site when they are shopping. The Internet gives you total control over what your prospective customer sees. Their shopping experience needs to be positive or you lose the sale. According to a 2002 survey by the Stanford Credibility Project, 46% of respondents said that design plays a role in a websites creditability. Even a reputable brand with a poorly designed website would cause people to leave.

Just like in a crowded store, where you can’t find the section you are looking for, a crowded/cluttered website confuses a prospective buyer. Have the website set up with simple graphics and navigation. What you need to do is remove all the obstacles from the selling process. To increase the click-thru rate, your site must offer instant gratification in terms of comprehension and clarity.

Remember, customers are entering your site at different points, so it is important that your brand message is clear on every page of your website. Try to have a consistent look on the site that matches your offline branding. Keep the same colors on your website so that they match your offline marketing materials.

Trustworthy Content

Creating content that gives your customer a sense of safety and security is also a way of building trust with your customer. Fraud and identity theft are big concerns for online shoppers. Sadly, according to Forrester Research, 71% of online shoppers don’t believe the retailer can protect them from fraud. So, they are reluctant to give out financial information. Consumers also believe that only 49% of companies will protect their privacy.

Website visitors need to feel that the information they give to a website will be held in confidence. Before asking someone to give you their email address, be sure you have a privacy policy statement. Make sure the privacy statement is near the email sign-up.

To reassure your website visitors of a secure financial transaction, use the security certification seals of Verisign, Hackersafe, and Thawte. Make sure the seals are prominently displayed on the shopping cart and throughout the checkout process. Forrester research found that sites using these certification seals had a 14% increase in conversion rates.

Another technique is to use privacy seals from BBB online and TrustE. These third party logos communicate that your company can be trusted and have met a standard of measurement for reliability. These seals need to be placed throughout the website: near email signups, registration, cart, and checkout.

Communicate to Build Trust

Building trust online comes down to clearly communicating with your customer. Something as simple as failing to communicate the total purchase price upfront, will lead to shopping cart abandonment. Forrester research found that 57% of shoppers will abandon a shopping cart because the shipping charges were more than they expected.

The goal of an online business should be to create an environment of worry free shopping. Create a website that makes a visitor feel safe, clearly expresses the company’s brand through good design, and boosts website conversions through trustworthy content.

Effective, ethical, and ongoing SEO can deliver targeted traffic to the pages of any website. It can provide geographically and topically targeted traffic that is ready to begin or continue the purchasing process, but SEO needs to be done effectively.

It is best to implement SEO practices during the first stages of development although with a little extra work it is more than possible for an existing site to benefit from search engine optimization efforts.

Planning

The planning stage of any web development is a critical facet to a successful online business plan. As well as planning your own strategy and interlacing your prospective customer’s needs you should also consider the methods of marketing you will use.

The most effective SEO methods include the regular addition of fresh content, as well as the creation of pages that will encourage others to link back to your site. By adding content platforms and structuring a site according from the beginning, it should become easier and more efficient to add the required content.

Design And Development

Website design needs to incorporate many elements. It should be appealing to your visitors and should be accessible and simple to use for anybody that opens your site.

In terms of SEO, text based content should be given a prominent position above the code of the page. Pictures, videos, and dynamic elements need to offer alternative text as well as clearly labeled and optimized HTML tags.

Site Content

In terms of on-page optimization, the content of your site is one of the most important factors. Optimised content should be clear and simple to understand for the benefit of your readers and should incorporate the relevant keywords for that page.

Using keyword infletions and semantically related keywords, as well as introducing header tags and other formatting elements, can help to further improve your search engine results.

Fresh content is critical to your success, so a method of quickly and conveniently adding new website content should be implemented for the best results.

Creating A Marketing Mix

A marketing mix is a program or strategy of marketing that incorporates various advertising and marketing techniques.

SEO is certainly one of the more popular forms of online marketing but it is far from being the only viable option. PPC advertising, social media optimization, and text links can also prove highly effective especially when combined into a single marketing mix.

Try to ensure that each page uses relevant marketing techniques so that they lend themselves to SEO, PPC, and any other technique you use without having to alter the page too heavily.

Ongoing Updates And Development

The Internet is a constantly evolving platform for business. Not only are new technologies being introduced that can be incorporated into most websites, but the way website visitors think is also changing.

Static websites with no content updates or new additions may prove successful for a period but the most effective sites should be monitored, maintained, updated, and improved over time to enjoy continued success.

Analytics And Performance Measurement

In order to implement successful changes, it is important to benchmark your efforts.

For the new website this means tracking analytics from day one and monitoring the effectiveness of any additions or amendments.

Different techniques work to varying degrees for different websites so there is no one size fits all solution. Learn what works for your website and use this information to improve or optimize your marketing efforts.

People who say that Flash is not SEO friendly are absolutely wrong. It is just a myth that Flash is SEO unfriendly.

Creating accessible flash content for search engines is crucial for you to preserve your online presence and drive traffic to your site. Follow these Flash Optimization Tips to get most out of the major search engines.

Adding SWF content to your HTML source

An iron-clad way to guarantee that a SWF’s content is picked up and ranked by search engines is to extract the content and place it into the page’s HTML source. Tools such as Dreamweaver use SWF Object to embed Flash. The code view in Dreamweaver displays comments where you should add your alternative HTML content.

Keep your URL unique

If your site is just one big lump of Flash in an HTML template, your page is never going to refresh. Consider having a different URL for each page of your site’s Flash content. Each page would have its own HTML source title, “H1″ and body copy containing the keyword you want to rank.

Use source content dumping

A one-page HTML rich internet application (RIA) will not be SEO enhanced simply by adding the content for each section of the Flash application into the HTML source for this page. Doing this doesn’t establish any prominence of content, as there are too many competing terms. Keep extracted Flash content relevant to the page it’s on.

Keep an eye on new initiatives

Adobe has been working with Google and Yahoo! to make the Flash file format (SWF) search engine friendly. This will enable the engines to see what’s inside a SWF’s content and index it. However, the use of Flash Player technology by search engines is still developing and so can’t be relied on as the only step towards optimizing your project for SEO.

Add text to your Flash applications

A simple Flash SEO enhancement is to use Flash-generated text in your creative when displaying or animating type. You can do this instead of using text that’s a flattened bitmap. Flash text can contain keyword-based messages, which help increase traffic. Include this text in the HTML source of the page as well.

Remember that search engine spiders hate pop-ups

We’ve all visited sites that urge us to click to launch Flash content into a new window. This removes any chance of the site’s content being picked up and indexed by search engines. In addition to search spiders not being able to see them, pop-ups suffer from being blocked by many browsers.

Get robotic help

Robots.txt is a plain text file found at the root of a server. This tells search bots which content needs to be allowed or disallowed when it visits their website. If your Flash text content is the same as your HTML version, you could set the Robots.txt file to ignore the SWF content and push only the HTML content to the search bots.

Embed Flash content with SWF Object

SWF Object is a search engine-friendly way to embed Flash content. Alternative (non-Flash) content is produced first, and then snippets of JavaScript are used to swap out the alternative content with the Flash movies. This ensures that the content is indexed by search engines. Users without Flash will still see a working HTML page.

Building a great landing page should be on top of your priority list if you want your website visitors transformed into customers.

While a great looking website can grab the attention of your visitors, a strong landing page will keep them involved and get them to buy your products/services.
Wikipedia defines a landing page as:

The page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.

Wikipedia’s definition sums it up nicely but there is certainly more to a great landing page then relevant and keyword rich content. Here’s 10 things that you should be looking at when optimizing a landing page:

- Relevant Content

A landing page’s content should be directly related to organic search results, PPC campaign, anchor text in inbound links and any other targeted inbound advertising, online and offline. If people don’t get what they expect, they will be more likely to leave.

- Multiple Landing Pages

A landing page shouldn’t necessarily be your homepage. In many instances a homepage is a good landing page. However, for more targeted traffic and better results, you want a landing page to be focused on specific offer and specific call for action. To accomplish this, a given website should have multiple landing pages. Create some deep link landing pages that will focus on specific offer and your conversion rate will be higher.

- Focus on Functionality

More and more visitors seem to judge the professionalism and credibility of a site by its design. To satisfy this, many website owners concentrate on the design aspect instead of focusing on its functionality. A well-designed landing page is essentially worthless if the prospect can’t accomplish anything. While I wouldn’t suggest skimping on the design, it shouldn’t be your priority. Focus on the exact steps you want your visitor to take and design a page with that in mind.

- Call To Action

You got visitors to your landing page, now direct them to take action. Make it clear and highly noticeable without overwhelming your audience. Whether it’s a sign-up form or a “buy now” button, make it the focus of your page.

- Send a Clear Message

Keep your landing page clean and clutter free so your visitors stay focused on your message. Emphasize the biggest reasons that they should carry out the applicable call to action with larger text, contrasting colors, images. Make it easier for them to scan the content by using lists and getting right to the point.

- Offer Incentive

Bribing your visitors with freebies and samples is a proven method of enticing them to sign up. Offer more than your competition but don’t sell yourself short either. Provide a list of reasons why your offer is better and what exactly the visitor can expect. Provide references and testimonials.

- Make Visitors Stay

Avoid sending your visitors to another page unless it is absolutely necessary. That includes any internal navigation as well as external banners. If you remove all distractions and limit navigation options, you stand a better chance of keeping your visitors around.

- Simple is Better

Make it easy for your visitors to complete the action you want them to. Less confusion and decision making for your visitor means better conversions rate for your landing page. Don’t offer multiple choices and throw in optional extras. Focus on the offer the page was created for.

- Power of Freebies

Everyone likes free offers. They are hard to resist and can be a powerful conversion tool. Whether a call to action is free or something free is received as a result of carrying out a call to action, it certainly doesn’t hurt. If your competition charges for something and you offer it for free, you’ll win the customer. Remember, just because you make a free offer doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be quality.

- Testing

In a recent post “How to Turn Website Visitors into Buyers”, I’ve stressed how important testing is in finding out what your visitors like. Testing various text, call to action forms, layouts will give you true idea what produces the best results as far as conversion.

Using a tool like Google’s Website Optimizer you can easily monitor the conversion rate, bounce rate, and tons of other useful metrics found in most modern day web analytics apps. Using these metrics you can easily figure out which version will be your optimal page, one that maximizes the results.

Creating a successful and effective landing page takes a lot of work but should be the focus for anyone involved with a website. Whether you are a website owner, web designer, web developer or a web marketing specialist you must be aware of the components that comprise a solid landing page. After all this can mean website’s success or failure.