http://www.justsearching.co.uk/JustBlog/improve-your-internet-marketin

A popular example of a call-to-actions (CTA) is “Click here”, however this particular primitive and simple CTA is fast depreciating, as in essence it does not fulfil in terms of driving conversions and it lacks the basic requirements of using CTAs effectively.

Here are a few tips for using CTAs effectively, to push visitors through your site and on to specified landing pages:

1. The action to be taken.

Keep it simple. Clearly display what to do and what to expect for doing it. Remember not to overload visitors with too much information. Also avoid ambiguous CTAs. Studies show a call to action should consist of a clear and concise descriptive action.

2. The presentation and execution of the CTA.

Like any every other type of advertising, it is first impressions that make the biggest impact. Use the following techniques to advertise effectively.

• Utilise eye-catching image CTAs by using attractive and colourful buttons to execute the call to action.
  


• Utilise formatting in anchor text CTAs by using bolder or larger fonts to emphasise the call to action.
  


• Utilise advertising space and position CTAs by generously sprinkling CTA links in the header, footer and body of the page as an alternative path to the same landing page as readers scan and jump around the page when they read.

3. Ensure the conversion process is easily completed within a few clicks.

Make it simple, this way readers know exactly where to click to initialise the conversion process and are less likely to navigate away, effectively losing a conversation.

Conclusions

Adding more CTAs and using CTAs that are more clear and obvious will be more effective in driving conversions. Make it easy for the reader to understand, not just where but why to click through and what they can expect on the other side. Address your readers’ interests to see your CTR increase.

Vipul

SEO Programmer

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http://www.justsearching.co.uk/JustBlog/anchor-text-optimisation.html

Anchor text is a text link on a website that points to another page or resource. An example would be as follows:

“Just Search provide search engine optimisation services”

As you can see ‘search engine optimisation’ is the anchor text.

Not only is the choice of anchor text an important part of creating a useable website, it is also a useful tool in the SEO process. Well chosen text helps search engines understand what the page being linked to is about.

Using wording such as ‘view product’ is informing the search engines that the link page is about the subject ‘view product’. A more effective way to write the link would be to use the product name or description. For example:

“View our selection of Christmas cards for sale”

Keywords in anchor text can be utilised for internal links and also for backlinks to your site. If you are asking another site to link back to you, it is a good practice to provide them with the html code for them to paste onto their page. That way you ensure that the correct anchor text is used. It is also a good idea to vary the keywords you use in backlinks to avoid the search engines thinking you are spamming them.

Finally always make sure that your anchor text makes sense to both the viewer of the website as well as the search engines.

Caroline Bell

SEO programmer

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http://www.justsearching.co.uk/JustBlog/improving-your-site-index-rate

A major feature of having a successful website is ensuring it is properly SEO-optimised. This ensures search engines pick up all the relevant information from the page, hopefully reducing the amount of ‘clutter’ or unwanted data. However, once you have an optimised website, there are a number of steps the continued progress of the website could take. One of these steps is to improve the frequency that your website is indexed by the likes of Google.

The most important concept search engines look at when deciding (it is automatically derived from each search engines unique algorithms) how often to return to a website is the regularity of changes and the significance of each change.

You could just simply decide to re-arrange the information in your website either manually or using scripts, but search engines can tell if the overall data is the same and are likely to discount these changes. Instead, the website should receive a stream of regular, yet original, content.

This is where content writing is useful, it ensures the information is sufficiently unique to be picked up as changes to a website, it adds new pages, which helps a page rank as well, and also helps to bring visitors in through the use of several other factors such as long tail keywords and interesting discussions.

Stefan Crowe

Creative Developer

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http://www.justsearching.co.uk/JustBlog/new-tool-released-from-google-

Now you can find out what keywords you are potentially missing from your Adwords account thanks to Google’s new keyword tool called the Search Based Keyword Tool. It really is a fantastic addition to Google’s existing tools as it tells you what keywords are missing from your account based on search query data from a website.

This tool was revealed earlier in the year at the annual Google conference in Dublin. I got the chance to speak to a number of staff there about the tool and they basically explained that it is really good for advertisers as it is easy to spot keywords not currently bid on that could generate good ROI.

Probably more importantly there is the opportunity to use the tool for competitive analysis. Essentially it is possible to see data about keywords that relevant to any website on the internet.

Also within the tool is the possibility to show all keywords generated by category. So if the website you’re getting data from is an electrical retailer, for example, it is possible to get keyword data from specific product areas. This can be immensely useful for expanding your Adwords campaigns.

So why has Google released this tool now? Well one theory could be that we are coming up to Christmas and Google are hoping that we can get more keywords that convert and generate more money for advertisers and Google themselves as no doubt click costs will increase substantially.

Adam

PPC Consultant

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http://www.justsearching.co.uk/JustBlog/moving-and-removing-pages.html

With the HTTP protocol, when a page is called from a client but not found, it is referred to as a 404 error message. For example, if you go to a made up page on the Just search site here, you will find our own custom 404 page which tells the client the page does not exist.

When search engines crawl your site they will index every available page they can find, but often you may rename or delete a page. Any page on your site which 404s will be removed from the search index and you will lose valuable rankings - after all, content is king! The best way to deal with this is to either create a custom 404 page or, if you have just moved or renamed the page, use a 301 redirect.

If you have only moved the page, you can use a 301 redirect which will tells all clients trying to access the missing page that it has permanently moved to a new location. 301 and 404 redirects are implemented in different ways depending on the server and type of server script you are using.

For more information on 404 pages you can read up on Googles enhanced 404 page.

Adrian Mursec - Natural SEO Programmer

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