By : Nidhi Gupta

In April 2007, Google launched its Google Website Optimizer tool. It’s very useful and worth a mention here.

The tool allows you to test different versions of your landing pages to determine what converts best. It’s free and available to Google AdWords users. It was released in beta format in October 2006, but Google made it more widely available now.

This tool is very powerful, because it allows you to do split tests on multiple elements of your web pages. Split testing is simply testing two different versions against each other to determine which gets the better results.

To run a split test in real time, you’d direct half your visitors to landing page A, and the other half to landing page B. Then you’d look at your results over time to see which page converts better. This kind of testing does have some drawbacks; it can take weeks to see results, and it’s often tough to test many different elements at once and see which works. For example, to test a headline’s effectiveness, you’d set up a test with two different headlines. But what if you wanted to test a headline, your ad copy, your images, your call to action, and lots of other elements at once? It can get complicated quickly.

With Website Optimizer, you can do all this at once, in minutes. The Website Optimizer tool allows you to test a total of eight elements or sections of your page at a time. It tells you which changes generated the most buys, and you can check all your elements at once instead of setting up a large number of test pages to check each element.

Useful elements to test include headlines, images and image placement, your call to action and placement of “buy now” buttons, offer incentives, your shopping cart set-up, and sales copy.

This tool should be exciting to anyone with an AdWords account. There’s been some discussion in the SEO community about whether using this tool constitutes cloaking, however.

The way the optimizer tool works is simple: it swaps out various elements on your site for other elements using Javascript. This is a pretty common black-hat cloaking tactic spammers use to show one copy of their site to visitors and another to search engines. Google’s algorithms are designed to pick it up and penalize webmasters who use this tactic.

The cloaking debate is a long-running one in the SEO community. Some SEO’s feel that as long as they’re showing visitors relevant pages, there’s really no “ethical” problem with using it to get higher rankings. The search engines, of course, feel differently.

Chances are, if Google has released this tool and made it available, it won’t penalize people for using it. Just to be safe, however, Conversation Marketing has some good information on how to decrease the likelihood that you’ll be penalized for using it.

And Google isn’t the only game in town, either. There are other programs that do similar things, including Split Test Accelerator, Offermatica, Optimost, Maxymiser, and Vertster. Some of these aren’t free, but they also don’t require an AdWords account.

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By: Admin

Once you create a website for your business, you quickly figure out that people are not flocking to it. When you assess the different ways of driving traffic, your options include advertising your website address, promoting your website address through Public Relations and gaining media coverage, encouraging other sites to link to you and getting placed in online directories.

However, these marketing activities will deliver small and sporadic volumes of traffic. The single biggest thing you can do to drive traffic is search engine marketing. If you want to drive traffic to your site it is imperative that you get onto the first three pages of Google and the other top search engines.

Here are few ways through which you can get your site appear on the first page of Google search results.

In order to optimize your website to appear in natural search results, there are four components that you will need to address.

1. Design: Many small businesses make the mistake of designing their website and then start thinking about driving traffic to it. The problem is that the way you design your site can result in your site being ignored by the search engine spiders, which means you will receive very little traffic. When designing your site, ensure you avoid the following pitfalls.

   Flash: Sites are designed in HTML or flash codes. The spiders that are sent to your site by the search engines cannot read flash.

   Frames: Some agencies design sites within frames. It makes designing the site easier as the only thing that changes from page to page is the content within the frame. However, spiders cannot read what is inside a frame so you will not get indexed and noticed by search engines.

   Dynamic pages: Some sites are developed with a database which generates dynamic pages. Again, most but not all of the search engines can read dynamic pages.

   Text within graphics: To ensure text is read uniformly by different browsers, design agencies often put text within a graphic. It looks great, however, a spider cannot read what text is in a graphic and simply moves on.

   Keywords: At design stage, think about the keywords you want to be found by on search engines and incorporate that into your design.

2. Content: Major areas to be stress upon are:

   Keywords: Choosing the keywords that you want to appear in search results for is one of the most important things you can do. Invest time in choosing the keywords. Think about how you would search for your product or service. Once you have decided on your keywords, you need to place them throughout your site. The main areas are:

   Web page title: This is what you see written in the title bar of the browser. This should explain what the purpose of your site or your page is and include keywords, but always in such a way that makes sense to a user who reads it.

   Meta tags: The tags are not visible to users but they explain what the content of the page is. Keywords should be placed in here as they are easily searchable by spiders.

   Homepage content: Your homepage is searched by the spiders and you should ensure that your keywords appear near the top header. They should also be sprinkled throughout the homepage.

   Keyword density: Each page should have a minimum of 250 words; your keywords should account for 2 - 8% of the word on the page. That means they should appear between 4 and 16 times. To help you achieve both objectives you should focus on a couple of keywords for each page rather than a large number.

3. Links:

   Inbound links: your site might be designed in a way that is easily searchable by spiders and your content might be sprinkled with keywords, but you need to have other sites linking to you in order to achieve success. Ensure you know how many other websites are linking into your site and set a goal for increasing that figure. You can Post comments on forums or discussion groups with a link back to our site or Register your site with multiple directories in order to get links.

4. Maintenance: Once you achieve a high ranking in the search engines, it is important to realize that you need to maintain your ranking. The criteria the search engines use in the algorithms constantly change and what works today may not work next week. Your site will need to be tweaked to bring you back up the rankings.