Free Convert Visitors with Google Analytics

Rand Fishkin ups the considerations with a lengthy post at SEOMoz entitled "What Makes a Good Web Directory, and Why Google Penalized Dozens of Bad Ones." The most interesting suggestion is that Google is manually taking down directories that violate its guidelines, and not necessarily with a strategy that involves spam reports, but rather by taking what might be obvious cues:

Banner Ads for paid links from Your Directory on SEO Sites

It's like waving a flag with a voice-activated, wind powered speaker that yells "ban me! ban me!" Sure, you might get clicks and money and submissions, but you've gotta know that search quality team members read SEO blogs, too - so if you do this, make sure your directory is ready to be manually reviewed by search engineers.

Marketing to Webmasters

If your forum signature at Digital Point (sorry to stereotype, but it's just so true) contains links to three directories you own, you're probably in possession of three obviously manipulative directories. I'm sure there's a couple exceptions, but if I were Matt Cutts, I'd just tell one of my quality control guys to go spend a few days trawling DP for directory domains.

Get Visitor On Website

If your website is set-up to get visitors to fill out a form, make sure to then figure out what the difference is between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This is because not everyone who fills out your form will actually become your customer. However, whether your site is set-up to sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a form, the site conversion rate will measure the success or failure of your website whenever you make changes to the site.

You may find that you need to implement some additional marketing strategies if you find that traffic to your site is extremely low. There are several effective methods to improve the flow of traffic to your website, particularly launching a search engine optimization campaign. This campaign is targeted at increasing your position in search engine results so that consumers can find your pages faster and easier. You can either research the steps you need to take to improve your search engine rankings, or employ a search engine optimization company to do the work for you. In either case, after your have improved your search engine positions, make sure you keep on top of them by regular monitoring and adjusting of your efforts to maintain high positions.

Another factor to examine is how easy it is for a visitor to your website to accomplish the action the site is set-up for. For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily accessible, or does the visitor have to go through four levels to get to it? If it's too difficult to get to, the customer may just throw in the towel and move on to another site. Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible.

Finally, have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase or fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign.