Landing Page Optimisation

One of the most critical factors in determining how many of your visitors will convert into sales or leads depends on the design and layout of your page and site as a whole. Without a well planned and thought out structure, you may as well throw your money down the drain. Landing Page Optimisation or LPO is a procedure within Search Engine Optimisation that aims at increasing conversions by analysing  and modifying existing key pages.

Relevant Content

Make sure that the link that the user clicked to get to the page is directly relevant to the content that is on the landing page. In other words, if your link is “Mozambique Honeymoon Specials”, make sure that you have got Mozambique Honeymoon specials on that page. Try keep word count on the page below to below three hundred as you don’t want the user to worry about what he/she is missing if they are going to skip reading the content.

Highlight important phrases and words

As many of the users will only scan the content on the page you need to make sure that certain keywords and phrases stand out from the rest of the words.

“Call to actions”

Once your user lands on the page, your goal is to convert the user into a potential sale or lead. By adding “call to actions” you are allowing the user to accomplish this. Make sure your call to actions stand out from everything else. Ensure using bright colours and enticing copy to attract the user to fill out the form or click the link.

Keep it simple

You want your user to instinctively know what to do next on the page. Keeping everything simple and minimalistic is the best way to avoid making the visitor think about what to do next.  Removing the navigation links (except the home link) will ensure you stop the user from wandering off. Make sure you remove other advertisements, distracting images and irrelevant text from the landing page.

Test, test and test again.

Create different versions of your landing page (eg. product.html, product1.html, product2.html) and run these through Google’s Website Optimizer. This will enable you to further optimize your landing pages by identifying which version of the page is converting more visitors. Once you have identified a version that is performing the best, start the whole process again. Landing page optimisation is all about experimenting with and analysing how users interact with your landing pages.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Facebook- the social media site that has taken the world by storm. With 1 million users in 2004 to over 400 million users in 2010, Facebook has become one of the most common ways to communicate with people not only on the other side of the world but next door too.

Despite the number of users, Facebook has recently been taking slack from many of its followers. It has slowly been increasing the amount of data that can be shared with “friends” on Facebook. Between December 2004 and April 2010, Facebook has increased the amount of items that are available for public viewing from 4 to over 8. This means that information that is put up on Facebook has gone from being available for viewing for Facebook users, to available for the world to see. Not a good thing if your mate put pictures up of that time you passed out drunk, hugging the toilet bowl.

Facebook suicide

There was recently a website formed, www.quitfacebook.com, that petitioned the privacy settings. The plan that was to follow was for Facebook users to “kill off” their social network profiles. Quit Facebook Day on the 31st May 2010 had almost 30 000 members who planned to say goodbye to the addictive site forever. They felt violated by Facebook’s privacy policy and settings. However not all of the angry users did delete their profiles.

The creator and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and the rest of the team have nothing to worry about should more people decide to cut ties with the popular social site. Facebook is gaining a monstrous 35 000 users an hour. To break that down for you, that’s about 10 users every second, all over the world.

Privacy control on Facebook

With so many complaints about Facebook privacy settings there have been changes made to try decrease the amount of personal information and data that is available to the public. A privacy setting has been added to all content. It applies to contact details, photos and status updates. Facebookers can now decide whether or not they want to share their information with Facebook friends, friends- of- friends or everyone on the internet. Less information will be available to the public from now on and games applications on Facebook will have to ask the Facebook account holder for permission to access private information.

Over the last few months, Facebook has received harsh criticism from regulators. The European Commission and advocacy groups such as Electronic Frontier Foundation have made remarks and complaints about Facebook’s privacy settings. Facebook was accused of steering users towards sharing private information instead of keeping it private.

Mark Zuckerberg says that because so many new applications and features have been added to Facebook, it became almost impossible for users to control the privacy settings. They became complicated and difficult to use. Let’s just hope that they have overcome this hiccup and that we can continue posting those crazy weekend pics up without the rest of the world having a good laugh at us.

Popularity: 12% [?]