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Tailored News )
15 August 2006
...in this issue
  • Don't Be Boring & Safe - It Will Cost You Sales
  • 3.5 Times Less Visitors At # 2
  • Add A Map To Your Site Within Minutes
  • In Brief (Not In Briefs)

    		•

    Greetings!

    Being boring is.....well, boring. But being different can grab people's attention - see below for how the setting of a simple photo can increase conversion rates of a web site.

    Being number 1 in search engines is critical - until now no-one could really quantify just how critical, but with the release of mountains of data from AOL we have a pretty good idea. See below for more.

    Do you want to know how to put a map on your web site in minutes? We'll show you a quick and easy way below.

    Happy Reading!


    Brendon Sinclair

    		Don't Be Boring & Safe - It Will Cost You Sales

    That's Mel (the blond) and Tina on the beach. With a Pina Colada each.

    You wouldn't think that sort of photo would be effective as a corporate 'About Us' shot, but these sort of informal/fun shots are.

    I was reading some recent research that suggests that 'fun' About Us pages increases the conversion to sales of people who visit that page by a whopping 30%!

    I can understand that.

    The photo of Mel and Tina looks friendly and they seem 'real'.

    Not like the usual boring staged shot in the office (we have a Garden Gnome - Nigel - on our Team page).

    The other big thing it does, of course, is make the page interesting. Nothing worse than a boring page.

    		3.5 Times Less Visitors At # 2

    AOL.com released a huge amount of search data a couple of weeks ago that, fairly easily, could identify the people doing the searches.

    They took down the data a few hours later (after the poop hit the fan), but not before the data was copied.

    And ever since, geeks have been running tests on the data. And they've been finding some fascinating things:

    Such as, if you're position # 2 on a search engine for a search term you will get 3.5 less visitors than the site at position # 1.

    If you're at # 3, you get 5x less visitors than # 1.

    At position # 10 you get 14x less visitors than # 1.

    Being # 1 pays and is well worth the extra effort and work required.

    If you're serious about your web business, then you need to be serious about getting high search engine rankings.

    		Add A Map To Your Site Within Minutes

    1) Go to WikiMapia.org site and find the bit of the map you want. Zoom in as required.

    2) Click WikiMapia at the top right corner and choose 'Map on your page' link.

    3) Move and resize frame you see to desired view, adjust view setting if needed and copy given html code to your page or blog.

    Thanks to Wikimapia blog for the tip.

    Within minutes you'll have a brilliant map of the area on your site.

    		In Brief (Not In Briefs)

    If you want a great statistics program on your web site you can't go past Google Analytics - excellent and free. Used to be you'd wait up to a week to get an invite - I waited about 20 minutes for my latest one.

    I finished the Gold Coast Half Marathon last month. Almost killed old me, but I lived to tell the full tale!

    Matt Cutts is one of the world's most important search engine commentators - mostly because he's a Google Insider and provides an enormous amount of critical information. Matt put out some video recently - Anthony talked about what's in them on his own site.

    If you want the best book on the market for search engine advice, check out our review here.

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