Imagine this scenario:  You’re on a site, and you find the perfect TV.  You’ve seen it before in stores, talked to sales people, done your research on consumer reports, AND now you’ve found it 45% off and with free shipping! You’re already imagining who you’re going to invite over to watch the big game… until you notice that there are 3 typos on the homepage, including the brand name of the TV you’re purchasing, and there’s no way to enter a shipping address that is different from your billing address. Notice how quickly you’ve gone from ‘cloud nine’ to ‘too good to be true’.  Chances are, you are not going to be making this purchase and you rationalize that watching the big game on a little TV isn’t so bad, even if it doesn’t have HD.

Credibility is yours to lose.  Visitors will give you the benefit of the doubt until you don’t meet their basic expectations.  Most SEO Professionals and web designers often will give clients little pointers about misspelled words or broken links as part of their SEO Campaigns to improve their marketing results.  Unfortunately, many times, clients don’t seem too concerned about it.  The truth is, every visitor who notices these little things is less likely to convert on your site, return to your site or recommend your site to someone else.

The 3 most common credibility mistakes:

1. Typos and grammatical errors. Examples: loose/lose;  their/there/they’re, its/it’s, a lot (it’s two words, people) etc.  Pick up a copy of Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style” if you want to set yourself straight on what is proper.  At 85 pages, it’s the most concise miracle ever written on grammar.

2. Lack of (or un-clickable) security assurances in checkout.  In rare occasions with clients, their privacy page is the most visited page by visitors who convert.  This is not un-likely if you have a very methodically minded product like insurance or software because people come to your site expecting to look for detail-oriented information.

3. Un-professional design. Search engine optimization is an ongoing task.  What may have been the norm for website design a few years ago is likely to be obsolete now.  If visitors come to your site and have to think about what they’re seeing, you’ve already lost.

So, proof-read your site, have someone else (preferably not involved in the creation of the site) go through it and make a purchase online, and remember not to give visitors an excuse to leave!

This is pretty self-explanatory. Once you’ve uncovered any problems with your conversion paths, fix them. Patch holes, fill cracks in your web design or otherwise improve the performance of each step along the way. Use your analytics to identify problem areas and test different versions to see which performs better.

Step 5: Add or remove steps to create the most efficient path

Again, using your analytics, determine if there are places where steps need to be added or removed in order to make the conversion process more efficient. Your goal is to make the site as streamlined as possible. Add no more steps than are needed and no fewer than what it takes to get the job done.

Remember, each set of visitors is different. Some paths may be long, others short but you need to have the options there for each segment of your audience.

Step 6: Create and test new paths

Once you have tested, fixed and retested your original paths and everything is functioning as it should, it’s time to start building and testing new paths. Consider your users carefully here. The first pass at creating paths should have been designed to hit the majority of your target audience. Now it’s time to accommodate the rest. While the broader target is easier to hit, the smaller target is no less important. Build paths specifically for these users as they can be the source of many additional sales, and often result in higher conversion rates.

Step 7: Test new stepping stones

By this time your conversion process should be going strong and you have pretty solid conversion rates. Well, if it ain’t broke… fix it anyway. Never stop looking for new opportunities to improve your SEO Campaign and conversion process. Test, test, and test some more. Sometimes adding new steps in the process can help improve conversions with certain audiences. Just be careful to keep an eye out for any negative effects as well. The goal here is improvement, not to add clutter.

Building a cohesive path from your visitor’s landing point to the conversion goal isn’t easy. What makes it even more difficult is that you never know what any individual’s preference or needs will be. But by taking the time to know and understand your audience, you can find ways to build and improve upon the conversion paths that will satisfy the majority of your visitors.

Follow these seven steps and there is no doubt that you’ll find ways to improve your conversions rates. It may be incremental or you may find huge gains all at once, but every gain is a good gain.

Stepping Stones

Most people look at their website as a whole but in reality it is a collection of many parts. These parts (web pages) are essentially individual steps on a path that should lead your visitors to a specific goal: the conversion. If your site as a whole, and web pages individually, are working properly, you should see an increase in conversion rates and sales. If anything is broken along the way, your visitors are led the wrong way at the wrong time and you open the door to having them leave before they’ve reached the conversion goal.

Each entry point of your site (wherever the visitor lands first, not just the home page) needs to be treated as the starting point that will lead your visitors step by step toward the conversion goal. In order to guide your visitors from this starting point to the end point, you need to make sure each step along the way is aligned with the next; in sync and unbroken.

The seven steps to strong conversions

Step 1: Build the path to the conversion point

Just like good book needs to have a beginning, middle and an end, your site should be no different. All the steps, from start to finish, need to work together to bring the visitor toward the ultimate goal. However, with a website the start isn’t always the home page. In fact, a website is more like a choose-your-own-adventure book than a traditional novel. The visitor starts at different points; wherever the search engine dropped. This could be the home page, product page, testimonial page, informational page, an article, or anywhere else.

This makes building the path to the conversion a bit more challenging, but it can be done. Each page must be able to act independently from the previous, having a beginning and a middle while guiding the visitor to the end. Essentially, every web page of your site needs to be able to be the very first step in the process, provide a link to or act as the middle step, and lead the visitor to the last step, which is the conversion.

Step 2: Create alternate paths to the conversion point

Not every visitor has the same wants, needs or desires as the next. If you plan only a single path to the conversion point, you will ultimately lead much of your audience down a path that isn’t meant for them.

Twenty visitors can land on the same page and take 20 different paths to the conversion. Some want to read about your company, others want to see your testimonials, while another group wants guarantee or warranty information. Yet still others want to read more about your products or services before learning more about you and then getting some testimonials for confirmation. And of course there are always those who are ready to buy now with very little persuasion having to be done..

A path to the conversion should be created to provide each of your users precisely what they need in order to take the next step. Every visitor has different needs, desires, and temperaments from the next. Their needs vary at any given time in the process. Keep your visitor’s options open but also be aware that too many options can create confusion or inhibit your visitors from choosing any path at all. Don’t try to be all things to all people, but instead try to narrow the options down to the most common and significant so you can be sure to meet the vast majority of your visitor’s needs.

Step 3: Inspect your conversion paths

Once you have created your paths you then need to inspect them. Put yourself in the mind of your visitors and follow through as many paths as possible. This is where you’ll find out if any steps are missing or broken, or if there are too many steps in the process.

SEO Professionals say to take notes of obstacles that may disengage the visitor or may be an impediment to them reaching the conversion goal. Look for missing information, errors on the pages, broken links and calls to action. You want to make sure that the visitor finds no hindrances to getting to the destination and are able to find all the information they need to make a confident purchase decision.

Sage Lewis from Click Z wrote an excellent article called “The Four Keys to Image SEO Success.” Below he gives some of the important aspects of developing proper SEO on image tags. If you are interested in this topic, please follow his blog below as he seems to always have the right idea.

I have this nasty habit of making, what I think are, casual remarks that lead to a bit of controversy. In my last column, I wrote: “Putting key phrases in image ALT tags or comment tags does little good.”

A couple people thought that wasn’t right. For example, IslandsT wrote:
I like the rest of your ideas and they are great except this one:- ‘Putting key phrases in image ALT tags does little good’. Only little good? Do you know that this is one of the most important factors in SEO nowadays? Image search is so important and can always helps us to get extra traffic to our online blog. My point of reference is so often connected to the concept that search engine optimization primarily refers to the blue text links in the search engines. That is an outdated perspective.

SEO takes so many shapes these days. That doesn’t make this conversation as clear and straightforward as one might like, however.

SEO refers to many things:

* Video optimization

* Local optimization

* Real-time optimization

* And most definitely, image optimization

This fact came home to me this past week when a new client discussed all the traffic they were getting from image search.

I’m not talking about some hip hop music site. These people fabricate a niche, industrial product. Only people that knew about this industry would do searches for these kinds of products.

Image search is becoming a significant driver of traffic. This is amusing because, not long ago, clients were asking me how to stop search engines from indexing their images. They didn’t want all that pesky server traffic. If that line of thinking makes sense to you, the easiest way of stopping search engines from indexing your images is adding something like this to your robots.txt file.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/

If your images are all located in a single directory such as “images,” this little bit of code will pretty much stop all those nosy search spiders from finding all your juicy images.

You can also specifically designate the Google image spider to stop accessing any of your site using this code in your robots.txt file:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

Just don’t somehow mash those two pieces of code together. I highly discourage something like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

That will save you a ton of server traffic by telling all search spiders to not bother spidering or indexing anything in your site.

All that said, you would have to make a pretty strong case to me as to why in the world you wouldn’t want image search traffic. The point of your Web site is to market your business. While image search takes a bit of “out-of-the-box” thinking, it doesn’t take a mental giant to arrive at the conclusion: traffic is traffic.

So, how do you go about scooping up all this image search traffic?

Fortunately for us, Google has done a nice job laying out all the general tips and tricks.

Here are the highlights, which culminates as the four keys to image search optimization success:

* Create detailed, informative file names. If you upload images from your camera, they are often named things like: img00234.JPG. This doesn’t tell anything about the image. A better option would be something like: hp-95-ink-cartridge.jpg.

* Create detailed, informative image alt tags. With our ink cartridge example, you might say something like: Remanufactured, compatible HP 95 Tri-color Ink Cartridge.

But you also don’t want to go overboard with something like this: COMPATIBLE HP 95 Tri-color Ink Cartridge. This is a Remanufactured HP 95 (C8766WN) Color Inkjet cartridge. For HP Deskjet, OfficeJet, PSC, Photosmart printers.

You run the risk of looking like you’re stuffing key words in the alt tag. This could throw up a spam flag.

* Create detailed, informative anchor text. Anchor text (the text pages use to link to your site) gives the search engines a clear understanding of where they’re about to go. So, if our HP Ink Cartridge page had a link to it from another page on your site, you might link to it like this: HP 95 Tri-color Ink Cartridge.

* Create clear context for your image. Google says it best: Wherever possible, it’s a good idea to make sure that images are placed near the relevant text. In addition, we recommend providing good, descriptive titles and captions for your images.

People rarely make use of the title attribute for images. The w3schools.com describes its use like this:
The alt attribute is meant to be used as an alternative text if the image is not available, not as a mouse-over text. To show a mouse-over text on images or image-maps, use the title attribute, like this: Angry face.

Google is clearly stating that the title attribute plays a role in optimization, so I strongly encourage you to consider using it.

According to w3.org, there is no HTML element for a caption. So, you might do something like this:

Remanufactured, compatible HP 95 Tri-color Ink Cartridge

COMPATIBLE HP 95 Tri-color Ink Cartridge. This is a Remanufactured HP 95 (C8766WN) Color Inkjet cartridge. For HP Deskjet, OfficeJet, PSC, Photosmart printers.

Taking time to do these things could significantly help you get a bunch more image search traffic.