50 Ways to Optimize for Christmas
| Manoj Jasra - Tuesday, December 18, 2007 1 Comments |
Jessica Hupp and her team at VirtualHosting.com have come up with over 50 ways that you can optimize your website for Christmas. Read the entire post here. Here's a quick summary of their tips:
Usability
- Make it easy for buyers to find what they want
- Be sure everything works
- Be clear with errors
- Use descriptive headings
- Follow conventions
- Clearly identify the next step
- Use readable text
Landing Page
- Answer your customer’s question
- Create different landing pages
Checkout
- Make checkout easy for new customers
- Second Bite
- Make sure cart editing is easy
- Offer a progress indicator
- Keep payment options simple
- Offer total costs early
Copy
- Avoid excessive adjectives
- Use trigger words
- Use question-based headlines
- Make your copy “scannable”
Design
- Provide lots of photos
- Use text more than images
- Differentiate between significant and insignificant attributes
- Avoid “click here”
- Place important items in the upper left corner of your pages
- Don’t overload browsers
- Avoid banners
- Check for dead links
- Highlight just one thing
- Embrace white space
- Differentiate your site from others
Cross-selling
- Recommend products other customers like
- Don’t end the cross sell at the transaction
- Offer best-sellers
Trust
- Make your return policy easily available
- Offer assurance
- Prove there are real people behind your site
- Join trust groups and display their logos
- Use testimonials
- Back up statements with evidence
- Make yourself available
- Send out automated emails when contacted
- Offer alternate ordering methods
- Make it look like you have customers
Closing the Deal
- Create a sense of urgency
- Offer customer reviews
- Give an incentive
Tracking Tools
I recommend you use seodigger.com for keyword tracking, just trace your best competitors
keywords and positions in SERP, they've done all the work allready :-).
And try SeoQuake, seo toolbar. It can analyze anything you may need including keyword density on a page. https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3036/ - for Firefox. seoquake.com - for IE.