The PET Research Advisor Company brief was to design and develop a website that helps promote Positron Emission Tomography (PET). It’s not an area we are too familiar with but it’s provided an exciting and challenging project for us. We decided to go with Wordpress for the build as it is SEO friendly and the endless plugins provide the extra functionality we required. Clean and simple design principles were used on the project as the emphasis needed to be on highlighting the high level content.

Terry of THE PRA had this to say about the build:

Especially important was the tutoring provided by PushON to allow the client to painlessly load material onto and edit the draft Web Sites. This provided for a very efficient and creative collaborative exercise

For the Smoke Free North West project PushON were asked to rebuild an existing site in Wordpress. This would help make the site more search engine friendly and provide a functional CMS for staff members to use.

Smoke Free North West is funded by all 24 NHS primary care trusts in the North West and aims to provide a tobacco free future for people in the region. The site provides an authoritative resource on the effects of tobacco and how to quit smoking.

We were pretty excited to be working on such projects and we are currently in the development process for a number of other key new websites. We will keep you updated on those but please share your comments with us on the new sites.

1. WP No Category Base

Remove the mandatory /category/ section from category permalinks, resulting in more search engine friendly URLs.

2. All in One SEO Pack

It’s surprising how many WordPress websites still don’t use this. Customise META and title tags for each page/post, advanced canonical URLs and more.

3. Contact Form 7

Although not an “SEO plugin” as such, this is the best contact form plugin for SEO. Easily add success pages (to monitor conversions) and create page-specific forms to improve the ‘call to actions’ of a website.

4. Yoast Analytics

One of the many great plugins by Yoast. Easily install Google Analytics tracking on a WordPress website, with the added advantage of automatically tracking outbound links.

5. Google XML Sitemaps

An XML sitemap generator that will automatically notify the major search engines each time a new post or update is made in WordPress.

6. HTML Page Sitemap

Does what it says on the tin. Easily create a static sitemap that will help users navigate through your content.

7. Search Suggest

Another Yoast plugin. Provide your users with related queries and spelling suggestions when they perform a suggest, encouraging them to stay on your site for longer.

8. FD Feedburner Plugin

Redirect the default WordPress RSS feed to a Feedburner account, without the need for any template alterations or hassle.

Got a favourite WordPress SEO plugin? Let us know in the comments.

The full report is yet to be released, but there have already been some interesting conclusions drawn from the data.
Bearing in mind the origin of the funding for this project, it’s likely to have a certain bias, and highlight the benefits of spending more on a non-Google search engine.The research suggests that you can roughly pigeon-hole people based on their search engine preference.

“Consumer preference for a specific train [search path] demonstrates a unique demographic and psychographic profile … The search experience on different search engines yields different results, with some being more relevant to the consumer than others. [This] contributes to overall customer and brand awareness. If the results of the search satisfy the needs of the consumer, then the search engine has greater appeal to that potential customer and he or she will have a deeper connection to the brand and the search engine. Therefore, the research indicates, search engines provide different degrees of a “brand lift” to the destination site.”

I have to say, this is an ambitious statement to make, because it assumes that you can group people into just 3 different user types based on what could potentially be the search engine that was set as the homepage on their PC. They go on to segment by industry, giving different conversion rates for Google/Yahoo/Bing users for certain brands, products and services.

So far, the data that comes into the main focus regards conversion rates for the various verticals, but the snippets of the results are so specific to brand, that we will have to wait for the full report to be released to come to any actionable conclusions.

For the original press release : Research by Wunderman Finds Link Between Brand Building and Search Engine Use By Consumers

When reporting we often talk about conversion rates and sometimes clients will ask why a conversion rate isn’t 80, 90 or even 100 percent. These people are often new to SEO and in need of educating but I think Tim Ash of sitetuners.com explains perfectly why the 100% conversion rate doesn’t exist. He believes there are three types of visitor to a website.

Noes – These are people who will never take the desired action in order to complete a conversion. There are endless reasons as to why someone might not take the desired action. For example they maybe simply surfing the web and thought your site looked interesting or simply don’t have the financial means to use your service or products. It would be difficult to change these people’s minds.

Yesses – These are the people who will always take the desired action. They are not put off by shocking registration or check out processes and are often sold on an item before they arrive at your site. If you are the only seller of a particular product or service then they have to use you. People who fall in to this category don’t need convincing.

Maybes – The title is pretty much self explanatory and it is likely that you are converting some of these already. This is where you should focus your attention as testing different landing pages can improve conversions here dramatically. Tim goes on to break down this group further and can be found on the graphic below.

For one reason or another you can never satisfy all the visitors to your site. This is because they often have different intents. For example many searchers will research a product or service before making a purchase. They will look at maybe 3 or 4 sites before making a decision. Are you likely to convert every one of these? Unlikely.

So when explaining this to clients i start to look at ways with them at trying to convert the maybes. I do this by exploring possible user mind sets. What is their intent and how can we convince them to purchase our products and services over others. Once i have looked at the various options i move onto landing page testing.

People have written whole books on this topic so i couldn’t do it justice in this post. I recommend reading ‘Always be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer‘ by Brett Crosby though. At the moment i am using Google Optimiser for testing but there are plenty of other great tools out there.

I guess the take away point from this post is that you should never assume that every visitor is a potential buyer. The 100% conversion rate doesn’t exist and you should spend time refining your landing pages.

Secret sources from within the bowels of Apple Inc have today leaked plans for an alternative to the Apple Tablet which was launched today.

The Apple Suppository.

Details of the specifications are yet to be disclosed, but there are rumours that it will have vastly more functionality than products released of a similar size, such as the Shuffle or iRing.

However, critics suggest that Apple have gone one step too far, and that despite the advantages of improved security, this new device is much less accessible and will lack the street cred of the iPod.

Only time will tell.

With the start of a new year comes the start of a new article series. There are so many new articles being published each week that we thought it would be beneficial to have a roundup each week of the most important or popular stories. Each week we’ll bring you five of the latest SEO articles from the blogosphere, and maybe a few extra bits if you’re lucky!

In no particular order…

1. A Decade of SEO

It’s no surprise that one of the most popular SEO articles this week would be a roundup of the decade, but High Rankings really pushed the boat out here. From the year 2000 to 2009, a detailed review of what happened in SEO throughout the last 10 years.

EDIT - Also check out A Decade of Search series from iCrossing.

2. Wikipedia Emerges in Google Maps Results

On Monday this week, Search Engine Land reported that Wikipedia has emerged as a major influence in Google local search listings. Google Maps now pull content from Wikipedia for popular places in order to provide more information on the listings. This may influence listings, as places without articles on Wikipedia may not be prioritised.

3. Getting More from Google Analytics

Everyone loves a good refresher course, and Shark SEO this week provided a great guide to help you get more from Google Analytics. Creating custom reports, goals and segments, it is a must read if you haven’t put much time into Analytics.

4. 2010 Link Building Trends

A guest blog post on Search Engine Land this week explored some of the link building trends of 2010. The article includes some of the link building influences in 2009, with a look at some recommendations and advice for the coming year.

5. Google Caffeine Going Live?

This isn’t necessarily confirmed yet, but Search Engine Roundtable yesterday posted that Google Caffeine results may now be going live. Google announced that it wouldn’t happen until after the holiday period, so the release of Caffeine may be imminent.

Favourite Link of the Week

This was doing its rounds on Twitter this week:

How To Do Onsite Seo – Illustrated By Kittens

Is there a popular SEO article that’s been missed off this list? Please let us know in the comments and we’ll be sure to take a look.

Best wishes from everyone at PushON

xxx

An example taken from the Google blog is below:

The above example shows how potentially useful Browser Size could be in determining the best positioning for important information or purchase links. The best value would be to owners of ecommerce websites, to ensure the maximum amount of visibility is achieved for users.

We ran the PushON blog through Google Browser Size:

The data shows that 90% of users are able to see the full width of the blog, and 90% can see the initial paragraph from the latest blog post. For a blog, the articles are the key information you want to get across to your users, so 90% visibility for the first post is a nice statistic.

Minor changes to the positioning of items can make quite a huge difference, as Google provide an example of increased downloads:

…on the download page for Google Earth, the install rate increased by 10% when we moved the “Download” button 100 pixels upward. We can attribute that increase to users who wanted to try out Google Earth, but didn’t see the button before.

Want to try Browser Size out for yourself? Head over to the following link:
http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/

If you receive an email asking you to verify that your adverts are running, check the link it points to – as it’s more than likely an attempt to gain access to your account.

Here’s the email that’s doing the rounds at the moment:

Be careful with email, because it’s very easy to fake the sender address, so if any of the companies that you normally deal with emails to prompt you to log in – then visit the site direct rather than clicking on an email link.  It’s one extra step, but it’s a habit that may save you a huge amount of hassle in future.