Impressive conversions statistics are beginning to emerge from digital catalogs, for example:

• Significant increases in visitors – some sites report an immediate 30-40 percent jump in website traffic following the launch of their first catalog.
• Catalog referred traffic can make up a significant proportion of traffic – 25 percent of all website traffic is not uncommon.
• Double average time-on-site – visitors that have clicked through from digital catalogs have already researched products offline before arriving at the ecommerce site. Their interest is high.
• Increased AOV – Some merchants have reported increases in average order value of 33 percent.

However, before we get carried away on a wave of digital catalog euphoria, it’s worth noting that measurement of the true effects of having a digital catalog is not straightforward. The tablet is not a conversion device. Tablets are primarily used for entertainment, exploring new things and for social networking.

Consumers feel most secure making ecommerce purchases on traditional desktop computers. Clearly, there is a usability issue as well: Entering in shipping and payment details on a touchscreen can be a pain.

We see this reflected in the shopping cart abandonment rate. In 2011, the average shopping cart abandonment rate for mobile devices was 97 percent, compared with 72 percent across all devices.

What this means in practice is that digital catalogs, just like their paper-based ancestors, provide a great platform for customers to shop and research potential future purchases at their leisure. The future potential purchase will often be in a different session and on a different device.

Getting Started

If you already have a print catalog, then it’s an easy step to take a PDF of your catalog and get it up on one of the digital catalog applications such as Google Catalogs, Catalog Spree or Catalogue by TheFind. There’s even a catalog category now in iTunes. It doesn’t make sense to try and build your own catalog tablet application. Digital catalog applications have aggregated many of the biggest brands into one app, which means millions of app downloads and lots of traffic. It is this traffic stream that you want to tap into. Many smaller brands talk of the ‘halo effect’ of being associated with these mega brands, which brings both credibility and new customers. Many brands, such as Sephora, are on multiple app platforms.

New to Catalogs?

If you don’t have a print catalog, then there is some effort in producing a digital catalog. You need to lay it out in a PDF format and be prepared to update it regularly — four to six times per year. If you are starting from scratch, then it’s well worth thinking about interactive content, video in particular, where it makes sense.

Digital catalog applications regularly promote featured applications, and the apps are more likely to promote catalogs that have rich user experiences. An example of a rich user experience is Williams-Sonoma which has links back to recipes related to the products featured on their catalog.

Getting featured is important in raising your visibility on the app itself. Catalog Spree has more than 100 catalogs; Google more than 200 with 100 more in the pipeline. So getting your brand’s visibility up is important. In addition, to be featured on Google, you’ll need to be on Google Product Search since this is used in the set up process to link your PDF product images to the relevant ecommerce pages on your site.

A good example of a digital-only catalog is Dooney & Bourke. According to Google, approximately 15 percent of their merchants are digital only, and they anticipate this growing as more brands catch on, especially in some of the smaller categories where more of the merchants are niche designers unlikely to be able to afford a printed catalog.

The ability for a consumer to create their own personal ‘lookbook’ of items featured in different catalogs from different brands is important. Bookmarking items and creating a collage ‘Pinterest style’ is an important part of the buying process, as well as enabling customers to socialize and share items or complete lookbooks of items they like or are considering.

The tablet apps all enable customers to variously share on Facebook, Tweet, or Pin on Pinterest, so you need to have your social media act together as well to really leverage these pins, tweets and shares fully.

Summary

If you’ve already got a printed catalog, then the process of going digital is really simple, and you are probably already looking at this. Undoubtedly, digital catalogs will secure you new customers significantly beyond your current subscriber list. The fact that this is essentially a free traffic source makes it all the more attractive.

If you are new to catalogs then you’re going to need some help to pull together a PDF version. However, this is worth the effort to test; having your brand in front of a high-quality traffic stream of buyers and basking in the reflected glory of association with some of the top brands makes this well worth trying out.

While the data is still hard to find, the early conversion and traffic numbers from digital catalogs are really encouraging. In terms of costs, with Google Catalogs there is currently no charge, while others, such as Catalog Spree, charge based on clickthrough traffic.

Before designing any type of web form, it is important to define what you are trying to achieve. For instance, is your goal to maximize the number of form submissions, or drive only qualified leads i.e. quantity versus quality. Also, what value do you attribute to these form submissions – do you want a long standing relationship with these people? You need to have defined your requirements and those of your target audience so you can incorporate these into your form and required fields. Depending on the form’s purpose, the number of fields can range dramatically, so one of the first considerations is whether to have a single page or multi page form. Getting the balance is essential – people will be more reluctant to fill in multiple pieces of personal information if they do not feel it warrants it (i.e. a 10 field form for a pdf download) and too many fields on one page will put people off filling in the form completely.

Single Page Web Form

Some key considerations when designing a single web form are described below on our web form design checklist:

1. Number - Use the minimum number of fields possible
2. Order – Easy data first, hard data later. Make it easy for your prospects to get started
3. Placement – Ideally all above the fold
4. Call to action – Clear ‘positive action’ button which restates the benefit, as opposed to a simple ‘Submit’ button
5. Flow – Logical flow of requested information

Multi Page Form

Multi page forms can prove to be more problematic. For insurance claims or credit card applications, organizations require detailed, and in most cases very personal, information from the applicant in order to progress the form submission:

1. Simplify – Break forms done into multiple steps so it does not overwhelm
2. Show progress – Implement progress indicators so applicants can track their way through the form
3. Order – Easy first page, getting harder the further down the application process, when people are more compelled to complete since they have already gone so far
4. Email address – Capture email address early in the process – this allows you to remarket to those that abandon the form
5. Use persistent forms – Ensure applicants don’t have to re-enter information on an application that they had previously started to complete
6. Show ‘Email me this’ button – So applicants have an easy link back to their partly completed form, which you can include in a remarketing email

Landing Page

Depending on the way your website and forms are set-up, you may also have a landing page to construct. The landing page needs to entice people to start the form submission process. Here are a few items you should consider for inclusion:

1. Clear benefits statement – To show why people should fill out the form
2. Testimonials / quotes or video – To increase the organization’s credibility and their offerings
3. Encourage communication – Through detailing contact phone number, email address and/or a click to chat button, which enables people to contact you should they have an issue. You have to strike a balance with this though since you do not want them to go away from the form unnecessarily to contact you by other means

To gain more insight into how to design web forms and increase conversions, register for our webinar this Thursday, November, 18th. The webcast will discuss best practices when designing forms and landing pages, long forms vs. short forms, field order (and why it’s important), landing page optimization techniques and best practices as well as how Facebook can help you to increase form conversions. You can register for this webinar, entitled “Maximizing Conversions from Web Forms” here.

There is a significant opportunity for emarketers here. On average 70% of shopping carts, and 62% of web forms are abandoned before completion. Yet email remarketing should recover on average between 10% and 30% of abandoners. That translates into significant dollars.

Several global brands have asked us about the compliance requirements for remarketing, especially in Europe. So we engaged Ruth Boardman, a partner at Bird and Bird LLP, and one of the world’s leading electronic data privacy experts. Ruth and I co-authored a white paper on email remarketing compliance which covers this subject in more depth, and additionally we recorded a webcast titled Email Remarketing and Compliance (in the US and European Union).

In a previous blog, we looked into what marketers have to do in order to comply with CAN-SPAM in the US for email remarketing – this week, I’m looking into The European Privacy Directive in Europe, which is slightly more complicated.

Email remarketing compliance in the European Union is more complicated than in the US because while there is umbrella Europe-wide legislation in the form of the European Union Data Protection and e-Privacy Directives, each of the individual countries in Europe have interpreted the legislation slightly differently.

European Union Privacy Directive Email Remarketing Checklist

As with all processing of personal data, you will need to comply with general data protection obligations (including, but not limited to ensuring security of data, accuracy and quality of data and filing requirements). Here is a useful checklist of the specific requirements for email remarketing in Europe to comply with the European legislation:

1. Check Privacy Policy: As with the US, the first step is to check your website privacy policy before embarking on a remarketing campaign.  Most website privacy policies already contain the required language which covers using the data that has been captured for remarketing, but best practice is to insert a specific paragraph. An example of this is given in our email remarketing compliance whitepaper.
2. Have an opt-in / opt-out on your shopping cart or web form: You need to explain to customers that you will keep their email addresses for email marketing and ask them to give consent to this – for example by ticking an opt-in box.
   •    Opt-in: To maximize the number of prospects to whom you can send follow-up emails, you should design your registration page so that your email marketing opt-in box is as close as possible to the place where the customer enters his email address.
   •   Opt-out: The European Union e-Privacy Directive also allows businesses to send email marketing on an opt-out basis in limited situations to customers who have not ticked an opt-out box. Some member states only allow marketing to be sent on this basis to customers who have made a purchase (not prospects); others such as the UK and France, allow emails to be sent on an opt-out basis more widely where there has been a negotiation for a sale. This exemption varies country by country.
3. Easy unsubscribe mechanism: The sender has to offer the recipient a free-of-charge, valid and an easy-to-use mechanism to say no to future emails (opt-out).
4. Honor opt-out requests promptly: You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request promptly.
5. Don’t use false or misleading information: You must not disguise or conceal the identity of the sender in a commercial email message.
6. Tell recipients where you’re located: Your message must include your valid physical postal address.

Remarketing to visitors that abandon shopping carts and web forms is very effective in generating incremental sales. Remarketing is permitted in Europe, and subject to checking your privacy policy, and providing either an Opt-In or Opt-Out tick box on your website, can be implemented in confidence of compliance with the various legislation.

An Opt-In approach will work universally across the EU. However, some countries will allow remarketing on the basis of an Opt-Out. More details about the compliance requirements of the major European countries (France, UK, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Hungary, Sweden, Netherlands and Finland) can be found in the Country Compliance Table, contained in the email remarketing compliance white paper.

But most buyers do not make purchases based solely on logic. This is where emotion comes in to play. Emotion is probably the single most important, and least understood, factor which makes the difference between a sale and a shopping cart abandonment.

Last week I caught up with Patrick Bultema, CEO of Codebaby, at the Conversion Conference. In the video interview below, I asked him about the ‘moments of truth’ that online visitors have when making purchases, and the critical role that emotion plays in many online purchases and shopping cart abandonment.

I’d love to hear your opinion on what role emotion plays in ecommerce. Please post your thoughts in the comments section of this blog.

Before thinking about solutions to your shopping cart abandonment problem, it’s useful to look at the reasons why customers abandon. Based on this Forrester study, you can group the top 5 reasons into:

• Price, especially shipping and handling, and shopping around for a deal
• Not ready to buy

But what all the research tends to miss are the emotional reasons for abandoning a shopping cart. In particular, confidence in the brand, service and, if your site is not a global brand, the basic worry of doing business online with an unfamiliar brand.

Holiday Season Shopping Cart Abandonment Checklist

Hopefully you’ve been working on most of these items for months, but if not, it’s not too late to implement many of these this year:

1. Drive down shipping and handling costs
   The number one reason why customers abandon shopping carts is the cost of shipping and handling. While you may have seasonal free shipping promotions planned, these are tactical and it is difficult to offer free shipping more broadly. But driving down your shipping costs to rock bottom should be a priority at this time of year. This should have a measurable impact on your conversion rates.
2. Minimum order free shipping
   If you can’t offer free shipping, offer free shipping above a minimum order value. This should increase your average order value. Display prominently the minimums required for free shipping. Tell customers how much more they need to spend to get free shipping.
3. Give them valid voucher codes
   We know customers are looking for deals at this time of year, and it is important to recognize this behavior. Ecommerce sites that provide a list of valid voucher codes on their website have found that they reduce both affiliate fees as well as increase conversions. For example, Macy’s gets a 40 percent conversion on visitors to its voucher pages. An additional tactic to consider is to move the coupon code box down the checkout process to make it a bit harder to shop for voucher codes. If customers still abandon with invalid voucher codes, then trigger a real-time email with a valid voucher code.
4. ‘Email me this’ button on product detail pages
   In the run up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we know that customers change their behavior in anticipation of holiday promotions. The shopping cart abandonment rate changes dramatically as customers move into a research mode, waiting for the promotion to be rolled out. There’s been a trend toward using shopping carts as ‘shopping list reminders,’ so a permanent shopping cart is a great bonus which enables customers to store their potential purchases. But putting in a permanent shopping cart is not a 10 minute job, so an alternate that you can still get in this year is the ‘email me this’ button on the product detail page. Sending the customer an email with an item they were viewing is a great way to provide a reminder that they can keep in their in box together with an easy link back to the page. This is a very simple remarketing technique that works very well and isn’t hard to do. It also has the benefit of capturing email addresses.
5. Promote your phone number
   Particularly if your site is not a well recognized brand, promoting your telephone number is important in converting those nervous about doing business with you online. The customer may have questions or just need to believe that there is a real business and a real person behind the website. If you’re a well known brand, you should be doing this already; in many cases, simply by offering a phone number, you can recover about five percent of sales that would otherwise be lost.
6. Build trust with social media engagement
   Last year, most retailers made extensive use of social media to promote holiday season special offers. But social media should not be just about promotions. If your brand is less well known, engaging potential customers in dialogue about your company, products and services will build trust at a critical time. Remember that shopping is more about emotion and less about rational decisions to many shoppers. Positive emotions about potential purchases are countered by negative emotions about potential post-purchase dissatisfaction. There is no substitute for a direct conversation with the customer to reassure him/her that you are a company with great service.
7. Send remarketing emails
   Customers that abandon their shopping carts are customers that almost purchased. One of the most effective techniques to reducing shopping cart abandonment is to trigger recovery emails to abandoners. Most ecommerce companies that send shopping cart recovery emails recover between 10 and 30 percent, and that translates into a significant return. If you want to calculate your potential return this holiday season, you can use this revenue recovery calculator.In the run up to Black Friday, record numbers of customers will abandon. These customers are telling you what products they are interested in. This is valuable data, and used in your remarketing emails, it will make them incredibly relevant—resulting in very high open rates. Many customers are using shopping carts as wish lists, particularly during the holiday season; so even if your remarketing email doesn’t trigger an immediate purchase, there’s a strong likelihood that the email will be kept in their inbox and opened several times to use the short-cut link back to their shopping cart wish list.

Hopefully this has given you some ideas about reducing shopping cart abandonment this holiday season. Let us know how you fare!

While the federal U.S. CAN-SPAM laws apply across all states in the U.S., in Europe it is more complicated. In the European Union, individual member countries are required to craft their own local country laws based on the Europe-wide legislation. As the different countries implemented their laws, each interpreted the requirements of the European Privacy Directive slightly differently. This makes implementing a pan-European campaign more complicated.

Given this confusing landscape and our mission to simplify remarketing for all, we hired Ruth Boardman of Bird and Bird LLP, one of the world’s top privacy lawyers, to work with us and produce a definitive answer to these questions. Working with her colleagues across the U.S. and Europe, we set out to see whether there is one compliance solution that can be applied to both the U.S. and European markets, or if not, which countries could be grouped together to simplify compliance with both CAN-SPAM and the European Privacy Directive.

Ruth and I collaborated on a joint whitepaper that sets out what you need to do to comply for email remarketing campaigns in the following countries: United States, France, UK, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Hungary, Sweden, Netherlands, Finland and other European countries.

Ruth has also kindly agreed to present the findings with me on an educational webcast taking place on October 12, 2010, at 11:00 a.m. Eastern time / 4:00 p.m. UK time / 5:00 p.m. Central European time. This will be a one-off opportunity to ask the experts your legal, compliance and remarketing questions in an interactive forum.

The webinar recording for this is now available on demand which you can play back by following this link: Email Remarketing and Compliance Webinar.

The accompanying White Paper can be found here: Email Remarketing and Compliance White Paper.

The poll also looked in detail at four key areas of conversion to determine their priorities. The four areas examined were as follows:

•    SEO
•    Landing page optimization
•    Email marketing
•    Web conversion/shopping cart recovery techniques

Each respondent was allowed to pick only one response in each category, forcing them to choose their top priority.

SEO Priorities

Which SEO technique would you prioritize in next 12 months

Marketers plan to focus on link building as their top priority in the next 12 months, with 42 percent stating that it is their top SEO focus. Changes to website pages to ensure they are more SEO friendly were the highest priority for 22 percent, while 21 percent plan to focus on social media integration. Site-based optimization (such as sitemaps and navigation) was the main focus for only 15 percent. There are two notable conclusions that you draw about these findings:

1)    Marketers have taken on board the changes made over recent months by Google to prioritize quality and diversity of links in search results over the content itself.

2)    Social media integration is unexpectedly high. While social media is hot for marketers, in SEO terms this is really cutting edge stuff, and it signals that marketers have recognized the importance of social media in driving traffic. In particular, Facebook’s social plugins, including the easy to implement ‘Like’ button, are beginning to be viewed as a simple ‘social SEO toolkit.’

Website and Landing Page Optimization

Which landing page optimization technique would you prioritize in next 12 months

Marketers are taking the ‘less is more’ philosophy to heart when it comes to landing page optimization. Just over half (51 percent) stated that reducing clutter was their top priority, recognizing that landing pages have been added to gradually over time at the expense of simplicity and simple, strong calls to action.

Twenty-eight percent of marketers plan to re-evaluate their text on the page with a view to increasing website conversion rates, while only seventeen percent are prioritizing removing fields from data capture forms. This is surprising as experts repeatedly emphasize the importance of having only the necessary fields on forms to increase online conversion rates.

Email Marketing Priorities

One third of email marketers plan to prioritize post purchase email marketing (such as reviews and satisfaction surveys); while another third plan to focus on pre-transactional email (e.g. abandonment remarketing including ‘browse-but-no-purchase’ and shopping cart abandonment) in the next 12 months. Twenty-two percent plan to focus on relationship building through email marketing, such as loyalty schemes and vouchers.

What’s notable from these findings is the rapid growth in transactional email, whether from a successful or an abandoned transaction. As integration between ecommerce systems and email engines has become much more pre-packaged—with the widespread availability of transactional interfaces for email—marketers are (finally) able to fulfill a long time desire to use website behavioral data to trigger targeted email marketing that is highly relevant and personal to the recipient.

Website Conversion / Shopping Cart Recovery Techniques

Which web conversion/ shopping cart recovery technique would you prioritize in the next 12 months

Organizations know that their hottest leads are with website visitors who have abandoned shopping carts, and 55 percent of marketers plan to make shopping cart recovery their top website conversion priority in the next 12 months. Marketers also recognize that price promotions are increasingly critical in the battle for online sales, particularly in the holiday season, and 19 percent intend to focus on onsite voucher pages where customers can view all active promotions. These pages are effective in driving conversions and also reduce affiliate fees to price comparison engines and promotion code websites.

A further 19 percent are prioritizing incentivized signups to capture email addresses and social network ID’s to enable the build of opt-in lists for email and social marketing.

These results, individually and collectively, illustrate the growing awareness among eMarketers that having a website in isolation is no longer sufficient. In order to achieve conversion rate optimization, organic SEO results—predominately through link building—have been proven to be more effective than PPC and sponsored links, which consumers have grown wary of. Many websites built a few years ago have been added to incrementally and now require simplification in order to ensure the calls to action are more prominent. Marketers also plan to use email marketing for more than batch-based, campaign-related emails; they intend to utilize this to build relationships with customers and potential purchasers. Finally, organizations have identified that they are losing a substantial percentage of leads as they have a high form and shopping cart abandonment rate. They are thus looking for online marketing tools that can help them recapture these hot leads through remarketing.

•    Less clutter
•    Less text
•    Less information

Less clutter. Visual clutter kills conversion. In many cases, graphic designers, the people actually constructing your pages, can be your worst enemies because they try to do too much with the page. As a result, website visitors have no idea what to look at, or what to interact with, on the page.

If the call to action on your landing page is not obvious, you should radically strip down the page to increase online conversion rates. If there are a lot of bright but unnecessary visual elements competing for the visitor’s attention, you are advised to refocus on the page’s objective and declutter. What do you want the user to do? What’s the next step in the conversion process? Make it obvious to the user, because if it’s not obvious, you are losing money.

Less text. Too much text limits conversion. Landing pages frequently include a lot of text, especially if they are also being used for SEO purposes. Do you really expect people to read all of that information? Of course not. Putting an overbearing amount of information on a landing page basically guarantees that people will not read it. They won’t even begin.

The alternative—less text—can look pretty stark in comparison. Less text, however, makes the call to action much clearer. If you need text for SEO, you can still put it on the landing page; just put it at the bottom where it won’t interfere with a good user experience. People will have to scroll to read that text, but that’s okay. That text isn’t for your users; it’s for the search engines.

Less information. Asking for too much personal information also hinders conversion rate optimization. Marketers tend to ask for too much personal information too early, and they drive up the form and shopping cart abandonment rate in the process. Reverse that trend by collecting only information that is absolutely necessary to complete the specific transaction or form.

For example, you don’t need to ask for a user’s street, city, state, zip and country to let him or her download a PDF. So don’t ask for it. What information is needed for the download? Nothing. If you let users download a PDF without any sort of registration, downloads will increase significantly as a result. If you do want to follow up, however, as most website owners do, collect the minimum information you’ll need for the follow up, such as the user’s name and email address. Collect additional information later, when it’s appropriate—e.g. the mailing address when the user is ready to buy.

If you’d like more information, you can view a 10 minute video of Tim’s presentation (by selecting View SiteTuners presentation), or view a replay of the entire webinar (by selecting View entire presentation), under The Conversion Leaders Summit here.

Other insights are also available from myself on website conversion and recovery of abandoned shopping carts through remarketing; Danny Dover, an SEO expert from SEOmoz.org; and Loren McDonald, VP of Industry Relations at Silverpop, a leading email service provider.

Transactional emails are automated and trigger-based, driven directly by user behavior, profile or demographics. Depending on how aggressively you adopt it, the extended scope might include transactional emails related to:

• Pre-transaction emails: browse abandonment and cart abandonment
• Purchase event emails: order confirmation, order status, shipping notice, shipping confirmation, trip preparation
• Post-purchase emails: satisfaction survey, review request, review notification, recommendation, replenishment, repurchase, upgrades
• Relationship emails: bounce back, account reminder, loyalty programs, account status, purchase anniversary

For example, a post-purchase email could notify customers of stock shortages, reminding a customer who bought an item in the past that you’re about to sell out of it. This kind of transactional email not only generates revenue but actually enhances the relationship with, and adds value for, that customer.

Another post-purchase email might 1) thank the customer for posting a product review and/or 2) include product recommendations based on previous purchases. While this level of sophistication might seem difficult to achieve, most ecommerce sites are already using the web analytics, reviews and recommendation engines needed to do these transactional emails. The sites simply need to leverage their existing technologies, using established APIs and dynamic content, to generate the new emails.

Purchase review emails can actually lead to significant incremental revenue. One Silverpop client reports that 14 percent of the people that click on the “review” link actually make another purchase. For that client, purchase reviews hold the second highest conversion rate next to their abandoned cart program. Follow-up, review notification transactional emails—thanking the customer for the review and offering a discount or other incentive on the next purchase—encourage 12 percent of the people who click on them to make another purchase.

When it comes to this new breed of transactional email, the keys to success include the following checklist of items:

1.   Leverage existing technology. As mentioned above, this technology already powers your website, so it can also be tied into these new transactional email opportunities.
2.    Time the emails appropriately. For instance, you might wait a month to email a review request to a book customer but only wait a week to send it to a toner cartridge customer.
3.    Design for all devices. In particular, make sure your emails work in a mobile environment, in preview panes, with image blocking on, etc.
4.    Create compelling content. Beyond making recommendations, superior content leverages customers’ non-purchase behavior, uses the right tone and makes compelling offers.
5.    Test, test, test. Test everything, from timing to layout to offers, copy style, and the level of personalization.

In any case, these automated, trigger-based transactional emails can supplement more traditional, broadcast email campaigns to increase online conversion rates and revenue, which is what we really care about.

If you’d like more information, you can view a 10 minute video of Loren’s presentation (by selecting View Silverpop presentation), or view a replay of the entire webinar (by selecting View entire presentation), under The Conversion Leaders Summit here.

Other insights are also available from myself on website conversion and shopping cart abandonment rates; Danny Dover, an SEO expert from SEOmoz.org; and Tim Ash, president and CEO of SiteTuners, a thought leader in website conversion and landing page optimization.

Why do SEO? Because SEO drives traffic to your website—for free. The traffic-driving alternative is to buy pay-per-click ads. It turns out that organic SEO links—the actual search results generated by Google, Yahoo!, et al.—get about 90 percent of the clicks while the PPC ads on those pages get 10 percent. So, SEO is important because you can get a lot of free traffic if you do it right.

Everyone knows the higher your rank in a search engine’s results, the more traffic you’ll get, but how much more? The number one position gets 42 percent of the clicks. Number two falls to 11 percent; number three gets 8 percent; and finally, number 10 drops to 3 percent. Clearly, you want to be in the top five because people don’t look much beyond that fifth result.

How to do SEO? Two primary consideration factors in SEO—popularity and relevancy.

Popularity in SEO means links. SEO experts suspect that links account for 75 percent of the overall Google algorithm, making them extremely important. Google emphasizes link profiles—where they come from, what the anchor text says, etc.—and you can optimize your link profiles by studying them, as well as those your competitors are using. Tools such as Yahoo! Site Explorer or SEOmoz Open Site Explorer will help you with this.

Relevancy translates to on-page optimization, which includes such things as keyword choice and where it’s located on the page. On-page optimization makes up 25 percent of the Google algorithm. Here, the important things to look at are the URL, title tag, meta description, content, and images with Alt text. The title tags are probably the most important area, with the URL being second. Also, content helps build relevancy as well as popularity (gaining links).

Danny’s SEO six-point checklist of things you can do today to improve your SEO includes:

1.    Study the cached, text-only version of your site (and your competitors). Perform a Google search and select the “cached” option from the results page. Then select the “text-only version” from the cached page. The text-only version shows you what Google sees as important when trying to determine relevancy.

2.    Avoid duplicate content. Search engines have a difficult time determining relevancy when they run into duplicate content, e.g., a website accessible from both http://www.company-name.com and http://company-name.com. It’s a common mistake, and it hurts SEO.

3.    Optimize your site’s global navigation. This is especially important on ecommerce sites. Make sure your categories and subcategories are well-implemented and are as close—from a click perspective—to the homepage server as possible. Search engines rely on this categorization; and every time they go down another level, another subcategory, they devalue that page.

4.    Use a robots.txt file. This is the one file on your server that you can use to control the search engine and what it can and can’t see.

5.    Submit a sitemap. The sitemap is an XML file you submit directly to the search engines. It’s a complete list of your website, and it’s easy for the search engines to parse. Basically, sitemaps help you get indexed, so they can make a dramatic difference.

6.    Look at the links. Check out where your competitors are getting links with one of the tools mentioned earlier. By discovering where your competitors are getting links from, you can tailor your content and link building efforts to leverage their success.

If you’d like more information, you can view a 10 minute video of Danny’s presentation (by selecting View SEOmoz presentation), or view a replay of the entire webinar (by selecting View entire presentation), under The Conversion Leaders Summit here.