Last month, I attempted to better myself by attending the Landing Page Optimization Workshop put on by MarketingSherpa and Marketing Experiments in Santa Monica. While Closed Loop Marketing has extensive experience optimizing search marketing landing pages, I was interested in learning more about the methodology used by Marketing Experiments to improve landing page conversion.

Now I have to admit up front, I am hyper-critical of conferences, workshops, seminars, etc. I seem to require them to be targeted only to me and I have no patience for presentations that are too remedial, advanced, off-topic, sales-oriented, theoretical, etc. In other words, it’s all about me and I rarely walk away completely satisfied.

I’m happy to say that this was one of those rare occasions of satisfaction. This workshop was well designed and well taught (led by Dr. Flint McGlaughlin of MECLABS). It effectively covered a methodology in a tight day and a half while incorporating lots of group discussion and live optimization of landing pages provided by the attendees (some of whom were more gracious than others about the feedback they received).  I (and I believe most attendees) left with a strong enough understanding of the methodology (or conceptual tool) called the Conversion Sequence, to apply it immediately to our own landing pages.

The workshop walked through each of the essential factors that impact conversion, the relationships between these factors and their relative impact on conversion. The factors are:

1.    Motivation of the user
2.    Clarity of the Value Proposition
3.    Friction or resistance to an element of the process
4.    Incentive used to stimulate a desired action
5.    Anxiety about entering information

While each individual factor is important, the one that really stuck in my mind was #2, the Clarity of the Value Proposition.

I know, that’s boring. What about usability and persuasion best practices? What about A/B and multivariate testing? What about advanced segmentation and targeting?
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When we help organizations optimize their websites for organic search, one of the first things we do is look for "low-hanging fruit". Is there a technology or architectural decision that's inhibiting the search engines' access to content? Are the website's page titles adequately descriptive and do they include targeted keywords? Quite simply, we start with the basics.

The same approach is often the case with link building. For all the recent hype and arguments regarding the various methods for acquiring links (which I will gladly stay out of), we typically find opportunities for acquiring new inbound links or optimizing existing links staring us in the face. A favorite source of these "low hanging links" comes from partner sites. I'm not talking about traffic partners. I'm talking about strategic partners, distribution partners, business service providers, etc.|
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View related topics: linkbuilding, SEO, seo-success

With all that’s going on with advanced link building techniques, what’s to become of our old friend the Web Directory? That tried and true guide to the World Wide Web. The organizer of cyberspace chaos. The human touch in an algorithmic world. OK…that’s enough. The time of the traditional human-edited Web Directory has passed (it actually passed quite some time ago). DMOZ is still in hibernation (from which it may never return). Yahoo! has removed directory links from its search results and homepage (it doesn’t get much clearer than that). And, Microsoft is rumored to be pulling the plug on its bCentral small business directory.

The human-edited Directory has simply gone the way of the floppy disk. The concept has been rendered obsolete by improvements to algorithmic search and the emergence of social bookmarking and tagging sites that provide users with more relevant and reliable guidance. The only "directory-style" sites that may still have a bright future are those that have maintained strict editorial control and do not allow direct submissions of content by site owners (which, by the way, means no payments from the site owners).

You can see the decline of the directory by simply taking a look at many of them. Designs typically look like they were frozen in 1997 (with a few exceptions). Some don’t even bother to promote their directories to visitors anymore and instead direct visitors to Google’s search results or Ad Sense advertisements. The directory is simply there behind the scenes to be crawled by search engine bots.

So let me get to the question at hand. Should we still look to directories to promote our sites? Yes and no (you saw that coming didn’t you?).

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