One of the topics that’s high on my list of importance when dealing with clients is conversion rates. Ultimately, no matter how much traffic you get, it’s the conversion rate that’s going to make or break your business. Conversion rates also happen to be the easiest element to control as most if not all of it will be under your control.

What I mean by this is, if your website is receiving 500 visitors a day from Keyword A, then there are 2 obvious ways to increase revenue from these 500 people:

1: Work on optimising the page and SEO to improve the rank of Keyword A, get more visitors, sell more.
2: Work on testing the landing page for Keyword A, get the same number of visitors, sell more.

To me the latter option makes much more sense because not only will you discover a better converting design or sales text for Keyword A, but you most likely will be able to apply your findings across other pages of your website, meaning that you’ve instantly improved conversion rates on multiple pages.

Also, when testing various landing pages and analysing conversion rate increases, always work on the actual percentage increase from the base value to get a true measure of success. Increasing conversion rates from 1% to 2% isn’t a 1% increase…. it’s 100%! Even going from 5% to 6% is a 20% increase, which is huge.

Back on the SEO side of things, because of the infancy of the industry for now, and the various levels of SEO that can be conducted on a website, becoming an SEO reseller might be a great option for someone just starting out. Being an SEO reseller means that you work on behalf of other businesses who might not have the internal capacity to run their own SEO department. Remember, any business with a website could do with SEO and so that means there are various opportunities that exist amongst firms like web development companies etc.

While we were developing a website for a client based on Wordpress CMS, we needed to add several custom fields but for Wordpress categories. Since Wordpress doesn’t have native support for adding custom fields to categories we needed a plugin. I googled couple of hours trying to find the plugin but had no luck so we decided to develop it.

At this stage it’s has vary basic functionality. You can define infinite key=>value pairs for each category and also supports WYSIWYG editor if you need (x)HTML. We plan to implement image upload, in case you need to “attach” images or icons within your categories, in feature versions. It can be used also to define custom title, description and keywords tags for example.

Download plugin

INSTALLATION

1. 1. Unpack/upload the “category-fields” directory “wp-content/plugins/”.
2. 2. Activate the plugin from the Admin interface; “Plugins”.
3. 3. Go to “Options -> Category Fields” and create custom fields as necessary.

USAGE

1. Returns an array of key->value pairs for current ($cat) category

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   <?php $cat_custom = get_cat_fields($cat); print_r ($cat_custom); ?>

2. Display single value for key_name for current ($cat) category

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   <?php echo get_cat_fields($cat, 'key_name'); ?>

Supports Wordpress 2.3+

When I do SEO on an existing site, I will often do a deep analysis of the current traffic stats and keyword ranks. What I’m looking for is a keyword that is bringing in a decent amount of traffic but not ranking well. It makes sense that these keywords, when worked on can bring in a lot more traffic by ranking hopefully at #1.

So how do we prioritise these keywords? How do we know that keyword A has more potential than keyword B? Drum roll……. and enter the “PTI Value”! The Potential Traffic Increase Value is worked out as follows:

PTI Value = Current number of organic visitors per month for keyword multiplied by the ratios given in this link which is a statistical analysis on some AOL data which was accidently leaked out. Subtract from this total the current number of visitors per month since we are measuring the potential increase, not the total. When all is done, just rank them all in the orderof largest to smallest and you have what you need.

Example:

Keyword A - 150 visitors a month, ranked 3rd

Keyword B - 80 visitors a month, ranked 7th

Keyword C - 400 visitors a month, ranked 1st

Keyword D - 250 visitors a month, ranked 2nd

PTI Keyword A: 150 * 4.9 - 150 =585

PTI Keyword B: 80 * 12.3 - 80 = 904

PTI Keyword C: 400 * 1 - 400= 0

PTI Keyword D: 250 * 3.5 - 250 = 525

So we can see here that by working on Keyword B, should it get to number 1 it will bring in the most additional traffic. Keyword C is obviously a zero value because it’s already ranked 1st which means you can’t expect any more traffic than the amount people are searching.

This value is simply a guide on how to prioritize keywords to work on. Of course you want all of them to rank 1st, this just helps you focus on the most important ones.

You need to also consider the strength and number of competitors above you for each of these keywords. For example, Keyword B has 6 competitors above it compared to Keyword D which has only 1. But if the end goal is to get to 1st then you have to beat them all anyway.

The real power comes with additional information such as conversion rates and other monetary data related to each keyword. In the example above, even though working on Keyword B may bring in the most additional amount of visitors, Keyword A might be the one that’s converting the most or bringing the most “meaningful” visitors to your site.

According to Fernando from beford.org, this is 4th vulnerability he found so far on Google services and because it affects huge number of users he decided to publish it. This exploit can be used to attack Search, Blogspot, Groups and Gmail.

Last couple of days were particularly interesting as different users reported various hole’s and vulnerabilities of Google services and some published ones you can find on Hackademix.net.

I must say that this isn’t something I was expecting to see from Google. I’m using Gmail account as my primary email and after this, I’m seriously considering not to use it anymore. Also all of you, who share the same opinion as me, should check for anti XSS protection NoScript.

Anyway, we are preparing new interesting articles and tutorials, free wordpress themes and more. Stay tuned

CSS has been around for some time and has gained a lot of popularity in recent years, specifically with designers who are concious with producing W3C compliant HTML/XHTML code.

It has been said that clean, compliant code helps the search engines crawl the website more efficiently and logically thinking, this is hard to argue.

CSS is an acronym for Cascading Style Sheets and it refers to the file or files which govern the visual formatting of elements on a webpage.

And now for the simple explanation. A style sheet can define or redefine the way traditional HTML elements are displayed to the user such as font, size, color and positioning to name a few.

The simplest example can be shown with the <h1> heading tag. Using this tag traditionally produces text in an ugly large size. There’s not really much point to use the <h1> tag “as is” because you will end up with a big chunk of text that’s going to mess up the look of your site. However for search engine optimization purposes these heading tags are great! So what are we going to do?

Let’s say the code starts off like this:

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<;h1>;Heading Text Here<;/h1>;

Before CSS was hot stuff, the answer to the $64 question was:

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<;h1>;<;font size="3">;Heading Text Here<;/font>;<;/h1>;

Additionally, if you wanted to change other properties as well such as color or font-family you had to do more:

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<;h1>;<;font color="Red" face="Arial" size="3">;Heading Text Here<;/font>;<;/h1>;

Quite a bit of additional code as you can see.

Now with CSS, you can leave the code in it’s original state, and specify all the visual properties in the CSS file. The CSS file will have a definition such as below:

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h1 {
color: Red;
font-size: 100%;
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}

In English we just wrote a new rule that “all <h1> elements should be red in color, be 100% of the base font size, and the font face should be Arial, followed be Helvetica then sans-serif.

You’ve just finished counting the number of characters in the CSS example and about to tell me “Daichi, you iiiiidiot. This doesn’t save me any time at all. I’ve typed more characters doing it your way than the original way!”.

Ok you are right in this example alone but I have a counter argument! What if you needed to define your <h2> tags in color, font and size and you had four <h2> tags on the page. You would only have to write the CSS definition once and it would apply to all 4 cases! So there, now we’re even. I have some more ammo. What if you decide later that pink is the new black (or whatever they call it) and you want to go and change the color….. you only have to change it in one place!

What about the search engine spiders who come to your site and crawl through less code to get to your important content? They will be happy too

This is such a basic intro to CSS that I feel like I need to ORDER you to keep reading the stuff I post here…. because really, there’s a lot more to CSS than what you’ve just read (you did read the warning right?).

Many years ago when I first heard of CSS, I found it difficult to grasp and didn’t give it enough thought. I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about and thought I would just do a “find and replace” when I needed to change the same thing in multiple places. Since I have been in the SEO game, CSS is something I can not live without and I believe that it gives me the edge when designing and planning websites to rank well in search engines. So my advice to you (and it’s free) is to take a good look at CSS and my future posts right here!

In this overview he explains why jQuery is so powerful and popular covering from DOM, selectors, chaining… through events, AJAX, plugins, etc. Whether you are rookie or hardcoded javascripter this article is well worth reading.

I will show you in a few easy steps how to create similar menu, and you don’t even have to be familiar with JavaScript.

Step 1

1) Download jQuery and Interface elements plugin.
2) Create simple HTML page.
3) Add JavaScript calls to ‹head›

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<script src="jquery.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="interface.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Step 2

1) In HTML body we define the menu and message slide-in container:

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<!-- menu block -->
<div id="menu">&nbsp;</div>
<div class="btn"><a href="/path/to/page" title="Test link for btn1">1</a></div>
<div class="btn"><a href="/path/to/page" title="Test link for btn2">2</a></div>
<div class="btn"><a href="/path/to/page" title="Test link for btn3">3</a></div>
 
<!-- slide-in container block -->
<div id="slideIn_container">&nbsp;</div>

2) Create CSS style either as external link or inline:

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<;style type="text/css" media="screen">;
    #menu {
        display: block;
        float: left;
        width: 120px;
        border: 1px solid #cecece;
        margin-right: 10px;
    }
 
    #menu div.btn {
        display: block;
        width: 30px;
        height: 20px;
        float: left;
        margin: 0 5px;
        background-color: #cccccc;
        color: #000000;
        text-align: center;
    }
 
    #slideIn_container {
        display: block;
        float: left;
        width: 300px;
    }
<;/style>;

3) Paste the javascript code in ‹head›, right beneath jquery.js and interface.js calls:

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<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function() {
    $("#menu a").hover( function () {
        var titleAttr = $(this).attr("title");
        $("#slideIn_container").html(titleAttr);
        $('#slideIn_container').SlideInLeft(500);
    }, function () { 
        $('#slideIn_container').SlideOutRight(300);
    });
});
</script>

That’s about it, try it . You can download jQuery simple menu here.

There is more

Did you noticed that when you hover the buttons/links, slide container or better slide-in message keeps flying through if you go over the buttons/links from one side to another? It’s because onmouseover/out function is immediately being called and animation cannot be stopped even if you’re out of button focus area.

Luckily there is a great extension plugin written by Brian Cherne that fixes this issue by delaying the mouseover/mouseout action and trying to figure out if you really wanted to focus on the particular button to start the animation.

However we will have to alter the above code to achieve this. First download the hoverIntent plugin and follow these steps:

1) Add new JavaScript call to ‹head› bellow interface.js call

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<script src="hoverIntent.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

2) We have to rewrite JavaScript code that does the magic

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<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function() {
	$("#menu a").hoverIntent({
	   sensitivity: 1, // number = sensitivity threshold (must be 1 or higher)
	   interval: 500, // number = milliseconds for onMouseOver polling interval
	   over: slideIn, // function = onMouseOver callback (required)
	   timeout: 700, // number = milliseconds delay before onMouseOut
	   out: slideOut // function = onMouseOut callback (required)
	});
 
	function slideIn() {
		var titleAttr = $(this).attr("title");
		$("#slideIn_container").html(titleAttr);
		$('#slideIn_container').SlideInLeft(500);
	}
 
	function slideOut() { 
		$('#slideIn_container').SlideOutRight(300);
	}
 
});
</script>

You’re done. This fix is also included in ZIP archive.

You can find more effects beside slide-in/out here, play with it

First lets list the marketplaces I’ve used. Bear in mind that there a number of similar websites providing the same service but I’ve chosen these cause I think they are most popular ones and that serious companies use them to outsource their work, except DesignQuote, I listed them because of different approach.

Not in particular order:

• Sitepoint
• Elance
• Guru
• DesignQuote

You have 2 business models widely spread, one is charging a freelancer monthly fee and the other is charging project posting fee. There are of course variations of these 2 business models and some companies are trying to “rip off” both company/person who Is submitting the work and company/person who is requesting the work.

DesignQuote however has totally different model which is becoming very popular now days, lead generation or pay-per-lead.

Pricing

As you can see from pricing table Sitepoint is free for project seekers so you could say that ROI is 100% cause there are no whatsoever expenses for freelancer so bear that in mind when you see next table.

Personal experience ratings (from 1-10)

Pros and Cons

Conclusion

Seems like Sitepoint is winner, but is it? It’s true that I’ve made most of my connections through there but on the other hand only one was high paying project (so far).

Guru is very close to Sitepoint if you check the overall score table, but it’s damn hard to compete in terms of prices with thousands of companies from India, Ukraine, China, etc. Also it’s very hard to get noticed on such (bidding) marketplaces among top rated and ranked freelancers and companies who made their way up long time ago and now they collect up all the cream.

This is something we saw right here on our very own blog!

See how there are words, “keyword” and “blog” at the bottom of the ad block? When I clicked on them, the ads changed dynamically into related ads for the keyword that I clicked! But these keyword tags only appeared randomly…… I can’t seem to get them to show up anymore.

If anyone else has come across these keyword tags in AdSense ads, let me know as I’d like to find out some more information on it.