There has been a lot of talk lately about how Google has changed the search engine optimization landscape by adding speed as an organic ranking factor. There have been a lot of cries about the ramifications of this move. Everybody who has worked with Google knows that Google is a big business’ business. Sure, it allows millions of people to bring their ads to Google and get traffic through paid and organic search results. But the treatment that the big boys get from Google is not comparable to what others’ get. That is certainly not a problem if you are a small business taking steps to move to the next level. But unlike what Matt Cutts suggest, this latest move will essentially give Google the blank check to give a boost to those companies with big pockets. There are many ways to improve a website’s speed and having a big budget can certainly help.

I won’t go into why I believe this move can backfire on Google big time. But I do agree with Matt Cutts that faster sites make for better experience and better conversions. Have you ever gone to a small website to shop for something unique only to leave frustrated due to the site being too slow to get anything done ? As a marketer, you should not put all your eggs in one basket. There are plenty of people who are complaining about how they trusted Google and went with its recommendations only to be screwed this time around. In reality, you should spend your time and effort to speed up your website to improve your conversions. Sure. Your search engine rankings matter too. You can have all the traffic in the world, but if you are not converting, you are wasting your time.

What’s disappointing about Google’s move is the fact that big businesses will have the opportunity to play the game with a big advantage over the smaller players. But my concern is more in smaller niches where a little change in ranking factors can push splogs to the top of the results. Trust me, that happens everyday on Google. But the biggest disappointment of it all is seeing all these marketers and small businesses complaining about how their sites are slow, and it’s going to be “tough” to fix them.

If you are a website owner and have not paid attention to your site’s speed, now’s the time. Never do it for Google. Google is not there to look out for you. Your landing pages and how they convert are what you are in control of. Speeding up your pages can only help your visitors make decisions faster without getting a bad impression about your website. You shouldn’t need an excuse (such as what Google is going to do or plans to do) to work on improving your conversion rates. So think of Google’s move as a blessing in disguise. You don’t have to agree with it, but speeding up your website can lead to more revenue/profits for you business. Who wouldn’t like that?

One way to make sure your disclosures are all in order is by using services such as CMP.ly. These services are designed specifically for anyone who is promoting and reviewing products online and want to have a way to differentiate between their relationships on their various landing pages. Sometimes you are promoting a product because you are an affiliate. Other times, you are getting freebies and other incentives to promote a product. Whatever the case, you are going to need to have proper disclosure lines on your website.

Many marketers have now realized the risk of not having proper disclosure statements on their landing pages. The same concept applies to testimonials as well. If you are putting anything on your landing pages that can’t be proved or is not entirely accurate, you better disclose the facts on your page. As far as affiliate products are concerned, you can always rely on CMP.ly disclosure statements to help you along the way.

Disclosing your relationships and facts on your landing pages may not increase your conversions, but it is what’s required of marketers by the FTC at this point. You certainly don’t want to leave yourself open to warnings and potential penalties for not staying compliant.

As someone who has worked in the advertising space in the past, I can tell you that a lot of people are hurting by all the changes that Google has made to its Adwords program. We are not talking about the major changes. Everybody knows that your ad ranking depends on your CPC and your quality score. We also know that there are plenty of things that Google doesn’t tell you when it adjusts your quality score or slaps your campaigns altogether. But most often, people are blaming Google or keyword tools for things they are responsible for.

A lot of people believe Google Adwords is some magic service that will help drive traffic to your website and convert them at the same time. So they don’t pay enough attention to how they are putting their feet forward with their landing page. Getting slapped by Google can be an eye opener for a lot of folks. I have seen so many companies that have poor quality flash landing pages up and hope for some miracle. Some companies don’t even have a product yet, but they don’t even use their landing page to collect names or give people a way to find out more about their future products.

When you happen to put up a campaign on Adwords or any other service for that matter, you want to make sure you give your future visitors relevant information about your goods and services. And if you don’t have a product and are just using Adwords for branding or promotion of future products, you want to make sure your ad dollars don’t go to waste. Sure. You want to pay attention to the on-page factors on your pages as well. You want to have relevant keywords on your landing pages. You want to optimize the tagging of your images and add <h> and <b> tags when appropriate. But you don’t want to forget about what your page is supposed to accomplish.

Google Adwords is not a magic solution. It can’t get you traffic and convert it as well. So don’t put up a landing page without doing your research and paying attention to details. Can you easily tell what your page is expected to accomplish by just looking at it? That should be your starting point.

Businesses are not in it to make $10 profit per transaction when they can make $20 profit doing that. So landing page optimization will have to be at the top of your agenda if you want to keep your CPA manageable and keep growing business for your employer or clients. By improving your conversion rates, you can not only lower your costs but increase your profits as well. So it’s a double whammy.

No matter what niche you are involved in and how sophisticated your business operations are, you are going to have to focus on landing page and conversation rate optimization at some point. If you want to improve your ROI and reduce your costs, there is no better way to do it than working on every element of your sales process. It’s not easy to do and takes a bit of effort but that’s what you should expect if you want to gain a competitive advantage over your competitors.

Your competitors are not sleeping at the wheel and nor should you. The above video should give you a decent idea what to look for to optimize your landing pages. It never hurts to keep testing and improving your sales process on your website. It pays for itself in the long run.

Google Custom Search was decent before, but the company has introduced a few additional rich features to help you get more out of your custom search snippets. For starters, you now access to more themes to choose from. So you can give your search page a better look and feel.

Rich snippets are another cool feature that allow you to customize the actual Custom Search Element search results with additional relevant content, like thumbnail images and actions. So you can provide even more value to those who are performing a search on your content portal.

All in all, if you own a content portal and haven’t taken time to try Google Custom Search, it’s certainly worth a try. GCS helps your users get more out of their searches on your website, and you make some money on the side. Everybody wins.

The Rich Jerk is one of my favorite online marketers of all time. Not because I love her products or even have tried any of them, but the way she has create a persona for herself that is magnetic and brash at the same time. The Rich Jerk is not your average marketer. You see, top marketers tell you why their products rock and why you shouldn’t leave without them. Some bombard you with testimonials and bonuses to get your attention. The Rich Jerk does that and more. For starters, he uses geocoding and advanced technologies to grab your attention. So when you log in to his landing page, you are going to see your own city show up on the page. You are also going to get so many bonuses, your head is going to spin.

These landing pages all come with benefits, features, proofs, testimonials, content break down, call to action, and extreme call to action. And the colors used on these pages are proven to be the most effective when it comes to increasing conversion rates. The Rich Jerk’s landing pages are magnetic as well. You are constantly reminded how rare this opportunity is and how it can change your life. But there is more. The Rich Jerk doesn’t mind insulting you while she is at it. Not that she really wants to insult her visitors. But it’s a cool way to grab the attention of visitors and give them something they have not experienced before.

So why is the Rich Jerk so successful? It’s very simple. She is too frank and her words bring out emotions in people. You read it, and you feel the need to get the material to get to where the Rich Jerk has gotten selling products online. As I have mentioned, I have not tested any of the Rich Jerk products. I don’t know too much about the Rich Jerk, but I can see why she is so effective with her sales copy and landing pages. Her approach is outside the box and innovative. Is it to brash for my taste? Maybe. But there is a reason she has made lots of money selling her course. This approach is not going to work for everyone, but the Rich Jerk has adopted and implemented this strategy to perfection. Who says differentiation is too hard?

I have talked in the past about the importance of optimizing your landing pages and websites to get the most out of your landing pages. You can spend years learning the art of working with Google Adwords. You can spend a lot of money driving traffic to your website. But if your site is not designed with your users in mind, you may as well burn your money. I hear these low conversion rate numbers from marketers everyday, and it seems people have accepted that you shouldn’t be able to convert more than 4-6% of people who come to your landing page. That could be true but you wouldn’t know it unless you keep testing and optimizing every aspect of your website. Web Design for ROI is a great book that teaches you exactly how to design your website to increase your ROI and get the biggest bang out of each click.

Web Design for ROI: Turning Browsers into Buyers & Prospects into Leads brings to light what many companies have been doing wrong for years. Quite frankly, a lot of large corporations used to not worry too much about optimizing their landing pages. After all, if you have a lot of money, you may want to just throw it at your problems to solve them. But as the economy has hit us hard, a lot of big corporations are now changing their ways. These companies are now learning from their mistakes and wish they had paid more attention to the testing process. This book covers every area that you need to pay attention to to increase your ROI. Here are some of the concepts you should pay extra attention to:

• Mistakes: the common mistakes made by marketers and how you can avoid them.
• Landing pages: how to optimize your landing pages and increase your conversion rates by 3-5%.
• Home pages: how not to treat your home page and get the best out of your home page traffic.
• Category pages: ways to design your category pages to let your visitors navigate through your pages.
• Forms: how to design forms like a pro without turning off your visitors.
• Checkout process: increasing your checkout conversion rate is an art. You are going to learn exactly how to optimize your checkout process and make it easier for your visitors to buy from you.

It’s one thing to know web design. It’s another thing to know how to optimize a page for a better conversion rate. Web Design for ROI provides you with all the tips you need to make the transition from a good web designer to a great web designer who knows how to design pages with visitors’ needs in mind. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to get into the business of web design and landing page optimization.

You want to succeed with your pay per click campaigns? You’ve got to have super campaigns and high converting landing pages. Many marketers have no trouble mastering the first part. There are thousands of blogs that you can read to pick up a nugget here or there. But when it comes to designing or putting up a landing page fast, a lot of marketers have their doubts. After all, creating a landing page from scratch is something only the geek nation is capable of, right? The reality is, anyone who knows anything about the Internet should be able to put up his/her own landing pages fast. These days there are simply no excuses for not being able to launch landing pages for your campaigns. There are just too many solutions out there. You can do it yourself or you can outsource it. What you can’t do is sit around and curse yourself for not knowing HTML.

Here are a few solutions you can use to build and optimize your own landing page:

1. Affiliate Theme: if you are using Wordpress for your website, there is no reason not to use it for your landing pages. Wordpress is free and so easy to use. All you need is a theme that allows you to put up and optimize your pages fast. Affiliate Theme is a new Wordpress theme that makes it so easy to develop all kinds of landing pages. These layouts are all optimized for search engines to give you the highest quality scores possible.

2. Ajax Landing Pages: if you have used those cool looking Web 2.0 sites, you probably heard of Ajax. With Ajax landing pages, you can put up highly interactive landing pages fast. You get over 8000 Ajax landing pages, and that should be enough to keep you busy with your tests for a long time.

3. Outsource: if you don’t want to use the above solutions, you can always ask a freelancer to do the job for you. It won’t cost you much if you use websites such as Rentacoder. Just make sure you check your freelancer’s background before asking them to do a job for you.

4. Landing page optimization: so you have your landing pages up and ready. That doesn’t mean your work is done. You’ve got to test your landing pages to make sure you have the best conversion rate possible. You can use tools such as Long-Tail Magic and HyperTracker to test and optimize your pages. If you slack off here, you are going to end up spending a lot of money and get nothing in return.

5. Ask a Consultant: if you can’t improve your conversion rates all by yourself maybe you should talk to a landing page consultant. There are many of them around. Asking an expert never hurts.

As you can see, there are just too many options available to us marketers these days. Whether you want to create a landing page or optimize it, you can do it all by yourself or outsource it all. There is no right way or wrong way here. The key here is to get the job done!

There is this tendency among some online marketers to be lazy. Everybody wants to make $1 M online in 24 hours. But the online marketing business takes hard work. As always you should test your landing page against that of your merchant to figure out which one performs the best. It’s true that some merchants spend a lot of time and effort optimizing their landing pages. That’s great. But that doesn’t mean their landing pages will convert the best with your audience, does it?

You should always try to create, test, modify, test to find out the best you can get from your landing pages. It take a lot of time and effort but even if you improve your conversion rate by 1%, that could make a big difference in the long run. By the way, don’t for a second think that building a landing page requires a doctorate in programming

Google Adwords is becoming so competitive that unless you are getting great quality scores from Google, you are going to have break your bank to get any decent traffic. I remember when I started my financial site a while back. Google was asking me to pay, get this, $10 a click to be in the top 10! That’s like paying a million dollars to get a used car. Of course, if you are getting a great quality score from Google, you are going to pay less.

It is apparent that getting “great” quality score from Google on your landing pages is a must. But do you really need to create one landing page per each keyword? I have been hearing from some experts that you don’t have to do that to get great quality scores. I really don’t have any evidence for that argument, so I will consider it B.S. for now. Here is what has worked for me. You create a landing page for each keyword, and you start your title tag with that same keyword. You also use the same keyword throughout your content. I have tried this many times, and it works like a charm. Keep in mind that the keyword “books” is different from “book.” You need to create one landing page for “book” and one landing page for “books” (just an example).

Is this approach inefficient? You may say so. But that’s the only sure way to get great quality scores from Google. Everybody knows about LSI and all that nonesense. I am not saying an LSI-based approach to landing page optimization doesn’t work. I just personally have not had 100% success with that approach. I have had 100% success with the above approach, and that’s why I recommend it. And if you are a hard-worker, willing to put hours and resources to implement this, more power to you. But you can always trust the “experts” and get no results. It really depends on your taste.