Yup Seocontest2008 is now over and my contest entry only got number 8 Position. Thanks you to all my friends and bloggers that support me. Congratulations to Sphere Team and to my fellow filipino seo Benj Arriola (2nd Place) and Eligio Tapiador Jr. (3rd Place).

As we continue to count the effective ways to increase your websites conversion rate, we arrive at some of the most neglected despite their being the most significant. Here are tips seven to twelve that can allow you to increase your sales all with the same number of traffic.

7. Be strategic with your affiliates. Just like in the business of real estate, location is key. Affiliate Marketing pertains to the partnership between two online businesses where one is promoted on the others platform while the “land owner receives a reward for the traffic his site generates for the advertiser. You need to seek out affiliates and thoroughly strategize/decide on which ones you would want to be advertised.

Topical relationships between websites are critical in choosing your affiliate partner. When you present yourself on a site related to your business, you can expect more traffic and perhaps even sales leads to result from it.

8. Do Offline Marketing. The hype created on Internet Marketing by Internet Marketers tends to make people overlook the equal selling potential of Offline Marketing. One good starting point is including your website address on your email signature. If your business involves delivery, Offline Marketing can also be as easy as printing out your site URL on the shipping box and the packing material itself. The possibilities are endless!

On a related note, it is understandable that your creativity in Offline Marketing may carry over to the creation of your company name. If you decide to be cute with your brand such as naming your company Flowers 4 U, you might want to consider registering or buying Flowers For You as well. Theres no stickier situation than discovering that your company has a name rival; worse when you realize that theres nothing you can do about it.

9. Connect intimately with your customers. Believe it or not, customers do examine your About Us page. They know, of course, that they wont necessarily see anything suspicious or smell anything fishy about the business owner on that page, but then for some reason it provides them with a sense of security. And sometimes, they literally play it by ear i.e., by listening to the confidence in your copys tonality. This is why it’s essential for you to emphasize your third party partnerships (e.g., security and data encryption) on your website. If your goal is increasing your websites conversion rate, its important to establish a personal relationship with your customers.

A few sure fire ways to build that relationship is the integration of an About Us page, a blog or forum/community page where customers can talk to other customers, a contact option where you guarantee speedy response times, and by setting up periodic promotional email blasts especially for those who have already purchased from you before.

10. Keep your visitors from clicking the back or close button. Similar to tip number five but a bit different in execution. When the road to the completion of your desired transaction has finally been meticulously designed, you can then include a map of that process for customers to look at as they go along. By providing this map, they know exactly what they will be doing next and how it will be done. This tip is more of a warning because if your customers get lost in the process, they will simply hit the back or close buttons as an instinct to escape the transactions perplexity.

11. Make sure they keep coming back. Closing a sale can be associated to the saying, When a door closes, a window opens. Providing your customers with a user-friendly process in obtaining their purchase will convert them into promoters, free of charge. On this day and age when its all about Search Engine Optimization, Usability, and all that technical schmanzy, word-of-mouth remains as powerful a marketing tool as it did decades ago.

You can also inspire repeat business through a Loyalty/Rewards Programme, tie-up freebies/discounts, and money-back guarantees.

12. Learn how to generate and use your statistics. This is arguably the commandment of all the commandments we have just dished out in increasing your online conversion rate. There is nothing to manage if you do not know how to measure.

Measuring your performance metrics lets you know where you stand. Your numbers can tell you how much more effort you need to exert, which areas to improve on the conversion process, and basically how your online business is doing. You can also utilize website performance trackers available on the Web that provide valuable insight on the profile of your visitors, how they find you and where exactly they land on your site, and the page/s they most like and dislike. Arming yourself with these information will certainly be crucial in optimizing your conversion rate.

With all that said, its time to convert your traffic into Cash.

Conversion as a term is appropriate for business websites that desire a completed action to be accomplished by its visitors. These websites have a typical purpose: sell. Whether it is a product, a service or even an experience being offered, closing a sale is the fundamental goal.

The context of conversion differs a little between those who manage Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns and those who have brochure sites. For PPC advertisers, conversion refers to the percentage of visitors who completed your desired transaction (or informed you of their intention to do so in the future) against the total number of people who clicked on your ad and basically did nothing. When it comes to brochure sites, conversion is simply the number/percentage of people that completed your desired transaction from the overall amount of traffic.

As a process, conversion obviously starts with traffic generation. Your websites online visibility will contribute hugely to this step. You then inform that traffic on what youre all about and have them complete the ultimate transaction of purchasing your product, making a reservation, filling up an inquiry form or requesting for a quotation. For something that sounds very simple, however, many websites surprisingly complicate matters for their beloved clients.

Here are 12 proven effective ways of increasing your websites sales conversion, if not boosting its marketability.

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It has been a long-running argument whether or not Flash is feasible to use on websites. While it provides glitz and glamour to web pages, so to speak, it can defeat SEO purposes because 1.) it will take dial up or modem users forever to load even a single all-Flash page, 2.) Flash content is typically impenetrable by Search Engine spiders, and 3.) Usability suffers greatly.

Note: This is a discussion based on all-Flash websites.

At this age of DSL, Cable, and T1 connectivity in usual places and even in common households, a surprising fact remains: many Internet users still utilize dial up connections and modems to surf the Web. Flash files “ particularly those that have sound effects, bitmap images, and/or videos added to them “ need a tremendous amount of bandwidth when loading. To make matters worse, there is also the issue that the average surfer will want your information right when and where they try to access it (enter text readers); granted of course that their machines havent already crashed from the stress of accommodating the huge files.

Okay, Flash files are not completely impenetrable by Search Engines. At best, however, the actual indexing will still be imperfect. While you can add Meta Information to a Shockwave Flash File (SWF) for detection by Search Engines, your hard work (or money, for those who hire third party services) will still more or less be for nothing in a comprehensive Search Engine Optimization point of view. Plus, you simply cant keep building links for a site that has its contents included within the Flash file “ its just a mismatch of gargantuan proportions in Search Marketing.

Finally, most people say that if there is a thing most affected by Flash on the Web, its Usability. Take for example the all-Flash Introduction or Home page that we have all bumped into once or twice. It might be pretty and catchy, but once the animation is over and your awe begins to fade, you are then faced with the challenge of finding out how to start navigating. Flash forces you to be intelligent, and to think that every Web surfer is intelligent is one of the worst assumptions an Internet Marketer can make. Some Flash developers who believe they are clever by disabling the Back and Forward buttons actually dont make any difference “ users can simply click the third most important part of any browser, the X button on the upper right.

Flash isnt necessarily evil, it is the developer that utilize it who should be more conscientious about what hes doing. After all, it is the misuse of the technology “ not the technology itself “ that is bad. In addition, Flash content is perhaps most advisable when displaying directions/maps, providing virtual tours, and constructing portfolio sites. For business purposes, however, one good workaround is to set-up an HTML version of an all-Flash site; and, say, include a link to it as an alternative on the Introduction page or as a one-way footer. HTML and Flash can definitely work together, with the latter used minimally (e.g., on banner ads and/or headers). This way, Search Engines will still have a grand time combing your website and human visitors will have additional eye-candy to look at.

Close your eyes. Lets dream.

In this dream, we jump twenty years into the future. We see food that are molecularly decompressed and re-hydrated with a single drop of water, skyscrapers reaching over two hundred floors or gigantic structures housing an entire city, and cars that not only already run on a cheap type of gas, but can also fly. Sweet.

In this dream, Search Engines and their Algos (Algorithms) have tremendously evolved¦ in this dream, they already know how to understand the stuff we write.

The early 2000s saw Search Engine and Internet Marketers devaluate the concept of stuffing web copies with the keywords they would like to compete for. More and more websites have found themselves being found through low-competitive search terms or simply words that they didnt actually optimized themselves for.

In this dream, however, the Search Engines have also fully integrated Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). (For the uninformed, LSI is a type of indexing where Search Engines do their usual word-weight distribution when releasing query matches but pays higher importance to co-occurrences when indexing for true Link Authority.) SEOs were actually able to come up with the scientific art of preparing LSI-friendly documents and both factors transformed the world of Search into a whole new different (ultra modern and uber mathematical) ball game.

For some reason, you feel very old within the dream. Here you are, you keyword-dense writer who makes sure to put your keywords at the beginning or end of all your sentences. Here you are, the keyword-dense writer who never cares for the opinion of your readers about how you present your information to them, who never thinks about visitors clicking on the Back button immediately as long as you get the traffic. After all, thats everything you promise to your clients, right?

The panorama of ten times more modern things scares you. The dream suddenly starts seeming like a nightmare. You wish to wake up immediately so you can go back to your old ways and continue earning money.

Okay then, lets wake up.

Here we are! You can breathe a sigh of relief now because Latent Semantic Indexing simply cannot be considered as Search Engine Algorithms’ final destination today. Were very lucky. It is still inescapable that we need to somehow indicate our keywords within our copies because thats the only guaranteed way that Search Engine bots and spiders will find us and let us be found for the items we sell or the services we offer “ and it will probably be this way for more years to come unless searching stops being about words. But because of your dream, perhaps you can finally wake up to the fact that SEO Copywriting will evolve, maybe at a very slow pace but it will. Search Engines will require more from us, may even be able to determine if were deceiving them and our readers, and worse, punish us for it.

Make a difference. LSI may have yet to truly impact us, but that doesnt mean we stop or never begin to please our fellow humans. After all, it is already an established concept that topical relevance holds more power in the aspect of link building than being associated with just anyone. That quality content is KING. So now, make packaging your QUEEN.