The Stairwell

There's a lot to learn from Tim Ash about online sales conversion and effective landing pages. His latest book, Landing Page Optimization is a treasure trove of hard-learned facts about maximizing site exposure and, more importantly, maximizing conversions once someone has 'landed' on one of your site's pages. Published this year, it also goes deep into the Google AdWords account program and how small web site managers can take advantage of it without spending fortunes on key word purchases.

For our readers and clients, however, the one thing that seemed especially prescient, as everyone grows ever more nervous that they're not doing / spending enough to elevate their site the rankings, was this:

"...the main contributors to your high ranking are all off-page factors that have nothing to do with the text, design, or appearance of your page. Such off-page factors include authority of your domain name (including how long it has been active), the number and quality of inbound links to your page from other respected web sites in your industry, and the presence of keywords in your page title. If you will have properly addressed these factors, you will gotten 80-90% of the potential SEO benefit."

This might be helpful as 2009 web site marketing budgets roll around and tempers begin to flare.