We here at Feedback Secrets are obviously fans of the practice of accidental SEO. The question for some however, is where exactly to begin this process. There are two different ways to start out with accidental SEO.

The first method is to just start writing content for your site and see what positive results you get. Then based on those positive results you can test similar keyphrases and track the results.

The second method is to start your accidental SEO traffic flow with some good old fashioned research. Since most of the business owners who read Feedback Secrets are in the early stages of their online business development, I usually suggest starting with a free keyword tracking tool.

A personal favorite of mine is the free keyword tracking tool at WordTracker.com. You can use this tool to narrow down a list of keyphrases in your niche that have the magic SEO combination of a lot of daily searches mixed with a low relative number of competing websites.

Looking at the free tool at Word Tracker, you can get an estimate for the daily traffic for the keyphrases that you are interested in. Then you can visit Google and check to see how many competing websites there are which rank for the same term. You can do this by typing in your keyphrase and then clicking on the search button.

In the upper right hand side of the search results page on Google it will tell you how many competing websites Google recognizes as being indexed for that keyword.

Starting with this highly honed list of keywords you can start producing content for your site. After you produce your first wave of content based around your list, you will begin to see results in your site’s analytics tracking software as to which of these keyphrases are performing well for your site.

You have to keep in mind that just about every site has its own unique SEO architecture and therefore its own unique fingerprint as to which terms will naturally rank well for that site. The idea behind accidental SEO is to capitalize on your site’s natural advantages and therefore profit without spending an arm and a leg on your SEO efforts.

So let’s say that you already have a fair amount of traffic coming into your service based website but your conversion rate is not quite where you’d like it to be.

Improving conversion rate, for just about any type of website, is a matter of split testing. Our question then becomes what specifically we should split test for a service based website in order to be as efficient as possible with our time and effort.

Three specific areas come to mind regarding the question of where you should start your conversion boosting campaign. The first of these areas is your unique selling proposition or (USP). The term USP refers to the way in which you express your company’s unique blend of benefits to prospective clients.

Having a well defined USP is at the core of product differentiation and if your product is not perceivably different from those of your competitors then you inject unnecessary doubt in the minds of your prospects regarding the question of why they should buy from you, and not from your competitors. Keep in mind that a USP will never be just one selling point but rather several selling points that distinguish and define your offerings.

The next area to consider revamping and split testing is site design. We live in an attention deficit society with too much information and not enough time to consume it. For this reason we must assume that the visitors who land on our sites are making split second decisions about our companys based on the initial impressions that our sites leave on them.

This is why split testing site design offers large potential improvements in conversion rates for service based companies. When considering possible improvements to your site let your creativity give you ideas for potential improvements but don’t trust these hunches for the final verdict, make sure to make your final verdict is based on the raw data and results you get from your split tests.

The third area that I would suggest you consider split testing for your service based website is the addition of and adjustment of testimonials. If you don’t have any testimonials on your site, you should definitely consider adding some since testimonials are a powerful signal to potential customers that your company is reputable.

Keep in mind that some of the people who are considering buying your service may have first herd about your company after landing on your webpage in the last 20 seconds. They need reasons to believe in, and to trust you. In this day and age where anyone from any corner of the globe can quickly throw up a website and process credit card payments, the ability to convince customers that your company is trustworthy is invaluable.

The fact that people are willing you place their picture and name on your website to attest to the quality and level of service associated with your product goes a long way.

The three above mentioned points are just for starters, if you can think of anything else you might want to split test, then by all means, test away!

In our last post we discussed calculating value-per-visitor. This calculation is fairly straightforward when it comes to “front end” money to your website. However, when you start dealing with “back end” money, such as revenue from your opt-in email list, things get a touch more tricky.

Essential to this discussion is the concept of “discounting the future”. It’s an economic concept based on the idea that a dollar in your pocket today is worth more than a dollar you might receive a year from now, due to inflation.

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In a post on his blog, GoDaddy.com founder and CEO, Bob Parsons explains that “Everything that is watched improves.” If this statement is true it means that just the act of starting to pay attention to the VPV metric should cause your Value Per-Visit to improve. And of course, if your average VPV grows and your traffic stays the same, your site’s revenue increases.

Once you start to measure VPV you can decide on how fancy you want to get refining your measurements. For example if your site usually gets many more visits than unique visits, you may choose to track Value Per-Unique-Visitor (VPUV) instead of VPV.

Even if you choose to refine your measurement from tracking the Value Per-Visitor to tracking the Value Per-Unique-Visitor this metric you can still refine things a step further. This is due to the fact that a site’s average VPV could be calculated from traffic from several sites, and the VPV from each of these sites can sway wildly.

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For those not familiar with the term, Accidental SEO refers to the practice of producing content pages for your site and discovering from your site’s stat tracking software, what terms your site naturally ranks well for.

Once you know which terms you rank well for, you can produce more content pages based around these keyphrases to exploit your site’s natural advantages. The great thing about accidental SEO is that with it, you do not need to be a SEO expert in order to increase your search engine traffic.

If you are trying to market your website as an expert authority in a particular niche, then optimizing using accidental SEO means paying attention not only to the traffic you are receiving, but also how long that organic search engine traffic is staying on your site.

You might have a page on your site that has been bringing your site a significant amount of traffic but with a low average time-on-site.

The problem with a low time-on-site is that it usually means these visitors are bouncing off of your page as soon as they hit. Chances are that they are not clicking on any ads, not signing up for your newsletter, and most importantly not surfing the other pages on your site.

If you are trying to market your site as an expert authority in your niche, then it is essential to build your average number of pages-per-visit as high as possible.

One option you have is to try to edit your page in such a way that you improve time-on-site and the average number of pages-per-visit. The other option is to look not only at the amount of traffic you receive for particular keywords but also how long that traffic stays on your site.

Once you have found these winning combinations you can produce content that should increase the amount of quality traffic coming into your site.

A story made its way around the Twitter-verse starting about two day’s ago regarding a seemingly ground breaking event had occurred. An eBay auction for the right to sponsor the Twitter feed of Ian Schafer for one month had ended with a closing bid of $1,082.01. For more complete details on the auction you can view this auction’s auction page on eBay.

At first this would seem to be a momentous event. Certainly being able to raise over a thousand dollars for the right to sponsor a Twitter feed with less than 600 followers, for one month is noteworthy, even if the purpose of the auction was not for profit. According to Mr. Schafer’s Twitter feed all proceeds from the auction are to go to the David Wright Foundation.

The winning bid for the auction came from a bid from eBay user “teammetacafe” who prior to winning this auction had zero eBay Feedback. I am assuming that the eBay user “teammetacafe” refers to the metacafe.com website, though I am not sure. It is important to note that this winning bid may well have been totally legitimate and un-engineered in any way, shape, or form.

What is particularly interesting however, about this auction is its bid history. If you look at the bid history you will see that there were 22 bids from what appears to be 5 eBay accounts. If you examine this bid history closely you will see that with the exception of the first bidder who seems to have an eBay feedback rating of 50, none of the other accounts had a feedback rating higher than 1 prior to the end of this auction.

Hmm… a bunch of eBay accounts with little or no feedback history bidding what some would consider a surprisingly high amount for the rights to sponsor a Twitter feed for a month. What could it mean?

Regardless of how the end result of this auction came about, I think that there is an important lesson in this story. The lesson here is that marketing, to a large degree, is about creating a spectacle and it is clear that Mr. Schafer here has succeeded in doing so with the sponsorship he has obtained for his Twitter feed.

As Twitter becomes more and more popular, I think it makes sense to consider the possibility that Twitter may become the new standard for providing some of the same basic functions that RSS is known for. From a marketing point of view, I think that one of the most important functions of an RSS feed is the ability to create a crowd.

In our fast paced and frantic world we require the help of others to make many of our decisions. Instead of reading all of the blogs devoted to the areas that interest us, it makes more sense for us to briefly scan over the blogs related to our niche hoping to find a few that send us the signal that says “stop and read further, you may have struck gold”. One of those signs is the existence of a crowd, any kind of group or gathering sends the signal that at least a few people with interests similar to your own think that the site is worth their attention.

As human beings we can’t help but think, if it’s worth their attention, maybe its worth mine. Displaying a feedcount of 50,000 subscribed RSS readers instantly and clearly conveys the message “I am worth your time”. It is for this reason that some internet marketers have suggested “borrowing” the code from another blogger’s stats to display on your site. In my opinion Twitter provides this ability to create a crowd, inherent to RSS with the addition of some bonus features.

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Assuming that you have a WordPress based blog, and your own hosting, then there are several ways that you can add social bookmarking buttons to your posts. This post will briefly go over two options for adding this functionality to your site.

The first option that I would suggest is the option that we use here at Feedback Secrets. We use Feedburner.com to syndicate our RSS feed and FeedBurner allows you the option to add social bookmarking buttons to your posts from inside the control panels of your FeedBurner account.

If you are currently using FeedBurner, then log in to your account and click on the “Optimize” tab. Then click on the “FeedFlare” link in the left hand sidebar. Here you will have the option to select various social bookmarking links to be added to the posts on your site. Please note that next to the option for each link is a check box for adding the link to your site and another for adding the link to your feed.

The next option that I would like to suggest is the plug-in available from ShareThis.com. The ShareThis plug-in is probably the most used method for adding social bookmarking buttons to a blog that I have seen. The advantage of this plug-in is it’s clean and unobtrusive look.

The plug-in appears on the bottom of your posts as a single button in the shape of the ShareThis logo. Once you click on this icon you are given the option to bookmark the post with a host of other social bookmarking and social networking sites.

We hope that this brief overview provided you with some idea for adding social bookmarking buttons to your site. If you have used another method to add the functionality of social bookmarking to your site please leave a comment and let us know about your experience and whether you would recommend that method.