What if? The Australian Election Online
The federal election has come and gone and yet the public is none the wiser as to its leader as all remains too close to call. At a time when every vote counts so dramatically, one cannot but wonder about what could have been.
With about one and a half million young voters under the age of 25 eligible to vote this year, Labor should have been able to attract this group if they had adopted a stronger online election mobilisation like Barak Obama in the last U.S. election, or even Kevin Rudd’s successful 2007 campaign. Australia was a world leader in this area of online election mobilisation, so what happened in 2010?
While the average Australian voter is probably not directly affected by this turn of events its implications are more significant and do impact all.
The 2007 Election
Kevin 07′s digital campaign highlighted a key difference between himself and John Howard (ie contemporary vs old), however, its effectiveness was much greater than that. The Labor party and Rudd in particular were able to communicate directly and effectively with the electorate. Messages got through and were understood.
Also, many young Australians, a lot of them first time voters, were galvanized into action and helped to sell the message for the Labor party. Of course, this didn’t happen overnight but it was planned for and when they were needed, these supporters went to work.
What Is A Good Conversion Rate?
As an online marketing agency that develops websites we often get asked the question ‘what is a good conversion rate?’. And while it may seem like a simple question, the answer is a little more complicated.
There are 6 factors that define what a good conversion rate is:
- Source of the traffic
- Cost of the traffic
- Type of conversion you are measuring
- Maximum amount you can afford to spend for a conversion
- Sales conversion rate
- Number of sales you want
Now let’s take a look at each of these factors in a little more detail…
1. Source of the Traffic
Different traffic sources produce different types of traffic. One source may produce higher quality traffic than another. And the higher the quality of the traffic, the higher the conversion rate. For example, running a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign on Google Adwords is one of the highest converting advertising channels because you can choose to only show your ad when somebody is actively searching for your product or service. Banner advertising, on the the other hand, is a much lower converting advertising channel because you are advertising to prospects that are not actively searching for your product or service.
SEO Guide To Launching A New Website
With all the time, effort and money that goes into getting top SEO rankings and building a stream of consistent organic traffic, great care must be taken when developing and launching a new website that replaces an existing one.
It can take months or even years to get top SEO rankings but you can lose these rankings in a matter of hours. With this in mind, here are a set of guidelines to help maintain your website’s SEO value and minimise any negative impact on your rankings.
Maintaining URLs and Linking Structure
If your website has been online for a while then you have likely built some value for your current website through internal and inbound links. Before you develop your new website it’s important to keep in mind that any changes to the URL of any existing pages will diminish the value of those pages. With this in mind, and wherever possible, you should maintain the same URLs and linking structure in your new website.
If your website has a large number of pages indexed by Google or if internal pages on your current website are already ranking you should use the same URL structure for those pages so that all previous links do not need to be redirected. If your current website uses a search-engine-friendly link structure it would be best for SEO purposes if that structure was carried across to your new website.
How Domain Names Affect SEO
One of the most common types of question we receive is about domain names and how they affect SEO. While your domain name is, in most cases, the least important part of a top SEO ranking here are answers to the most common questions about domain names:
Should I buy a domain name that includes a keyword in it?
Having keywords in your domain name only makes a difference to your SEO when your domain name is the exact-match keyword that you want to rank for AND is the .com or local .com version (eg .com.au) of the keyword. Two examples of this are homeloans.com.au and travelinsurance.com.au, which both rank at the top of Google for those exact keyword phrases, which are highly searched for.
It’s important to note that using any other keywords in the domain name will negate the ranking benefit of having the keyword in the domain name. For example, mytravelinsurance.com.au will not have the same ranking effect for ‘travel insurance’ as travelinsurance.com.au but it will rank for ‘my travel insurance’.
Additionally, having a .net, .biz or any other extension apart from the .com version will not assist with your SEO rankings – you must have the .com or localised .com version (eg .com.au) of the domain name to rank highly for that keyword.
How to Write Effective SEO Articles for Your Blog
With the recent release of Google Caffeine, frequently updating informative, quality content to your website has never been more important. Regularly adding fresh content effectively increases not only the visibility of your website, but also assists with boosting your natural search engine rankings.
A perfect way to take advantage of this is to utilise a blog on your website and upload articles on a regular basis. This enhances the authority of your website and plays a major role in achieving top rankings for competitive keyword phrases. However, sometimes the hardest part of initiating the article writing process is gaining the inspiration or the article idea to start the ball rolling. Here are some article development and writing tips to make the process easier.
Creating Your Article Topic
The first task when writing an SEO article for your blog is to identify a high impact article topic. It is best to make your article topic short, snappy and appealing. Here are some ideas for topics ideal for your blog:
