A brief investigation determined that, for some reason, images that were being output using the_post_thumbnail(), at a specific size, were occasionally being output with the attributes height="1" and width="1". To fix the issue, re uploading the images worked just fine. However, on large sites this is time intensive!

To save everyone time, here is what we used to regenerate all of our images, without having to do a bunch of work.

1. Step 1: Download, Install, and Activate ONet Regenerate Thumbnails (a very handy plugin, for many reasons!)
2. Step 2: Navigate to Admin -> Tools -> Regen. Thumbnails.
   

   This is the main Regenerate Thumbnails interface. From here you can trigger a bulk update of all of your images.

3. Step 3: Click the button! Now you sit back and wait for the process to finish and voila! No more disappearing images.
   

   This is the process indicator. Time to sit back and wait! It took me about 15 minutes to regenerate ~600 images.

I hope you find this to be a helpful tip!

Feel free to ask questions in the comments below.

In fact, they are following you. Although you probably didn’t realize it, when you first visited one of these websites, a cookie was dropped on your browser. As long as you have that cookie, the website owner who dropped it can keep showing you ads for their website. The result is ads that appear to follow you around the internet.

These are called remarketing ads, and they are extremely effective. And although you’ve probably noticed these types of ads running for big brands like Amazon, you might be surprised to find out that you can start a remarketing campaign yourself quite easily, and with a much smaller budget than you might expect.

In this article, we’ll cover the most important points of remarketing, including:

1. What remarketing is and the problem it solves
2. Why it has the potential to dramatically increase your conversion rate, and
3. How you can implement your first remarketing campaign in less than an hour.

After reading this article, you’ll have a better understanding of how remarketing works and why it could be your website’s next secret weapon.

What Is Remarketing and What Problem Does It Solve?

Advertising is an inexact science. No matter how well our ads are targeted, and no matter how well our landing pages answer potential sales objections, its impossible to convert every website visitor into a customer on the first try. In fact, its exceedingly rare to find any website that converts even 1 in 10 visitors into a sale right away (3-5% is a more realistic goal).

So what happens to the other 90% of people who come to our websites, look around, but ultimately leave without buying anything? Is there any way to recover those sales?

In the past, the answer was basically “no.” You had one shot to connect with a potential customer, and if in that time you weren’t able to find a way to keep in touch (e.g., signing them up for your newsletter or having them start a demo), there was little chance that you’d get another chance to make your pitch.

Remarketing changes all of that. Remarketing ads follow your potential customers around the internet, delivering your pitch for weeks or even months, so that when they are finally ready to buy you’ll be top of mind.

This gives you many more chances to make the sale. For example, if a customer browses your kitchenware section and spends a lot of time checking out a particular mixer, you can show them ads for that mixer for weeks to come.

There are many reasons that customers who might buy from you eventually aren’t ready to do so now. Perhaps that kitchen mixer is a Christmas gift idea, but your customer is still trying to decide between several gifts. Or perhaps your product is expensive, and your customer needs to fully consider the purchase or clear it with accounting.

Whatever the reason, there are many customers who are not ready to buy the first time they encounter your website, but will be some time in the future. Remarketing lets you keep in touch with these customers long after they leave your website, so that when they are finally ready to purchase your website is only a click away.

Why Remarketing Has The Potential To Dramatically Improve Your Conversion Rate

Quite simply, remarketing gives you another bite at the apple. It means that even if you don’t make the sale on the first visit, you’re still in the game, and you’ll be able to keep marketing to these prospects.

Even with the notoriously short attention span of your average online shopper, remarketing lengthens the time you have to make your sales pitch from seconds or minutes to weeks or months.

This increased sales window alone will increase your website’s conversion rate, but when you tune your remarketing campaign to target individual customers based on their previous interactions with your website the increase becomes dramatic.

Unlike other forms of banner advertising, which are essentially “spray and pray” (where everyone sees the same ads), with remarketing we actually know a lot about the person seeing the banner ad and we can choose which banner to show them based on any number of criteria.

In fact, with proper tuning of your remarketing campaign, its possible target banner ads based on criteria including which sections of your website they’ve already visited, how they initially reached your site (banner ad? search?), and when combined with a demographically targeted traffic source like Facebook, even what gender, age, and interests that they have can be used to target remarketing ads.

With remarketing, its possible to show an advertisement only to males over 35 who have visited the basketball hoops page of your online sporting goods store. Or to show a selection of blenders and beach chairs to visitors who have been browsing for sunscreen. You can even show different ads to people who have read the FAQs page vs. those who haven’t.

The effect this can have on your conversion rate simply has to be seen to be believed. Even the most poorly implemented remarketing campaign has the potential to print money.

How To Implement Your First Remarketing Campaign In Less Than An Hour

Sounds great right? However, I’m guessing this also sounds complicated to setup, expensive, and you’re wondering if this is something that you can realistically take on without breaking the bank.

Thankfully, remarketing doesn’t have to be either complicated to setup or even expensive! In fact, you’ll only need 3 things to begin your first remarketing campaign:

1. Your website
2. Banner ads in several standard sizes (more on that below)
3. An account with a remarketing network, such as Google Adwords or Perfect Audience

We’ll go over each of these 3 items in detail now.

Setting Up Your Website For Remarketing

The first thing you’ll need to do is setup your website to drop your remarketing cookies to each visitor who comes to your website, so that you’ll be able to show them targeted ads as they browse other websites.

This is as simple as installing Google Analytics. Like Google Analytics, your remarketing network (e.g., AdWords or Perfect Audience) will give you a Javascript code to paste into your website’s footer. Once you’ve installed this code, your website is ready to start remarketing!

Obtain Banner Ads In Six Standard Sizes

Although each website has its own layout and design, the majority of banner advertisements are actually one of six standard sizes. Thus, you’ll need to obtain banner ads in at least one of these six sizes and upload the banners to your remarketing network in order for your ads to be shown.

Here’s the six sizes standard you can choose from. Try to represent all six sizes if you can, in order to make sure your ad is shown as often as possible.

Standard Remarketing Banner Sizes:

• 300×250
• 728×90
• 160×600
• 468×60
• 120×600
• 99×72 (Facebook)

Additionally, you’ll want to be sure your ad:

• Has a clear call to action
• Has a border
• Clearly displays your brand name
• Is under 40kb
• Is not overly flashy (although it can be animated)

(This list of sizes and guidelines via PerfectAudience.com)

If your company already purchases banner ads, it’s very likely that your marketing department can supply you with banner ads in these sizes that they’ll already have available from other campaigns.

On the other hand, if you need to purchase some new banner ads and you’re on a tight budget, Fiverr.com is worth a look. On fiverr you’ll be able to buy a very passable first set of banners for around $10, which is a great way to get started.

Choosing A Remarketing Network

Finally, you’ll need to choose a remarketing network. A remarketing network does the hard work of buying ads on all these individual websites for you. You’ll just setup your tracking cookies, choose a budget, and the network will take care of deciding where to run your banner ad.

The two remarketing networks we most recommend right now are Google AdWords and Perfect Audience.

Google AdWords’ remarketing component is incredibly easy to start up with if you’re already signed up with AdWords. Here’s a quickstart guide from Google on remarketing with AdWords.

Perfect Audience is a newer company that focuses only on remarketing. If you’re starting from scratch, Perfect Audience is a great choice for a few reasons: their software is very easy to setup and manage, they have no minimum budgets, and they can run remarketing ads on Facebook as well as the general internet.

Use this link to signup for Perfect Audience, and they’ll give you a free $70 credit to try their service (and we’ll receive a small commission as well). If you’re not running any remarketing ads yet, this is by far the easiest way to start.

How Much Does Remarketing Cost?

So let’s get down to brass tacks: how much does remarketing cost, especially when compared to other online advertising?

Surprisingly, remarking is actually far cheaper than most other online advertising, despite being extremely high value and very well targeted.

That’s because online advertising is sold in bulk by the thousands of impressions, and you’ll be able to pay these same bulk rates for highly targeted remarketing ads.

However, you’ll only be paying to show your ads to people who have already visited your website, and not wasting your money showing banners to people who might not even be interested in your product! The end result is that you’ll be able to run very targeted ads for very cheap.

Here’s some real numbers:

CPM, or cost per mille, is the standard unit for buying and selling banner ads, and a typical CPM is $3-4. That means for every $4 you spend, your ad will be shown 1000 times.

Even at a $3 CPM, this can add up quickly if you are showing your ads to a very large group (for example, all visitors of nytimes.com). For most business owners, this is well beyond their budget.

But with remarketing ads, you’ll pay the same $3-4 CPM rates, but you’ll only be showing ads to people who have expressed a strong interest in your product or service (by visiting your website). This means you can afford to buy ads on premium properties like nytimes.com even with a tiny marketing budget!

Don’t Wait – Start A Remarketing Campaign Today

If you do one thing for your website this week, start a remarketing campaign. It will increase the conversion rate of all your other sales activities, by giving you more chances to sell to the customers you’re already attracting.

And of course, we are happy to manage your remarketing campaigns for you. We provide remarketing campaign management on a monthly basis for select clients. Get in touch with us today, and we’ll schedule a short phone consultation to go over all the details with you.

Happy remarketing!

This guide is for small business owners who want to rank higher on Google and other local search engines. Its meant to cut through the fog, and present you with a step by step blueprint for better rankings in local search engines. We hope that it strikes a balance of being approachable without getting bogged down with terminology. If there’s any area that seems foreign to you leave us a comment, and we’ll do a deep dive into that area in an upcoming blog post.

We recommend you print out this list and complete every item on it, checking them off as you go. Some of the items will be harder to complete than the others, but every one of them is important.

If you complete every item on this list, your site will be exceptionally well positioned to rank highly in local search. And a high ranking in local search will lead to a lot of new calls and customers, which is of course what we’re really after.

Of course, if you’d rather get back to your business and have this handled by a professional, get in touch with us now. We have Local SEO packages starting at only $500/month that can complete every item on this checklist.

The Local SEO Checklist

Print out this list and check off each item as you complete it.

Getting Started

1. Get a physical address in the city. Closer to downtown is better, but its not a big deal.
2. Make sure you’re using a local area code for your primary phone number
3. Include your product or service keyword in your business title (if possible)
4. Update your business information with the secretary of state. Make sure the name, address, and phone match your website.
5. Make sure there you don’t have more than one Google Local Place Page for your business. Delete the extras if you do.

Setup Your Google Local Place Page

1. Make sure that your business is listed in the proper category (this is the most important factor in Local SEO)
2. Make sure your Name, Address, and Phone Number on your website match those on your Google Local Place Page
3. Have the business owner verify the Google Local Place Page
4. Fill out your Google Local Place Page completely (get the numerical percentage as close to 100% as possible)
5. Include your product or service keyword and your city name in the description of your Google Local Place Page
6. Repeat these steps for Yahoo Local, Bing Local, YP.com, and SuperPages.com

Optimize Your Website

1. Add Schema.org LocalBusiness HTML markup to every page.

   Tip: Look for a more specific business type at the bottom of the page, e.g., DryCleaningOrLaundry or ChildCare, and use that instead if of the generic LocalBusiness type you find a good match (DO NOT stretch it. If you’re in doubt use LocalBusiness.)

2. Include the City and State in the title of all pages
3. Include the City and State in your H1/H2 Tags, especially on the homepage
4. Add a rel=author meta tag to your website (linking to your Google+ Local Page)
5. Add a rel=publisher meta tag to your website
6. Make your site load as quickly as possible (tip: just use CloudFlare)
7. Optimize your titles, meta descriptions, and URLs to make them keyword rich and clickable, giving you a high organic click through rate
8. Add a +1 Button to your website

Domain Name

1. Include the name of your city in your domain name (if possible)
2. Include the name of your product or service in your domain name (if possible)
3. Register your domain name several years into the future (up to 10)
4. Make sure your WHOIS information is public and that the name, address, and phone match that on your website

Get Customer Reviews

1. Get as many native reviews on Google Local as you can
2. Get reviews on as many different 3rd party review sites as you can
3. Especially seek out your customers who already use sites like Yelp and Google Places, and ask them to leave you a review. (Reviewers who have many reviews are more authoritative in the eyes of a search engine).
4. Ask your customers to mention the specific service they purchased in their reviews
5. Ask your customers to mention the city they live in within their review
6. Ask for reviews consistently over time, not in bursts. Make it a habit.

Local Citations

1. Get listed in as many Internet Yellow Pages as possible. Free ones are fine.
2. Google your business. Make sure your Name, Address, Phone and other info is correct on any site you see. Claim your profile and correct it if not.
3. Update your information with local data aggregators (Localeze, Acxiom, Factual, others)

Unstructured Citations (i.e., newspaper articles and blog posts)

1. Put out a press release, pay PRWeb to syndicate it
2. Contact local blogs and newspapers and ask them to interview you
3. Add several photos to your Google Local Place Page. As many as you can.

Link Building

1. Build links to your domain from websites about your city or other places in your city (review sites, city guides, city business directories, your church’s website, etc)
2. Build links to your domain from websites about your industry (local or not)
3. Build links with your product or service name and your location in the anchor text (e.g., “Raleigh, NC plumbers”)

Social Media

1. Open a Flickr/YouTube account and upload geotagged photos and videos. Be sure to link the account to your business’ website
2. Open a Facebook business page, and make sure your Name, Address, and Phone number match your website
3. Setup a Twitter account and mention your name, your city, and your product or service keyword in your bio
4. Setup your blog to automatically post to Facebook and Twitter (tip: use IFTTT.com to do this for free)
5. Seek out reviews on Foursquare
6. Consider running a Groupon or Living Social deal

Is there something we should add to this list? Let us know in the comments!

Photo Credit: Grow by OpenSourceWay on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

PS: If you’d rather get back to your business and have this handled by a professional, get in touch with us now. We have Local SEO packages starting at only $500/month that can complete every item on this checklist.

Either one of these topics is deep enough to spend months researching, but we know you’re busy so we’ve broken them down into only the most important parts. This article focuses on on-site SEO, the tweaks and improvements you can make to your site that will help it rank highly in the search engines. In an upcoming article we’ll focus on its counterpart, off-site SEO, so subscribe now to make sure you don’t miss it!

This article is a bit longer than most blog posts you might be used to reading, but we promise that if you read the whole thing you’ll leave with a much better understanding of on-site SEO and what on-site SEO factors are really important for ranking highly on search engines like Google and Bing.

Note: Obviously, there are more than 10 on-site SEO improvements you can make to your website, but this article covers only the most important, highest-impact areas of on-site SEO.

#1: Create Unique, Short Title Tags For Every Page

The most important factor of on site SEO is your <title> tags. Search engines like Google and Bing use your title tag in their search results to represent your website. You’ve got less than 60 characters to convince a random search engine user to click through to your site, so make them count.

Your title tags should:

1. Succinctly describe what the page is about
2. Contain the SEO keywords that the page is targeting
3. Be written like a call to action, with click-through rate in mind.
4. Be unique to each page – don’t repeat title tags across pages
5. Be less than 60 characters long (otherwise it will be truncated)
6. Not contain any extraneous information (don’t put your brand name and slogan at the end of every title tag)

Its exceedingly unlikely that a search engine like Google or Bing will index more than one page with the same title, so its of the utmost importance that your title tags are unique.

Don’t gloss over this step – if your title tags need work, fix them.

#2: Use Heading Tags To Reinforce The Title And Subject Of Your Page

A page on your website should be formatted much like the outline of a book report or essay. Start with the title, which is your thesis, and then use the heading tags (<h1> through <h6>) to make your secondary points which reinforce your title.

The goal is that a stranger should be able to read only your page’s title and your headings, and still get most of the meaning from your page.

Here’s an example outline of a services page for a dentist’s website. The primary headings (Heading 1) reinforce the title tag, while each of the secondary headings reinforces the one above it.

Example Page Title: Family Dentistry Services

• Heading 1: Family Dentistry Services
  • Heading 2: Six Month Checkups
    • Heading 3: Why Your Family Needs Six Month Checkups
    • Heading 3: Why You Should Get Your Six Month Checkups From Us
    • Heading 3: What We Do In A Six Month Checkup
  • Heading 2: Professional Teeth Cleaning
    • Heading 3: Why You Need Professional Teeth Cleaning
    • Heading 3: What We Do In A Professional Teeth Cleaning
    • Heading 3: Why A Professional Cleaning Saves In The Long Term
  • Heading 2: Fluoride Treatments
    • Heading 3: What Are The Benefits Of Regular Fluoride Treatments?
    • Heading 3: Who Should Receive Fluoride Treatments
    • Heading 3: Are Fluoride Treatments Safe?

The end result should look a lot like an outline.

#3: Write Unique And Eye-Catching Meta Descriptions

Write a compelling meta description for every page on your site. Treat it like ad copy, because that’s essentially what it is – your meta description usually shows up right under your title in search results.

Behind your title, your meta description is the second most important element in your page for influencing your organic search click through rate, which is increasingly important for SEO.

Tip: Search engines don’t care one iota whether or not your meta descriptions contain keywords. So focus on writing a compelling description (treat it like ad copy), and don’t even think about keyword stuffing here.

#4: Page Speed Is Important – Serve Your Pages Quickly And Use A CDN

The speed of your website is increasingly important for SEO. You’ll want to make sure that your website ticks as many boxes as possible on Google’s Page Speed Tool.

Plug your website’s URL into Google’s Page Speed Insights Tool, and you’ll get a quick report of which factors your site is up to speed on, and which its not. Simply put, the more green checks you get the faster your site is, and the better it will rank.

Google’s site has a complete list of the Page Speed factors, and they include things like GZip compression, loading your images and other heavy assets from a CDN, and minifying your HTML, CSS and Javascript files. Implementing these suggestions is beyond the scope of this article, but definitely forward the list to your web developer.

Tip: Setup CloudFlare on your site, and you’ll get most of these taken care of for free. Its a shockingly easy SEO win, and free. We use CloudFlare on this website.

Faster Pages Means More Crawler Activity

A secondary benefit to having a faster site is an increased crawl rate from search engine spiders like Googlebot. Once Googlebot notices you are using a CDN, you’ll probably see a marked increase in crawl activity. Make sure you’ve registered your site in Google Webmaster Tools so that you can monitor the crawl rate.

Heads Up! If you put your site behind CloudFlare, be ready for a serious increase in crawl traffic for Google. Be sure that your server is equipped to handle the increased traffic.

#5: Create Fresh Content And Keep It Up To Date

Search engines love websites that are updated frequently. That means both maintaining an active blog and updating the existing pages of your website frequently as new information becomes available.

Do yourself a favor and try to write about topics that you can revisit over time with new information (experts call this “evergreen content”). This will both help position you as an expert on a specific topic and it will give you a built-in reason to keep updating your website’s pages.

#6: Make Your Website Crawlable – Use A Sitemap

Search engines can’t rank content they can’t find. Make sure every page of your website is linked from several others. Ideally, you have a hierarchical site structure that includes plenty of navigational links into your deeper pages.

An easy way to make sure that search engines can find all of the pages on your website is to create and submit an XML sitemap to Google, Bing, Yahoo and the other search engines. You should be able to find a plugin for your CMS which automates this for you. (Here’s a great XML sitemap plugin for WordPress). Even if you are using a custom CMS and you need to add a function to generate your sitemaps, you should spend the time to do so. Adding comprehensive XML sitemaps is one of the easiest ways to have a 10x effect on your crawl rate overnight.

Sitemaps and Large Websites (over 50,000 pages)

If your website has more than 50,000 pages you’ll need to create multiple sitemaps, and then reference them in a sitemap index file. Be aware, you can only have one level of sitemap index – don’t reference one sitemap index from another or it will not be indexed.

#7: Internal Links – Don’t Be Shy

We spend so much time focusing on offsite links that we often forget about the easiest source of links we have: our own website!

Be sure to link to your own pages as much as it makes sense. For instance, this post is about search engine optimization, so you’ll find that those words are linked to our SEO services page.

In addition to the SEO benefits, generous internal linking is a good way to improve your sites engagement and its a good way to bring your visitors from your blog over to the business side of your website.

Tip: Your navigation is repeated on every page, so pay special attention to the anchor text of those links. For example, if you run a landscaping company, try naming your services page “Landscaping Services” instead of just “Services”. That will naturally mean you have a link on every page of your site pointing to that page with the anchor text “Landscaping Services”, which will help that page rank highly on Google when people search for “landscaping services.”

#8: URLs – Make Them Short, Navigational, and Keyword Rich

Your URLs are important. They appear on your search results, and if they contain keywords those keywords will be highlighted. This can increase your organic search click through rate, which is important for SEO.

First, make sure your website enables you to use permalinks, or “pretty URLs”. That means your URLs should look like this: http://example.com/pretty-url/ and not like this: http://example.com/?page=298.

Second, don’t just stick with the URLs that your CMS generates for you automatically. Choose an SEO friendly URL that’s also descriptive for your visitors.

Here’s 3 rules of thumb for picking SEO (and visitor) friendly URLs:

1. Shorter Is Better

   Today’s content management systems generate some pretty incredible URLs. You know what I’m talking about – URLs like http://example.com/blog/ten-ways-you-can-improve-your-testing-right-now-an-interview-with-john-doe-ab-testing-expert/

   These long URLs are not helping anyone! Search engines and visitors both prefer short, readable URLs. So remove any stop words (and, the, or, etc), try to keep your page slug to less than 4 words, and make sure its readable.

2. Navigational URLs

   You could also call these hierarchical URLs. Basically, I should be able to look at the current URL, and be able to guess how to reach other related pages of your website.

   For example, consider this URL structure for a university’s alumni directory:

   http://example.com/alumni/2001/mechanical-engineering/john-doe/

   If I were on this page, I could reasonably assume that:

   1. http://example.com/alumni/2001/mechanical-engineering/ would show me 2001 graduates in mechanical engineering
   2. http://example.com/alumni/2001/ would show me other 2001 alumni (for any discipline)
   3. http://example.com/alumni/ would take me to a list of all class years

   If your site has this property, you’re ahead of the curve on SEO and usability.

3. Keyword Rich URLs

   If it makes sense to do so, try to include your keywords in your URL. Don’t keyword stuff and don’t sacrifice readability or URL length to include your keywords, but try to find a way to use them naturally in your page slug.

#9 Write More and Longer Content

Search engines like Google love long form content. In a recent survey, serpIQ.com found that most pages in the top 10 results on Google searches they surveyed had at least 2000 words of content, and the pages at the top of the listings tended to be the longest (in terms of word count). For reference, a typical blog posts only contain 500-750 words, so this is significantly longer than average.

This holds true with our experience across the many sites that we manage and maintain. Detailed articles and other long form content consistently brings in more search engine traffic than shorter pieces.

An easy way to lengthen and improve your content is to add rich media. Try adding creative commons photos from Flickr, embedding videos from YouTube and Vimeo, or presentations from SlideShare wherever it makes sense to do so.

#10 Add Rich Snippets (Metadata) Wherever You Can

Just a few years ago, search results looked very plain. Here’s a screenshot of Google from this blog in 2009:

Compare that to a recent search result page from Google:

The difference is obvious: today’s search results are full of rich metadata, such as customer reviews, recipes, movie showtimes, and even business’ hours of operation.

These “rich snippets” are generated by special HTML markup on the websites that Google has indexed. Google’s crawler is able to pull out this structured data from these websites because they are implementing these mircodata schemas, which are an open standard (meaning Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines support them too).

If you’re familiar with HTML, you might wish to jump right into the specifications. If not, you should check out this tool from Google which will help you generate rich snippet markup using their wizard.

Search engines love to show their users rich search results like the ones pictured above. So its no surprise that they prefer to highly rank sites which implement rich snippets. In our experience, adding rich microdata like this to a website has had an immediate and significant impact in for nearly every website on which we’ve implemented it.

Tip: You can be creative with rich snippets while still staying within the guidelines. For example, you could use the menu markup to list the services menu of your tire shop, for instance. This could lead to your services being listed in Google Places, Bing Local, or Yahoo Local.

Bonus Tip: Add Google Authorship and Google+ Tags To Your Site

I know we promised to keep this list to 10 items, but it didn’t seem right to leave out Google Plus and Google Authorship from this list. On the other hand, they could be considered off-site SEO, so we threw it in as a bonus for you.

Google Plus And SEO

Google’s recent push to make Google+ a popular social network has influenced every Google property, including search. So you should be sure to register your website with Google Plus, and make sure you post an update on Google+ each time you make a new post on your blog.

Also, for now, Google+ is not putting the nofollow attribute on outbound links. So this means your status updates can contain dofollow links on Google.com to your website. I know, that’s off-site SEO, but.. you’re welcome.

How To Get Your Photo To Appear In Google’s Search Results

As part of its Google+ effort, Google has recently introduced a new kind of meta tag that can be added to webpages which causes the author’s name, photo, and other information to appear alongside the search result.

Here’s an example, from Google’s support page on Authorship Markup:

(Image Source: Google.com Support Page On Authorship Markup)

This type of special search result can also occur in Google news, where it can also be the company’s icon (it must be a face in order to appear next to a normal search result).

Authorship markup might improve your click through rates, but strangely its not always a positive factor for SEO. In fact, a recent study by Moz.com actually found a negative correlation between authorship markup and ranking. That said, we think Google’s future seems to be Google+, and we expect that adding markup to support Google+ will be a long term win for SEO.

Conclusions

Follow this guide completely and you’ll give your website a solid SEO foundation to build upon for years to come.

If you’ve already implemented all of these items on your own website, go back through and improve on what you’ve already done. Find 10 meta descriptions or titles to rewrite, or add some images or rich media to an older page or blog post. Make a habit of improving your older content and you’ll ensure constant SEO gains for your website.

We’ll be updating this page continually as new information becomes available, so be sure to bookmark it and check back soon.

Is there a crucial on-site SEO tactic that you we should have included in this list? Let us know in the comments.

With AdWords, each new visitor costs us money, while with SEO each visitor is free. With AdWords, we can go from starting a new campaign to seeing visitors on our website in a matter of hours, while with SEO, it might be weeks or months until we see the first fruits of our labor.

Yet AdWords might just be the crucial factor that turns your SEO campaign into a profit machine.

How? By using AdWords to focus our SEO campaigns on only the most profitable and high volume keywords, we can multiply their effectiveness.

By using AdWords to “sample” a given keyword, you can get a preview of what it might be like to rank #1 for that keyword. This lets you find out which keywords are really worth your time and effort before you start an intensive SEO campaign to rank for them.

Below are our 3 favorite ways to use AdWords data to supercharge your SEO campaigns. We hope these tips will make your next SEO campaign your most profitable to date. And as always, if you have a technique you’d like to share, please let us know in the comments!

Technique #1: Use AdWords To Discover New Long Tail Keywords To Target With SEO

Long tail keywords are the longer, more specific searches that our customers are typing into Google (as opposed to short tail keywords, which are short and obvious). “Pet food” is a short tail keyword, whereas “dog food for miniature chihuahuas” is a long tail keyword.

Long tail keywords are great targets for any SEO or AdWords campaign, because they usually indicate a visitor that is further along in their purchase cycle. In other words, these visitors have done their research, have identified the specific product or solution they want to buy, and now they are trying to find the best place to buy it. This is when you most want to reach a new customer.

The problem with long tail keywords is that only a few people search for them each day. Its easy to spend time and effort ranking for a long tail keyword like “dog food for miniature chihuahuas” only to find out that very few people search for that term.

So how do we know which long tail keywords represent our perfect customers, and which ones are a waste of time? Easy: use AdWords to sample a bunch of long tail keywords quickly, before you spend time trying to rank for them.

Just start a new ad group in your AdWords account, and use the Adwords Keyword Tool to generate as many relevant keywords as you can. Be sure to use “broad match” setting, which will allow Google to show our ad for any keyword that it thinks is relevant. Although we’d never recommend leaving the broad match setting on for a normal AdWords campaign, its great for discovering new keywords to target.

After a couple of days and a few hundred dollars, Google will have shown your ad to several thousand visitors. Use your analytics software to find out which searches resulted in a conversion (or use Google’s built in Conversion Tracking tool to do this tracking right in AdWords). These are all keywords you’ll want to target with your SEO campaign.

But don’t only look at the keywords which converted. Also be sure to look through every keyword that sent traffic to your site. If you see keywords which accurately describe your product but didn’t convert, you might want to tweak your website to better target these keywords, and then run the AdWords experiment again.

Finally, pay close attention to not only which long tail keywords converted for you, but which ones sent a larger amount of traffic in general. You’ll want to focus on the keywords which convert well and also have a relatively high search volume first.

Technique #2: Sample An Expensive Keyword, Before Busting Your Hump To Rank For It

With any campaign, there’s a couple of very competitive keywords that seem like they would be ideal to rank for. These are short tail keywords such as “life insurance” or “online banking”. They’re often called “money keywords.”

Chances are you and/or your client have Google’d these keywords, and you’re looking at a long road ahead of you. You’re looking at a search results page full of big brands and Wikipedia articles, and you know its going to be a long haul to even break onto the first page.

Before you start down this road, take a step back. Make sure that this short tail keyword is really the one you want to rank for – that it will bring you new customers. It might be that the keyword you think will convert the best doesn’t convert well at all. It would be terrible to spend months ranking for that keyword only to find out that it wasn’t worth your time.

Start a small AdWords campaign to target this keyword, and bid high enough that you get the top spot. You might want to try focusing on a particular part of day or a specific US city in order to maximize your chances of being the top ad. But don’t worry about the cost per click – we’re expecting to overpay for these clicks right now.

Make sure you buy at least 20 or 30 visitors for that popular keyword and then closely watch how they behave on your website before you spend any time and effort on SEO for that keyword. This will cost you a few dollars now, but it could save you months of wasted work spent ranking for the wrong keyword.

Or you might find out that this keyword is exactly the one you need to target. In that case, you can confidently move forward with a large SEO effort to rank for that one keyword, knowing that the months of effort spent ranking will be worth it when you finally crack the top 10.

Especially if you have a client that is not experienced with SEO, this can be a powerful tool for making sure that the SEO campaign is not stopped prematurely. After showing the potential rewards in quantifiable data it will be easier to justify the SEO campaign to rank for these short tail keywords, even if the results take time to materialize.

Technique #3: Test Marketing Messages To Maximize Your Organic Search CTR

You know that when your website is listed on a search results page it’s much like an advertisement, except that the headline and ad copy are pulled from your website’s title and meta description, respectively.

You probably also know that your website’s click through rate in organic search results affects its position. If the #3 search result is getting more clicks than the #1 result, this is a strong signal to Google/Yahoo/Bing that perhaps the #3 result should be listed ahead of the current #1 result.

This means that your website’s title and meta description need to be optimized not just for your keywords but for click through rate as well. You should give your titles and meta descriptions the same treatment that you give your AdWords ads, presenting your message in a clear way that maximizes your click through rate.

Use your AdWords campaigns to find the messaging that has a high click through rate and a high conversion rate, and then extend this messaging to your pages’ titles and meta descriptions. This will maximize your click through rate in the organic search results and could have a big impact on your rankings.

Final Thoughts

There are many other ways to use AdWords data to inform your SEO campaigns, and we’ll be sure to do another deep dive on this topic in a future post. Be sure to subscribe to our blog so that you won’t miss the next posts in this series.

Photo Credit: Focus photo by Mark Hunter (toolstop) on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

The easiest way to increase your website’s conversion rate is to use A/B testing. This involves reworking one specific part of your website, and then testing the new version to see if performs better with your visitors.

For example, you might create 5 new headlines for your website and test them to see which ones are the stickiest, or you might try removing some of the fields on your contact form to see if more people complete it.

What outcome you are optimizing for depends your website and your business goals, but some common A/B testing goals are:

• Increasing order frequency and average order size
• Promoting more customer referrals
• Decreasing shopping cart abandonment
• Improving engagement within a software product

Depending on your goals and your existing revenue, you might have more or less room to try some of the A/B testing ideas below. We hope that you’ll find at least a few A/B test ideas in this list that pique your curiosity and get your brain thinking about what other creative tests you can run.

Although the tests which follow are proven winners that have produced gains across many sites on which we’ve tested them, please remember that every site is different and you should always test any changes you make before making them permanent. If there’s one thing to know about A/B testing, its that even your most educated guesses can be completely wrong.

Tip: If you have any questions at all, or you have a A/B test we should add to this list, please let us know in the comments!

Proven Idea #1: Add A Toll Free Customer Support Number

No matter how good your sales material is at reassuring them, your potential customers want to know that you are available for support if they need it. Adding a toll-free number (also known as a 1-800 number) is a great way to let them know you’re serious about customer support.

This point goes double for anyone selling software on the internet. Anyone can put up a website, so customers are naturally cautious about whom they do business with online.

A prominent 1-800 number on your website signals to your customers that you are an established business who cares about customer service, and that you seek out opportunities to connect with your customers.

Don’t forget the most important part: answer the phone when it rings!

If you need to acquire a toll-free number, you can get one in just a few minutes at www.twilio.com.

Proven Idea #2: Add Trust Indicators Such As Credit Card Logos, Awards, or Professional Association Badges

Adding trust symbols such as the logos of the payment methods you accept (e.g., Visa, MasterCard, Amex, PayPal) can drastically increase the conversion rate of your website.

Try adding common trust indicators to a highly visible location on your website. If you already have them all, experiment with moving them to a more prominent location or changing their order.

Trust Indicators That Increase Conversions:

• Credit card icons and other payment methods you accept
• Logos of professional associations to which you belong
• Better Business Bureau online badge
• Google Places, Yahoo Local, Yelp, and CitySearch badges
• “HackerSafe” (or similar) badges
• SSL / lock icons

Good places to put trust indicators like these are in your website’s header or, in the case of credit card logos, right next to the credit card fields.

Proven Idea #3: Add A Live Chat Widget

Try adding a live chat widget to your website, and measure its impact on your conversion rates. You may be pleasantly surprised.

Even if your visitors don’t use the widget now, they will appreciate that it is there. Like a toll free support line, its a strong indicator that you care about support and you will be available when they need you most.

Try Olark, LivePerson, or just Google “live chat widget”. We’ve used and highly recommend Olark.

Proven Idea #4: Add Videos of Your Product In Use

In many cases, even the most amateur video of a product being used will dramatically increase conversion rates. It helps people to see a product being used, so they can be sure they’re understanding your marketing claims correctly.

If you’re selling software, you may want to check out screenr.com for making quick screencasts. Otherwise, just grab your smartphone and a friend and start filming.

Proven Idea #5: Add Testimonials To Your Site

Testimonials are one of the most powerful sales tools available to any product. Try adding testimonials for your product throughout your website and watch the impact on your conversion rate.

If you can, try to place testimonials near the features they describe. For example, if your online accounting software’s marketing website has a Payroll & Direct Deposit page, put a testimonial about how your software saved your customer’s business 20 hours a week by automating their payroll.

Proven Idea #6: Add Photos and Bios Of The Founders (Small Companies) or Key Employees (Big Companies)

You should experiment with adding photos and possibly bios of your key employees all throughout your website. This makes your website feel more like a personal interaction, and it can really improve your conversion rates.

If you’re a small company, show photos of the founders. If you’re a big company, pepper photos of key employees throughout your pages. Rackspace.com does a great job of this. Go there and click around, and you’ll see a random sampling of their staff throughout the pages.

Proven Idea #7: Automatically Focus The Cursor To The Most Important Input On The Page

This is an easy one to miss, but it can be an easy win for engagement if you haven’t done so. Assuming it makes sense to do so, try automatically focusing your visitors cursor on the main input of your website (e.g., your search box).

Google.com is a great example of this. Go to www.google.com and just start typing (without clicking on the page). Because the cursor was already focused on the search field, this just works.

Proven Idea #8: Introduce A Premium Pricing Tier

Not only will this technique drastically improve your average order value, sometimes increasing your price can actually increase the number of sales you get and the perceived value of your product. It all depends on how you present the information.

Try offering a premium version of your product, and add a perk that’s likely to appeal to high value clients such as business owners. For example, try offering phone support with the premium tier, but only email support with the normal tier.

This will have a two-fold effect:

1. First, your customers that don’t particularly need the extra perk that the premium tier offers (phone support, in this example) will be able to save money by foregoing it.
2. Second, your customers that do want this perk will be able to buy it, whereas it was not offered before.

To make this work, the perk you choose should ideally have the following properties:

1. It should reflect the highest cost or most time consuming service your business provides.

   For many businesses, phone support is a serious time sink. Providing it to everyone would be prohibitively expensive, but offering it to higher paying customers makes economic sense.

2. It should correlate directly to a need of your highest value customers.

   There’s no sense offering a perk no one wants. But by offering something special that enables our customer, we can justify the extra cost of premium service.

   For example, overnight shipping is very important to certain customers (for example some laboratories), and those customers are willing to pay a premium for this above-and-beyond service. For many other customers, having a longer shipping time is well worth the savings.

   By offering overnight shipping as a perk of the premium tier, the business is able to offer essentially the same service (except for timing) at two price points and still make both customers happy.

Note: many pricing books often use the term “fence” instead of “perk.” Its the same concept by another name.

Proven Idea #9: Offer Free Shipping, Even If You Have To Raise Prices To Do So

Customers absolutely love free shipping. In fact, many will not purchase without it,

If you can’t absorb the shipping cost (most businesses can’t), try repricing your items to include the shipping costs, and then offer free shipping. You might see an increase in conversion rate.

Tip: Take a page from Amazon, and trigger your Free Shipping discount at a price point like $25. This encourages your customers to increase their order size to meet the threshold.

Proven Idea #10: Add A Resources Section, And Fill It With Instructional Videos and Guides

This goes back to demonstrating your commitment to customer service, and it demonstrates your expertise. Even if your customers don’t use these guides now, you’ll have a way to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

Here are some idea for things to add to your resource section which will increase your credibility and hopefully your conversion rates:

• Whitepapers and industry reports
• eBooks and guides
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Instructional videos
• Behind-the-scenes videos

Nevermind that they could use your guides and then buy the product from someone else – you will have created reciprocity, and your readers will most likely buy from you (assuming your resources are accurate and valuable!).

Proven Idea #11: Add More and Larger Images, Especially To Product Pages

This one is especially important for e-Commerce sites, but it applies to everyone selling a product or service online.

What Makes A Great Product Photo

Any photo will usually beat no photo, but here’s some attributes to look for when selecting a product photo:

1. Larger is better.

   Provide a zoom function if it makes sense. Make sure people can access the fullsized versions. This is the closest we get to a showroom online, so customers will spend a lot of time looking at product photos if you provide them.

2. People using the product is better.

   People like to see other happy people using your product. It shows how the product looks in “real life”, and it gives an accurate scale comparison.

3. Have your model looking at the product.

   Your visitors eyes will actually follow the gaze of the models in the photos, so try to have the model looking at the product or other item (such as a form) that you’d like them to pay attention to.

Proven Idea #12: Offer Case Studies

Almost nothing on a website sells like a well-written case study. Case studies cut through the marketing speak and show how the product actually helped a real business.

Case studies are easy for your potential customers to relate to and understand, and they are a great way to demonstrate the real business value of your product or service. They’ll give you the best chance you’ll have to really explain how your product works. If that doesn’t increase your sales, you may want to re-examine the product.

Proven Idea #13: Offer Expert Setup or Installation

This won’t work for every product, but if you’re getting a high enough average order value, or you have an ongoing billing component, this can be a great win.

An hour of consultation may sound time-consuming, but consider these two things:

1. A one hour consultation to land an account with an $1800+ LTV is a great deal
2. You’ll get invaluable feedback from real customers that you couldn’t ever buy.

Besides, are you really that busy?

Proven Idea #14: Offer Yearly or Bulk Discounts

Everyone’s looking for a deal, and sometimes its easier for your customers to buy yearly or in bulk anyway (for example, if they have to go through a purchasing department).

Try offering a 10-20% yearly or bulk discount and see what effect that has on conversion rate.

And don’t worry about accounting – in any business cash flow is king. If a bunch of customers take the deal you’ll have some new best friends.

Proven Idea #15: Add Logos Of Your Reference Clients

Do you have any well known or particularly prestigious clients? In sales, this is called a reference client.

If you do, don’t be shy about displaying their logos on your homepage and throughout your website. If you can, accompany the logo with a testimonial (or even better, a case study).

Reference clients are one of the best tools available to a salesperson, and your website is basically a virtual salesperson. So take full advantage of your reference clients if you have them!

Proven Idea #16: Offer A 100% Money Back Satisfaction Guarantee

This is a super easy thing to add your website that can have a surprisingly large impact. We’ve seen huge lifts in a website’s conversion rate just from adding a prominent money back guarantee symbol.

Tip: Most refunds will come within the first 30 days anyway, so consider offering a longer term such as 90 days, 365 days, or even a lifetime guarantee. You won’t see a big impact on returns, but you might see a big impact on your conversion rate.

Proven Idea #17: Try A Benefits Focused Headline

As business owners, we live inside our products each day, and we tend to get too excited about the “how” and forget about the why. Its easy to get to absorbed in your own product and forget about why we were concerned with solving this problem in the first place.

Your customers do not have this luxury. They don’t care about how your product works or why its a technical marvel, they just want their problem solved.

So try rewriting your primary headline so that it focuses on the problem your customer is trying to solve, and not how your product goes about solving it. If you’re convinced your headline already does this, experiment with a different benefit being the focus of your headline.

Here’s a quick example:

Bad: “Our Patented Microsleep Bubbles Cushion Your Neck, Providing Maximum Comfort”

Better: “Don’t Let Your Pillow Keep You From Getting A Great Night Sleep”

Best: “Stop Feeling Tired. Get More And Deeper Sleep Just By Changing Pillows”

Proven Idea #18: Humanize Your Website’s Content

Your website is a conversation between yourself and your potential customer. It should read like one.

Try changing the “voice” of your website so that it reads more conversationally. Use words like “you” instead of “the customer”, and don’t be afraid to break out of your boring corporate robo-speak.

As Joe Girard, the greatest car salesman of all time, once said: “people just want a fair deal from someone they like.” Since your customers won’t be meeting you and will have to settle for your website instead, do try to give it a human touch.

Proven Idea #19: Offer A Free Bonus For Buying Now

Scarcity is a powerful motivator, and sometimes offering a free bonus that’s only available for a limited time is what it takes to get a customer to buy now instead of later (or never).

Experiment with offering a free bonus such as a month of free service (or 3), free installation, a free bump up to the next service tier for 6 months, or anything else you can think of.

Sometimes its not the cereal but the free prize inside that we get most excited about. The same principle applies to grown-up products too.

Conclusion

This is a great list whether you’re just starting out with A/B testing or you’re an experienced tester who’s looking for new ways to improve your conversion rate. Even though these A/B test ideas are “classics”, even the most well optimized website can probably benefit from doing a better job in at least one of these areas.

Do you have a proven A/B testing idea you’d be willing to share with the community? Add it to the comments below, and we’ll update our list.

Photo Credit: Crayon photo by Paul Stein, used under a Creative Commons license.

Visitors coming from search engines are especially valuable because they tend to be well-informed, technologically savvy, and most importantly – ready to buy. Even better, we don’t have to pay for each additional visitor: after an initial investment in SEO, each marginal visitor is free.

SEO can be a time-consuming task, but you might be surprised by how much low hanging fruit is available. Here’s 5 SEO improvements you can make to your website right now that will bring you more traffic from search engines like Google.

#1 Drop Your Slogan and Your Brand Name From Your Title Tags

Everyone knows that the <title> tag of a webpage is the strongest on-site SEO signal we can send, but we still see this common SEO mistake running rampant on sites that ought to know better.

What is this common SEO mistake that is oh-so-common? Cramming your slogan into every page title on your site.

It might sound crazy, but try it: drop your slogan, brand name, and your favorite keywords from your title tags, leaving only the actual title of the page. The only place you should consider an exception is your homepage, where you’ll want to keep your brand name to avoid confusion. Unless you’re a big brand, its not going to make a difference to your customers.

Why does this small change dramatically increase traffic from search engines like Google?

Two reasons:

1. It makes your titles more unique

   If every single page on your site has “Online Bookkeeping Service” in the title, then each one is a lot less unique. Unique titles help Google index more of your pages.

2. It creates a stronger match to the visitor’s search query

   This is the crucial bit. Think about it: no one is searching Google for “how do I file my taxes online | Online Bookkeeping Service”, but plenty of people are searching for “how do I file my taxes online”.

   The closer your title is to matching the searcher’s query, the more likely your page is to rank. That means not only having the right keywords, but dropping the extraneous ones

Quicksprout.com is an example of a site which consistently gets this right. Notice how this post is titled “How To Create A Popular Infographic“, and not “How To Create A Popular Infographic – Quicksprout”

#2 Add Inline Links And A Related Posts Widget To Your Blog Posts

Its easy to forget, but its an easy SEO win: link your blog posts to one another (where it makes sense). Its best to link phrases within your posts to other relevant pages or posts on your site, but you should also add a “Related Posts” widget to the end of your posts. This is an easy way to drive the search engine’s crawlers deeper into your website.

#3 Add Images, Videos, and Slides To Your Posts

Make sure you’re adding images, videos and even slideshows to your blog posts (and pages).

You don’t need to create the images yourself – use sites like Flickr, YouTube, and Slideshare to find content that you can embed on your site.

If you’re sure you’ve already added enough images, videos, slides and other media to your posts, go back and swap out the worst images for some better ones. Google loves to see updated pages.

Note: always make sure your allowed to embed or repost media before you do so. Each of the sites listed above encourages this behavior on at least some of their media, but make sure to check the license before you post.

#4 Update Your Old Content

Writing new posts is essential, but don’t forget to update your old posts too. Every time we make an update to an old post, even a small one, we see an increase in search traffic to that page.

Protip: Plan ahead when you choose topics for your blog, and pick topics that can be updated over time as the facts on the ground change.

#5 Add Breadcrumbs and Other Rich Snippet Metadata To Your Pages

Google and other search engines are absolutely wild for structured metadata right now. No matter what type of site you have, you can at least add Breadcrumbs to your pages.

Be sure to browse the official list of schemas and see what you can add to your website. If you have menus, reviews, testimonials, showtimes, hours of operation, or any of many other types of metadata, be sure to mark them up on your website. You will almost certainly see an increase in traffic from this easy change.

In Conclusion

If you really put into practice all 5 of the techniques above, I guarantee you will start getting more traffic from search engines like Google within 3 months.

Do you have an easy SEO win that you’d like to share? Please add it to the comments, and we’ll update this post with your idea (giving you credit, of course)!

That being said, both good and evil people have access to the code-base so there are several security basics you want to follow. There are some great tips available on the WordPress Codex, here, and one of those tips is to change your MySQL Table Prefixes.

There are several steps involved in changing the prefixes of the MySQL tables in WordPress.

Step One: Rename the Tables

WordPress contains a varying number of tables, based on the collection of plugins you have installed, and many of them will begin with the default table prefix “wp_”. Changing this is an easy way to achieve some moderate level of protection from a SQL injection attack.

The easiest way to make this change is to log in to phpMyAdmin (or use a tool of your choice, such as MySQL Workbench). I just go through and rename all the tables to use the prefix of my choosing (in this example, we’ll call it “exampleprefix_”.)

The WordPress Table Structure, seen from phpMyAdmin.

Step Two: Update the Options and Usermeta Tables

This is a very important step: missing this step will lead to the “Insufficient Permissions” error when you try to access the Dashboard. Credit here for the tip.

As the above comment thread will tell you, you also have to check inside two tables to see that important field names are changed. Using our new prefix from above, “exampleprefix_”, we must go in the “exampleprefix_options” table and the field “wp_user_roles” has to be changed to “exampleprefix_user_roles”.

In the “exampleprefix_usermeta” table, the fields “wp_capabilities”, “wp_user_level”, “wp_user-settings”, “wp_user-settings-time”, and “wp_dashboard_quick_press_last_post_id” should all have the prefix “exampleprefix_” instead of “wp_”.

Step Three: Update wp-config.php

The final step is updating the table prefix setting inside wp-config.php. This is a crucial step; if you don’t perform this set your WordPress site will be unable to access the database.

Open your wp-config.php file and look for the following code:

/**
 * WordPress Database Table prefix.
 *
 * You can have multiple installations in one database if you give each a unique
 * prefix. Only numbers, letters, and underscores please!
 */
$table_prefix  = 'wp_';

Change the value “wp_” to our new prefix, “exampleprefix_”, save and upload your new file.

That’s it! If you’ve followed the above steps correctly, you should now have successfully changed all the prefixes of your WordPress MySQL Tables and hopefully have achieved some additional security and peace of mind!

Feel free to ask questions in the comments.

A popular way to add subscribers to your email list is to offer a whitepaper, special report, ebook, or another type of giveaway in return for the visitor’s email. This is called a Lead Capture Form, and its popular because it works extremely well.

If you’re using Contact Form 7 already, you’ll be pleased to find out that turning a normal Contact Form 7 form into a lead capture form is easy!

We’ve created a plugin that bundles up all the hooks and shortcodes needed to make this work, and have made it available here for free. If you’d like to download it, just complete the following form (or follow the link in the instructions):

Download The Lead Capture Plugin for Contact Form 7 (CF7)

This form is meant only as a demonstration how the plugin works! (We won’t send you anything). If you’d rather download the plugin without without completing the form, just click here to download the zip file.

We also have a Pro version, available here.

How To Use This Plugin

Once you’ve downloaded the plugin, you can start using it by following these simple steps:

1) Install the Contact Form 7 plugin, as well as our plugin, and create a new Contact Form.

2) Take the shortcode for your new Contact Form 7 form, and replace ‘contact-form-7’ with ‘cf7_lead_capture’ (no quotes in either). For example:

Before:

[contact-form-7 id="1206" title="Download The Whitepaper"]

After:

[cf7_lead_capture id="1206" title="Download The Whitepaper"]

3) Use this new shortcode anywhere you would have use the contact-form-7 shortcode!

Important: Be sure to add Javascript to the Additional Settings section of your Contact Form 7, which either reloads the page or takes the user to a download page. Otherwise, they won’t see the download link until they revisit the page on their own!

For example, you could add this code to the Additional Settings section of your Contact Form 7 to reload the current page after the form is completed.

on_sent_ok: "window.location.reload();"

Notes:

– If you include content inside your shortcode it will be shown to the visitor only after they’ve completed the form.
For example:

[cf7_lead_capture id="1206" title="Download The Whitepaper"]You've already completed this form.[/cf7_lead_capture]

Get The Pro Version For Enhanced Functionality!

We’re also offering a Pro version of this plugin, which is especially useful if you’re redirecting users to a Thank You page after they complete a contact form.

The Pro version introduces the cf7_before and cf7_after shortcodes, which allow you to show or hide content on *other* pages based on whether a Contact Form 7 form has been completed. For example, you could setup your Thank You page like this:

[cf7_before id="25"]Please complete <a href="#form">this short form</a> to download our whitepaper.[/cf7_before]
[cf7_after id="25"]Thanks for completing our form! <a href="#download">Click here to download the whitepaper.</a>[/cf7_after]

Visitors who have already completed the form will see the download link. Visitors who have not will see the link to the form.

This way if someone shares the Thank You page with a friend, you’ll still get to capture the friend’s info too before they can download your whitepaper, ebook, or special report.

» Click here to purchase the Pro version of the Lead Capture Plugin for CF7 for only $39. (using this link will earn you a $10 discount!)

You’ll get a zip file with the Pro plugin as soon as you’ve completed your payment.

—

Please Note: This plugin integrates with and depends on the Contact Form 7 plugin by Takayuki Miyoshi, but is not associated in any way with the Contact Form 7 project.

For more information on Contact Form 7, please visit: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/

Frequently, we use WP-PageNavi as our plugin of choice for outputting pagination links on WordPress sites.

Often, however, I want to customize its HTML output. Sometimes I need to display my items in a list, other times I just want to wrap them in some custom HTML. In both situations, I find it difficult to get the job done without a workaround.

I cooked up a quick function to customize the HTML output of WP-PageNavi, by wrapping the output in list item tags, and thought I would share it.

Wrap Output in List Items

Start by adding the following code to your functions.php file.

//attach our function to the wp_pagenavi filter
add_filter( 'wp_pagenavi', 'ik_pagination', 10, 2 );
 
//customize the PageNavi HTML before it is output
function ik_pagination($html) {
	$out = '';
 
	//wrap a's and span's in li's
	$out = str_replace("<a","<li><a",$html);	
	$out = str_replace("</a>","</a></li>",$out);
	$out = str_replace("<span","<li><span",$out);	
	$out = str_replace("</span>","</span></li>",$out);
 
	return '<div class="paging">
			<ul>'.$out.'</ul>
		</div>';
}

Once you have that code in place (and updated to output your desired HTML), you just need to implement WP-PageNavi as usual.

Output Pagination Links

Place the following code in your template file where you want your links to appear.

<?php if(function_exists('wp_pagenavi')){
	wp_pagenavi();
} ?>

And that’s all you need! I hope you find this quick solution to customizing the HTML output of WP-PageNavi.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments.