Pole Position Marketing's Stoney deGuyter follows up yesterday's post on tweaking a site's "About Us" page with these ssix tips for improving the "Contact Us" section. According to deGuyter, the "Contact Us" page could be considered the "absolutely most important" page on a site because of its critical spot along the purchase pathway. If consumers can't contact you with a question via IM, e-mail or phone, then it completely halts the shopping process. And even if your conversion metric is lead-generated, sometimes just knowing that there's a human available behind the Web site can nudge users into providing …

Search pro and soon-to-be author of "Search Engine Optimization" Randy Zlobec gave WebWorkerDaily his criteria for choosing a search consultant. While his set of five tips includes asking questions to figure out how long they've been in the business and how many repeat clients they've had, Zlobec adds that asking for references and examples of successful campaigns (keywords and optimized sites, anyone?) are important as well. He also notes that clients shouldn't expect a trial run or pilot project, as "it's all or nothing when it comes to SEM."

Price point choices have been ingrained in the practice of search marketing from its onset. Marketers choose how much they're willing to pay for a specific keyword, then close their eyes and bid, (hoping!) that their price point beats their competitor's (and is still a bit cheaper than they'd planned). But scoring the lowest price when it comes to choosing a search firm may actually be a bad thing. According to Did-It's Dave Pasternack, search companies that seem to be low-balling their competitors may be desperate for business and ultimately do marketers more harm than good. Pasternack argues …

Richard Hearne uncovers an interesting dilemma when it comes to the use of keyword research tools -- namely, that search marketers themselves are skewing the results that come up for search terms. Hearne uses the results he got from the Wordze tool for the terms "online marketing Ireland" and "Internet marketing Ireland" and notes that they received an unusually high volume of traffic. While its likely that there is a growing interest in online and/or Internet marketing in Ireland, Hearne thinks its more likely that that a significant portion of that search traffic came from other keyword researchers …

Piggybacking on a WebmasterWorld forum discussion, the SEO Roundtable team classifies the relationship that most search marketers have with Microsoft's adCenter as one of "love-hate." AdCenter's interface is the source of much of the frustration, with forum members describing it as "very slow and buggy," and noting that it makes managing a campaign more difficult than Yahoo or Google's platforms. But the love comes from the higher ROI Webmasters get from Live Search and adCenter -- since as one commenter says, they don't have the "low quality affiliates that clutter up Yahoo and Google's …

If a user is prowling through the "About Us" page on a site, chances are that they're closer to a conversion than a typical browser -- as according to Stoney deGuyter, "they are showing a bit more than a casual interest ... and are looking for additional signs of trust." So how does a site owner foster that trust and push them further along the purchase pathway? DeGuyter offers five tips for tweaking the "About Us" page so that it gives consumers the right kind of conversion-friendly info. From company description, to team biographies and mission …

Webmasters still feeling the sting of Google's paid link PageRank smackdown may be wary of any link-building, sharing or juice-passing schemes, but one brave Ask Enquiro reader posed the question of whether reciprocal links were still OK, or rather, if they had "more weight than paid links?" Jody Nimetz admits that this is a difficult question to answer, noting that while the focus was on paid links at the moment, a site with too many reciprocal links could still be penalized. When link building, "the goal should be to seek one way links, as these carry the most …

What happens when an AdWords account is created in error, or needs to be canceled for some other odd reason? According to an email response Lee Odden received from Google: "you are not getting the option to cancel your account." Apparently, because no billing info had been submitted with the account (it was a test account set up by a former staff member), it wasn't activated -- so technically he couldn't cancel it. That didn't stop a different division of Google from sending a follow-up letter to be sure that he really wanted the account canceled, and advising …

The innovation continues in the vertical search space, this time, with Cambridge-based Northern Light and its "meaning extraction" feature. The strategic research and search technology firm has integrated the new capability into its business search engine, directing users to the documents that are best suited to the meaning of their query -- not just the results that are most algorithmically relevant. According to Bill Hartzer, the meaning extraction technology determines what info is in the documents (be they white papers, trade journal articles, etc.), then determines which business issues they address, even going so far as to assess …

George Michie of the Rimm-Kaufman Group serves up a roadmap for companies struggling with the choice of whether to handle PPC campaigns in-house, or hire an outside firm. Businesses that are spending at least $20,000 per month are good candidates for outsourcing, as are companies that lack the in-house manpower or expertise to handle the tens of thousands of keywords such spending can entail. Meanwhile, Michie also notes the distinction between having an in-house team that works with free ad management and analytics, or a division that subscribes to third party SEM tools. One …