Best of 2009: Top 10 Website Optimization Posts to Kickstart Your Website in 2010!

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new-year-20102Wow – 2009 – another year went by so fast again! There were many great website optimization blog posts last year from some great experts around the web, so I thought I would put together a list of my favorite website optimization posts from 2009 that you should all read to help improve your website in 2010! So let’s get started…

1: The Art of the Landing Page: 7 Tips For Increasing Conversions
A great guest blog post by landing page optimization expert Tim Ash, offering some excellent, clear, concise, and actionable tips for helping to improve website conversion rates.

2: 6 Tips for Improving High Bounce/Low Conversion Web Pages 
Avinash Kaushik offers some great unique ideas for optimizing websites, including entry analysis, mismatched calls to action and first impressions. Also, don’t forget about Avinash’s great new web analytics 2.0 book  that just came out, an essential read to help understand your website and its visitors.

3: Conversion Optimization: When & Where to Address Customer Anxiety
Unfortunately, website visitors are still anxious when it comes to parting with their credit card details online. And many websites do a pretty poor job of reducing anxiety, therefore contributing to poor conversion rates. Linda Bustos does a great job discussing.

4: 5 Steps to Twitter Success – Twitter Optimization Series Overview
2009 was the year when Twitter became a powerhouse for driving and converting traffic to your website. Tad Chef over at SEOptimize did a great post early in the year revealing 5 steps to improve your success at using Twitter.

5: Is CAPTCHA Eating Your Conversions?
Thanks to spambots and malaware attacks, in 2009 it also become harder than ever for users to register for something online, or even often just submitting a button. Anil Batra covers this interesting subject and its effect on conversion rates.

6: Optimizing Website & Landing Page Copy – A 10 Step Process
Having poor copy and calls to action on your website is one of the biggest causes of low conversion rates on websites. Brian Eisenberg did a fantastic post all about how to optimize your website text, full of great actionable tips.

7: How to Improve your Homepage (in 10 Easy Steps)
Your homepage is one of your most important parts of your website, and often many website owners and marketers do a poor job of converting their homepage visitors, particularly first time visitors. One of my best posts of the year I like to think…

8: Conversion Makeover: LandsEnd.com – Part 2
One of my favorite things about this website optimization blog post by Brian Eisenberg is that it follows a visitors actions from Google, all the way through to the LandsEnd.com and potential purchase, and talks about the importance of having a visitor follow a good ‘scent’ to improve conversions.

9: 22 More-Unusual Ideas to Test & Help Improve Your Website
Often many books and blogs talk about ideas for website testing – but I find that many of them always discuss the same types of tests, so I came up with a list of more unusual things to test and help improve your website.

10: Your Baby Is Ugly
I saved the best for last – surely one of the best posts ever if you ask me. Tim Ash really hits home something that website designers or anyone else related to making websites needs to know – understanding the harsh reality that your website actually sucks and needs help.

So there we have it – another year goes by, and 10 blog posts to help improve your website in 2010! Feel free to reply and mention your favorite other blog posts of the year too!