WHITE HAT SEO BLOG

A website funnel is a series of pages by which a customer will go through from the first page through to the final page (or thank you page). Typically, this is used in a shopping cart web environment, but is important for all industries.

Clearly, you want the user to buy your pair of shoes, or whatever your product and/or services are. In the case of shoes, you have a page with many shoes, then he chooses brown shoes. Your page then shows brown shoes, sizes, pricing, etc. Then you want the user to input the marketing information (email address, cc information, demographics, etc).

From this part of the funnel, you do not want to lose the customer by him or her going to another shop. You need the customer to click the checkout button and finish the procedure and complete the sale.

The strategy here is to keep the guests and make them register on the site. Many people prefer to shop anonymously and then create an account and then checkout.
The funnel works in reverse if the registration is needed before shopping is allowed.  The people who would have bought these shoes, leave, as the pages are too difficult to navigate and too difficult to complete a given transaction.

A rule of thumb is to see if 20 or 30% of them leave before completing the purchase. Then analyse the funnel and see where the fault is with this form abandonment.

A new site is sandboxed by Google once indexed. Google tries to find out what this site is all about, before releasing it for higher indexing by the Google SERPS.

You get what is called the sandbox effect:  It has not yet been ranked by keywords and is a new site. These sites wait longer to be at the top of a Google page and are basically punished; irrespective of how competitive they are, until such time as Google’s algorithm takes the site out of the sandbox.

There are many ways to try to avoid the sandbox. One of them is to check your site with the many sandbox checkers on the web. You input your URL and check. If you are sandboxed then the following may help.

A new site is given enough rope to hang itself. Google SERPS give you a fair ranking and essentially wait for you to screw that up.  Get natural links on your page (other sites linking to yours).

Possibly purchase an older site and ride on its coat tails for a higher ranking. This helps with the age bonus factor, where the site has been up for a long time and the SERPS therefore reward you.

Add no more than 10 new links to your site. Also, add quality content to the site.  Don’t just link to your homepage but also deeper pages.
And finally, try to get a higher ranking with Yahoo or MSN. That can only help you with staying out of the sandbox.