Whenever I talk about good website design, I inevitably bring up sites like Craigslist and the Drudge Report. This is generally followed with gasps, a roll of the eyes, and complaints that the designs of those sites haven’t been updated in years. How can I use them as a good example of design?

Despite their “outdated” looks, both websites are one of the most popular online destinations in the world. The reason? Both websites make information easy to find. Enticed by well-written headlines, visitors are only a click away from reading a news story at the Drudge Report. With Craigslist, visitors are just a click or two away from finding and apartment to rent, a job, or selling something for free.

Don’t misunderstand. I’m not suggested you mimic the look and feel of those sites. For the services those websites offer, the look and feel works for them. Your website design needs to speak to your target audience too. What I am suggesting is that you go over your website and see how easy it is for visitors find information about your products or services, enter your sales pipeline, and contact your company. Can they find what their looking for in one or two clicks or is it a hassle for them to find what they’re looking for?

The easier it is for people to find what they’re looking for, the higher your conversion rates will be.

When someone types in a product or service you offer in to a search engine, you want to appear the #1 position-or at the very least the first page. In a way, having high search engine placement is like a receiving a free but qualified endorsement. If Google or Yahoo! ranks your webpage high, people tend to assume it’s because it’s what they’re really looking for. That’s why companies spend thousands of dollars optimizing their websites, creating back links, and writing SEO friendly copy in hopes of capturing and retaining a high search engine ranking.

The problem is that sometimes companies become too focused on their SEO efforts and not their online conversion efforts.

The result? Decreased conversion rates.

When optimizing your site for search engines meta tags and backlinks that help improve your SEO rankings and website description. Because they’re invisible to your visitor (unless they search for them), they don’t affect website conversion rates. However, SEO wrong copy can dramatically decrease conversion rates if not done right.

Marketing and copywriters often make the mistake of writing content for search engines instead of people. When writing copy for your website it’s important to remember that search engines don’t read websites. People do. You can write all the great SEO copy in the world, but in the end if the copy isn’t selling your product or service, your high search engine ranking is worthless.

The solution is to write great copy that sells. Yes, it needs contains the key SEO phrases but it must also be very conversion centric. If visitors can’t understand your company, what it offers, and see a call to action in about 15 seconds, they’ll leave. And odds are they won’t be back.

When focusing on SEO and SEM strategies, don’t let your efforts get in the way of converting visitors in to sales and leads. Without customers, your business won’t last long-not matter how high it’s ranked in Google.

In the latest issue of Website magazine, Peter Prestipino has a great article on the role of analytics and increasing your bottom line-something Sapha’s preached for years. Prestipino writes:

It might be the least sex of all Web Responsibilities, but analysis is arguable the most important to an online business’ success. Unfortunately, it is an area where most enterprises fail to focus their attention.

Let’s face it. If you can’t measure it, you have no way to improve what you’re doing or see if your wasting your time and money. There’s a reason Sapha packages our site-wide Fusion analytics with each HookTour we sell. Yes, we want to show you how they turn visitor into leads at an average rate of 15%, but we also want you to learn more about visitors’ behavior on your entire website. We want your sales team to have the prospect’s behavioral information (How did they arrive at your site? What did they do once there? How did they enter your sales pipeline?) before they even contact a client.

But don’t take my word for it. If you want to understand the importance of web analytics along with video analytics, social analytics, and CRM analytics read Prestipino’s article here and see for yourself how having the right information can increase your online conversion rates.

If done right, online forms are an effective way to turn a website visitor into a lead. However, most companies don’t put much thought into the information they ask for or how many fields they require a person to fill out.

As a rule of thumb, the more fields you have prospects fill out, the lower the lead generation rate. However, the quality of the leads tends to be higher. So if you ask for a name, email address, and phone number you may get more leads but the quality of leads will be lower than if you also ask for information like their title, number of employees, industry, annual revenue, etc.

Which approach is best? That depends on your audience, the product or service you’re trying to sell, and your sales cycle. If you don’t know what works, experiment with different forms and landing pages and find out. The one thing about conversion is that that a good analytics tool will give you an unbiased report of what worked and what didn’t. (And if you don’t have one, you’ll want to check out our conversion-centric analytics tool.) The more you know about your audience and their behavior, the easier it is to optimize your website and increase your overall conversion rates.