If you look at the Web experience as a train, the analogy can quickly acquire detail. First you have the Web user, let’s call him User. User is sitting in the Rocky Mountaineer in the glass-topped car winding his way through the spectacular online world. User has a destination. He’s searching for something. He has a target – he’s purchased a ticket to take him to Golftown. The ride into town is stellar, there’s gaudy banners, a large crowd and a pipe and drum band waiting for him at the station, but something goes horribly wrong – User doesn’t get off the train. He keeps going from town to town in an endless loop.

To get User off the train, as soon as he establishes a sight line with the station at Golftown, his train needs to be diverted from the main track and brought into a new and improved station called Conversion Junction. Here, the engineers of the new economy have built the gleaming infrastructure necessary to convert User from a surfer to a buyer. And many SEO firms are now offering their architectural expertise to help build your own Conversion Junction.

Search Engine Optimization has an add-on – conversion optimization – which appends to the surfer’s experience the goal of converting the surfer into a customer. At first glance, this seems like a big ball of common sense, but conversion optimization actually has a long and storied petigree.

The infancy of conversion optimization began with two brothers, Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, who pioneered persuasion design, a method of maximizing sales and marketing collateral by employing established psychological research methodologies to analyze their verbal content. The numbers don’t lie – significantly higher sales conversion rates can be realized when textual content is separated from graphic content and other design elements, and the words properly treated. Today, persuasion is a not-so subtle tool that motivates users toward action with the most persuasive websites focusing their efforts on gaining user’s trust through comfort and clearing any unsightly roadblocks in the direction of action.

As marketers and psychologists began to rub off on one another, it became obvious that small pockets of customers could not convey trends and tendencies because of the inability to separate chance events from real effects. Enter a bridge between the marketer and the psychologist – the statistician and his big bag of data. Statistical methodologies allow for the study of larger samples than psychological tests, and can supplant the urge to see patterns in small groups where none exist. From large-scale statistical methodologies it is not a giant leap to run the persuasion tactics in real-time in the real world, or online world, and the birth of conversion optimization methods are are soon upon us before we know it. Through real-time data collection, and the construction of marketing messages built from the results, a measurable increase can be realized in the scale and effectiveness of an online campaign.

To read an excellent article on conversion optimization, click here.