The Ebb and Flow of S. E. O.

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Scott

Keeping up with the Trends
You may or may not be familiar with Search Engine Optimization or S. E. O., but it has a huge impact on your website’s effectiveness. S. E. O. in simple terms improves your website’s ranking or position in search results (ie: google). This is done through a number of different techniques which have changed significantly over the last 10 years.

How has S. E. O. Changed?
Any site that was optimized for search engines between 1996 and 2002 is currently being penalized for the very same techniques that they were rewarded for during that period. In 1996 the major search engines met to develop a standard for Metadata use in web pages. This data was hidden from the user, but helped the search engine figure out what the topic and keys to the pages were. As people incorporated this into their websites, it was used by some to help the search engines, and by others to fool the search engines. In 1998 Google and Yahoo stopped using it for result retrieval, and in 2002 the last hold out stopped using it. As Metadata went out of favor, search engines began penalizing websites that used it when the search engine felt that the site was trying to fool it. One of the ways the search engines do this is by counting the number of characters in the metadata, the more you have, the greater the chance they think you are trying to fool them. However, before it went out of favor, a good S. E. O. would have crammed the Metadata full of any relevant terms because it helped them get to the top positions on the major search engines!

The Search Engines Fight Back
A search engines future is tied to it’s users. If they are not able to find relevant results to the searches that they are making, then they will use another search engine. It is therefore in the search engines best interest to provide the best relevant links possible to it’s users. Since this is a fight for their very survival, they will often penalize sites that they feel are trying to manipulate their results. In 2005 Traffic Power allegedly used some trickery to get their clients to rank better in searches without letting their customers know, and when Google discovered this they banned Traffic Power and some of it’s clients. The techniques that Traffic Power used were way outside of what is considered good S.E.O., but it serves as a good example to companies trying to rank high in the short term without looking at the long term.

Helping the Search Engines Understand your website
As search engines began to evolve away from relying on web designers to tell them what the subject of a page was, to figuring it out on their own, it became essential to make your pages easily read by search engines. This is one of the current fundamentals of S. E. O.. If your page can’t be read and understood by the search engines, you will not rank well in search results. That pretty Flash website that has lots of bells and whistles means absolutely nothing to a search engine, because it can’t interpret Flash! It is very important that your design and development firm understands how to code your website so that you are not making it difficult for the search engines to understand it.

The Inbound Link
Search engines have begun to place more and more value on inbound links. An inbound link is when another website links to yours. By doing this, that other website is in effect saying “This website that I’m linking you to has some valuable information.” The higher the number of inbound links, theoretically the higher quality the website could be considered. Of course, people also found a way around this method of ranking websites by adding their website to all sorts of different directories and link farms.

Today the inbound link still carries a lot of weight, but the search engines now evaluate the quality of the link. Through analysis they have found the link farms, and detect paid links very quickly once they pop up. It is only quality links from Vertical Directories and non-paid links on other websites that the search engines give credibility to.

How does this Impact your Website?
S.E.O. is no longer something that you do once and not consider doing again. It is much like a tune up to keep your website performing well, and bringing in the organic traffic from search engine results. For your marketing dollars, organic results referrals are your least expensive referrals. Relatively small changes to your website can return big results.

Posted in Keywords & SEO | Leave a comment

Improve Navigation and Calls to Action

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Scott

Conversion on your website occurs in part through navigation and strong calls to action. This leads your prospective customers comfortably through your site to find what they need. Conversion is considered any action which leads the customer closer to a sale. This could be a request for quote or even a CAD download. When you increase your conversion rate, you increase your sales and ROI!

Usability in Navigation
Usability studies tell us that a visitor should be able to reach what they are looking for within 3 clicks of landing on your website. For large websites, this number can be a little bit higher, but the user must feel like each click brings them closer to what they are looking for.

Learned Conventions in Navigation
Navigational conventions are another key component to visitor usability. A visitor expects to see certain things in certain places in a website. For example, if they want to get back to the home page, then typically they just click on the company logo. If your logo doesn’t do this, then they have to search further to find the link back to the home page. Having conventionally named pages is also important to this. Your contact information should be on a page called “Contact Us” or some variation on contact. If instead you have your contact information on a different page, it is still important to link to it with a “Contact Us” link so that visitors know where to go to get contact information without hunting for it. A website visitor is more likely to search for a competitor than work harder to make their purchase with you.

Don’t disable the users back button!
Another important navigational convention is to not direct users into a page that doesn’t have any navigational options. There is rarely a need to open a link in a new window, and when you do so you disable the browsers back button. The only time that you would want to open a link in a new window is when it is leaving your website. The thought process behind this is that your website will remain open, so that the visitor can return to it when they are done.

Left-hand Navigation
Navigation times have been shown to be faster on websites that have their primary navigation menu on the left side of the page. This is another convention that users have come to expect from websites that they visit.

Convert Visitors into Customers
The goal of a website is to answer visitor’s questions, and assay their concerns as quickly as possible so that they will advance in the sales cycle, or convert. Conversion on a website can be anything from downloading a document to purchasing a product or service through an e-commerce system. Conversion is done through calls to action.

Calls to Action
A user who is browsing your website may be interested in a product, but at the same time, may not want to go out of their way to find out more information on it. Having a request a quote on this product or add product to cart link on each page in an appropriate location, as well as in the upper horizontal navigation, will make it easy for users to take that little step to conversion.

For industrial companies, another form of call to action can be “download CAD drawing” or other file. This assumes that the user is going to incorporate the part into a project that they are working on, which in the end should result in a sale.

Combining Navigation and Calls to Action with Technology
A great way of helping the customer find what they are looking for, as well as convert them once they have found the exact product they need, is through the use of a Product Selector. This works through a series of choices about the specifications of the product they are looking for. Through the answers that the visitor provides, a list of possible products is generated, allowing them to then select the product from a list of a few or single products rather than a full product line of configurable items. At the end you provide a way for the visitor to add the product to their cart, or to request a quote on the product they have narrowed the selection down to. Because the customer has provided information and is vested in the process they are more likely to convert by almost 40 percent!

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What can you learn from Website Tracking?

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Scott

When your website is launched, the only way you will ever know if it is effective is if you have some way of analyzing it’s activity. This requires some form of website tracking. website tracking is an essential when it comes to the success of your website.

Discover what works
It is accepted that a successful website leads your prospective customer comfortably through your website. Without tracking, you will not know if you are doing this. Sure, you may get some conversions, but without knowing the statistics of people that arrive at your site, and then leave it without converting, you will not know your effectiveness.

Tracking also helps you locate the pages on your site that are poor performers. You can see pages that lose the customers (they leave the website) or pages that a customer views for only a few seconds before going to another page. This information allows you to make changes to your site to improve the visitor experience.

Types of Website Tracking
Basic
Server Side tracking of visitors logs activity on the web server and keeps track of how many times each file has been downloaded. This type of tracking is available on most web servers; however, it is highly inaccurate because it can’t distinguish between a search engine Spider (non-human website visitor) and a human visitor. It also does not accurately log all activity because of how the Internet works today. Large Internet providers like AOL or your DSL or Cable provider will cache website pages in order to make their network perform quicker. This means that if you (an AOL customer) request a page from XYZ.com and someone else (also an AOL customer) requested that same page 5 minutes ago, AOL will say “Hey, I already retrieved this page 5 minutes ago and it’s still in my memory, so I’ll just send it along to the new requester.” By doing this, they don’t actually get a fresh version off the web server for XYZ.com, and therefore there would be no entry in the log for the second request.

Moderate
Client Side tracking is a more accurate way of gathering information about your visitors. Because it runs on their computers, it can also provide you with a broader range of information such as the type of browser they are using (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc.) to how much time they spend on each page. Due to its nature Client Side tracking also solves the two problems that server side tracking has. It runs the tracking regardless of whether it is loading out of your Internet provider’s cache, and also doesn’t log the visits of search engine spiders. Pay-Per-Click tracking is another important feature of this type of tracking. It tracks which terms a visitor used to get to your website. You can then evaluate your campaigns effectiveness based on conversion rates for those terms. Conversions can be tracked in a basic manner with client side tracking by using a “thank you” page, which a visitor would only reach if they submit a contact form.

Advanced
The next level of tracking combines both Client Side and Server Side tracking. This keeps track of all of the things in the previous two types of tracking, but adds the ability to save information that customers submit to the website (contact forms, RFQ forms and more in it’s database) to its tracking tool. Imagine being able to track the path that visitors who are successfully converted take through your website. This would enable you to see what works, and work on improving the other areas of your website to work in similar ways.

Real Time Tracking
This is a fairly new technology that allows you to monitor on your desktop each and every visitor on your website and what page they are on, where they came from, and other information about that visitor. It even provides alerts when a visitor has been on a page for a specified amount of time you set, and allows you to initiate a chat with that visitor. By looking for signals that customers are close to conversion, the personal touch can close the deal. This type of tracking also includes the standard features of client side and server side tracking, but allows a real hands-on approach in the tracking and conversion of your website.

Ok, so it seems pretty cool, but what do I do with all this information that my tracking tools gather?

How do people find you?
This is perhaps one of the most important questions that you have regarding your website. Are you spending marketing dollars on PPC or advertisements? If so, then you want to know how those dollars are paying off. By tracking the source of your visitors you can evaluate winning and non-winning marketing campaigns, and adjust them in the future for higher success rates.

Where are your visitors from? This can be important for companies. One in particular that we assist is not interested in international visitors. Any efforts they see that are bringing in solely international visitors (marketing, PPC, advertisements) they want to be able to identify and eliminate. Since they can’t do business with these visitors, they don’t want to pay for their traffic.

Website tracking is the key component in your Internet strategy that allows you to evaluate how your website is performing and what areas you can improve upon.

Remember that what you cannot measure, you cannot improve!

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Determine the kind of website you need

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Scott

Many people think that a website comes in only one flavor and serves only one need. This assumption is incorrect. Selecting the kind of website that you need is a lot like selecting the type of house that you need.

The Mobile Home website:
You can start your website with some information about your company – this is the basic website, much like a mobile home is basic shelter. It doesn’t have many features, but it is a roof over your head, and provides people a way to gain information about your company.

The Starter Home
The Starter Home is a more functional website. It provides information on products or services that your company offers, and has basic interaction with the visitor. This website begins to focus on not just providing information, but interacting and converting the visitor.

The Moderate Home
This is the type of website that begins to bring in it’s own traffic. Quality content, articles, and product information make this site a destination rather than just another company website. Much like the moderate home, it looks good from the curb, but as the visitor takes a look around it provides multiple paths to the information they are looking for, and provides conversion opportunities along the way. This website also provides functionality like the Intelligent FAQ or a Complex Product Selector to begin to interact further with the user, and to start moving some of your customer service functions onto the website thus freeing up man-hours in the office.

The Estate:
This website brings the visitor experience to the next level. It combines the technologies of the other packages and adds e-commerce to it. By doing this we can bring a customer from a search on the Internet through all the shopping stages, and to the final purchase point. If you offer services that can’t be easily priced online, you can use the e-commerce system as an advanced RFQ solution so that the customer can indicate directly to you what they are looking for.

The Estate also incorporates advanced tracking of visitors, providing the owner with information on which pages the users visit, much like a security system would in a home. By tracking visitors and knowing, for example, what search term a user came in on for a visit that ended in a conversion, or sale, your company can target that type of visitor in the future, and tweak things so that you can increase the conversion rate for that visitor path. It is this advanced analysis and tracking that will reveal how your visitors interact with your website, and allow you to improve that experience. If you have a page that your typical visitor only spends seconds on before going to another specific page, you have identified a problem area of your website. Perhaps the link into this page is unclear, or the page itself contains little information. By tweaking this you may be able to convert more visitors. A user typically expects to find what they are looking for in less than three clicks, so if you can make that journey easier for the visitor then you will improve your conversion rate, and increase ROI!

Appearance / Curb Appeal
A visitor to your website, much like a visitor to your house, makes assumptions as soon as they see your website and as they look around the different pages. Browsing the web is a very personal experience for each visitor, and they are looking to fulfill the needs that they have. Does your website address the needs of each individual person? This is much like a person looking for a home. Home shoppers have a list of things they are looking for that will influence the home that they purchase. Some people will look for a large garage, others will look for a versatile kitchen, and others will look for storage space. Your website visitors will also have diverse needs, and if you are truly committed to using the Internet to improve your business then you should address these needs sooner rather than later.

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Web 2.0 Business 2 Business Commerce

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Scott

What is usability?
Usability measures the quality of a user’s experience when interacting with a a Web site.

Usability, as defined by Joseph Dumas and Janice (Ginny) Redish, means that people who use the product can do so quickly and easily to accomplish their tasks.

According to Jakob Neilsen’s research:
User testing shows that business-to-business websites have substantially lower usability than mainstream consumer sites. If they want to convert more prospects into leads, B2B sites should follow more guidelines and make it easier for prospects to research their offerings.

The problem is that many B2B sites are stuck in the 1990′s when it comes to usability, and their expectations for the website. By focusing the design internally they leave customers with unanswered questions, and prevent the user from finding the information that they are looking for. This does not lead to the overall goal of any business website – Conversion.

According to the research B2B websites lag behind overall in conversion, with on average only 58% of users able to complete their goals on a given website. The B2C (business to consumer industry) is significantly better with 66% of their users able to complete their goals. The truth is, there is alot more at stake with B2B, and this is a clear area that needs to be developed.

A B2B site should -support the many other stages of the buying process besides the add to cart — including the post-sales stages, which are crucial to customers’ long-term brand loyalty. In fact, many complex products require supplies, spare parts, or other consumables that are perfectly suited to traditional e-commerce.

In addition, B2B sites should be considered lead generators. Prospects use websites during their initial research and stick with the helpful sites during subsequent research.

Areas for improvement

The area for the greatest improvement is to open up your B2B Website. Instead of requiring users to register for something to get access to a portion of your site, allow them in. Even product support documents which are considered post sale information, can be of great use to a potential customer. Again, making the information availible puts you ahead of your competitors.

Pricing – When B2B Customers are shopping around it helps them to know a price range that they should expect. This allows them to quickly decide if the product that you supply is what they are looking for. Truth is, you are going to have great difficulty with a lead for a customer who expects your product to cost $1,000 when in reality it starts $50,000. Perhaps they are looking for a different level of product. This is an area that B2C has a great advantage in, because they are often selling homogenous goods at a set price.

According to the Neilsen research, when users were asked to prioritize which of 28 types of B2B site information mattered most to them, prices scored the highest by far (29% higher than product availability, which ranked second).

It’s time to have a closer look at how B2B utilizes the internet to improve ROI, and generate Sales. When you are ready for improvement, Contact Us for more information, and a Free Website Analysis.

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Snap Judgements – You have 1/20th of a second!

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Scott

According to a Nature Article researchers in Canada have found that Web site viewers make judgments about your site in as few as 50 milliseconds!

This of course has great implications in the field of Web Design. We have long thought that the design adds credibility to your company through the halo effect, but even the researchers were surprised at how quickly web site visitors were effected by web site design.

According to the same Nature article:

In the crowded and competitive world of the web, companies hoping to make millions from e-commerce should take notice, the researchers say. “Unless the first impression is favorable, visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors,” Lindgaard warns.

First Impressions Count

Ok, so your visitors have decided how they feel about your site, and therefore your company in the first twentieth of a second of their visit. First Impressions, are difficult to buck. People typically look for evidence to support their first impressions, in order to feel they made a valid assumption, sometimes even to the exclusion of contrary evidence.

The researchers found that sites that loaded quickly, that were simple, and easy on the eye were the most favorably rated by users. The second most important attribute was that the sites be easy to navigate. A user wants an easy, and direct path to the products or information they are looking for.

Have you been holding out on that Website Re-design?

Maybe it’s time to look at it again, perhaps you can’t afford not to!

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Top Ten Ways to Improve your Conversion Rate

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Scott

Quite simply, your conversion rate is the number of visitors that your web site turns over to sales or potential sales. A lot of times people only try to increase the number of visitors to their site, rather than focusing on developing the visitors they already get into sales, or quality sales leads.

10. Make the user’s experience pleasant

Avoid annoying colors, flashing text and graphics, and make the user experience easy. How do you do this? Develop the web site to the largest possible audience. Don’t use technologies that will restrict certain audiences. For example Java-script can be used to enhance web sites, however if your web site REQUIRES this feature, then many people on Corporate networks won’t be able to use your web site This equals an unpleasant visit, and creates a bad image for your company because the visitor doesn’t necessarily know why the web site isn’t working, and they may assume that it is broken.

9. Provide accurate and open information.

Users will be more likely to purchase from you if you don’t hide certain costs like shipping, or delivery fees from them until the very end. Make it easy for a customer to view your inventory (availability) and the prices of each item as well as any associated costs. Do they need a certain accessory in order to make your product work? Tell them about it in the beginning and avoid a customer service call later.

8. Don’t waste your visitors time.

On a Request for Quote form, don’t ask a potential customer for any more information than you absolutely need to process that request. This should boil down to Contact Name, Phone number, Email and information on what they would like a quote, or more information on.

7. Prove that the user can trust you.

Often this relies on the professional qualities of the design of your web site, the feeling of credibility the customer can derive from your web site Have your contact information prominent on the Web site A customer wants to know that if they have a problem, there is someone whom they can call.

6. Have a clear returns policy.

This will enable a customer to understand conditions of the transaction, and if you have a favorable return policy, provides one more way to convert the customer. If your competition doesn’t list their return policy, and yours is to your customers liking, then you have a far greater chance of closing the sale.

5. Keep Your user involved.

If a customer has ordered a product, send them a receipt, and when available contact them with tracking information. This can save your customer service department a large number of phone calls, and also re-assure the customer at the same time.

If you have a newsletter, make it easy for a customer to subscribe, and then you have a way to contact them should you come out with a new product or service, or simply have a sale that they may be interested.

4. Make a Positive Impression.

Even if you don’t make the sale that day, try to leave the customer with a positive impression. Often times consumers will visit a website a number of times before making a purchase. Because of this, updates, news and any changes you make will be noticed. If a customer sees that you keep the site current, that will also help provide a positive impression.

3. Offer multiple payment and shipping methods.

Customers like having options, and the more that you are able to offer them, not only in payment options, but shipping options, the more likely you will be able to fit their exact situation, and close that sale.

2. Always Create Value

People that buy from you are doing so because they like what it is they see. If a user adds a product to a basket, show them other things they might like as well. If they are viewing a product, the same applies – show them similar items. While they might not buy the product they first saw, other similar ones may not have issues that put them off the first. Up selling and cross-selling are tried and tested sales techniques. While you do this however, be careful to keep a pleasant interaction with the customer. Don’t bombard them with too many upsells.

1. Serve the customer.

Focus on what the customer needs, after the customer is #1! Design for the customer, add features for the customer in the end, if you serve the customer before during and after the sale, they will keep coming back, and even may generate positive word of mouth about your company.

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The First Step in Internet Marketing and Web Design – Keyword Research

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Scott

Keywords are the terms that appear in the pages of your Website, which users search for on search engines. Keywords need to be selected very carefully, and need to be updated as the website changes.

Keywords are also used for Pay Per Click Advertising. You place bids on different words, and the advertisements are displayed along with the organic search results when a user enters those words in the search engines. This is an amazing way to boost traffic, if you have done your keyword research!

How are Keywords used by Search Engines?

A search engine looks at all the words on your website, it then finds the most common words and phrases, and those are the words that your website will be found under. Obviously having words that pertain to your products or services are very important, or Key! This becomes a fine balance with maximizing your keyword saturation, but at the same time, not over saturating, because search engines will penalize web sites that have terms that appear as greater than roughly 8% of all the words.

We research the appropriate keywords for your company from a number of places. We start with your competitors, and look at what keywords they are using, and then we look at searches that are done on the search engines. This provides a foundation for adding the keywords to your site.

The Internet is changing everyday

Every day there are changes going on in the Search Engine industry, that have great implications on the way that your site is ranked on the major search engines. What one search engine values today, it may devalue the next, and effect your sites ranking. For example, in the begining META tags in the web page were of the most importance to search engines. Today they hold very little if any value. This is the reason you need someone to manage your SEO strategy. You need someone who deals with this every day, and stays on top of industry trends to help you navigate these difficult waters.

Content is King

The best way to embed your keywords is in your content. Search engines have grown smart, and are hip to the ways that people use to fool the search engine (black hat techniques). They even go so far as to penalize web sites that they believe are using these bad practices. The best way to have the appropriate keywords in your website is to write content for the website that is rich with keywords, but is still pleasant to read by a human. This is very important, after all, your customers are not search engines. This means that your content should be very descriptive, and avoid using generic terms in the content like “this product is what makes your device work.” Instead refer to the product by it’s correct name and exactly what it does. example: “this flux capacitor is what makes time travel possible.” It is then additionally helpful to put in as much content as possible on that device, because not only will the search engine be able to figure out what your web page is about, but the user will appreciate it as well!

Search Engine Optimization is a very complex topic involving HTML coding practices etc, but the first step to increasing your search engine visibility is Content.

Additional work can then be done on the web page to increase that visibility even further, and that is where we get into the Art of Search Engine Optimization.

We offer some very helpful Keyword Research Services.
 

Black Hat Techniques

Black Hat techniques rely on one form or another of tricking a Search engine into thinking you have certain content on a given web page. This could be hidden text saturated with keywords, that a human view can’t see, or it could be sending different information to the search engine than you do a normal visitor when the search engine spiders your page. Black Hat techniques are STRONGLY advised against. A professional Search Engine Optimization expert knows that these methods for fooling a search engine into giving your website a better rank, will in the long run (maybe next week, maybe next month) penalize your website, and even possibly get you blacklisted from the search engines. Just as people are always coming up with new black hat techniques, the search engine companies are always coming up with new ways of detecting these techniques. Stick to the White Hat Techniques that will not only work today, but will for you in the future, not against you.

Visit here for more information on Keyword research and density

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Manufacturing and Industrial Internet Support Ask your Questions, get Answers

Posted on November 13, 2010 by Steve

Possible topics Please ask any questions

How a Website can reduce Cost?

How a Website can work for you 24/7?

Things to consider when creating your Companies Website?

Reducing Data entry and increasing efficiency.

How Semi Custom Products can be sourced online?

Cad confiqurators and impact in reducing sales process and cost?

Your Business- Your Questions – we will help get Answers!

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