Vayu Media Articles: July 2009 Archives

Search Engine Optimization Friendly Web Design

on July 23, 2009 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Before we dive into site structure in detail, we need to first understand why site structure is important for natural SEO. A common misconception is that when you perform a search that the search engine goes out and quickly searches the Internet and brings you the results.

A search engine sends out agents (a.k.a. spiders, robots, crawlers) to surf the Internet and bring back what they find and deposit that information in the search engine's databases. So when you search, you're actually searching a database that has collected and stored information on the Internet.

Why is this important? Making friends with these agents or robots is a vital part of SEO.

Much of how you structure your Web site will be to befriend these robots, welcome them into your site, offer them something to drink and load them up with "relevant" information that they can take back to their home database. This type of site structure is commonly referred to as "Search Engine Friendly Design."

Search Engine Optimization Friendly Web Design

Developing your site to be "search engine friendly" is one aspect of SEO best practices. The idea is to simply design your site so that the visiting robot can read and take notes (or index) all relevant aspects of each page of your site.

If your site is designed poorly or doesn't have links to all of your pages, then the robot will bypass those pages and only report on what it sees. Designing your entire site with Flash or using images in place of text are great ways to be mostly "invisible" to search engines, because the robots can't accurately read Flash content or text embedded in an image (yet).

One Page at a Time (No SEO Shortcuts)

The first principle to understand in designing your site is that you don't optimize your whole site all at once. You're optimizing each and every page of your site individually.

Many people think they only need to optimize their home page and then they're done. Many times when you click on a link from a SERP, it will take you to a specific page on your site. Thus, SEO is a very time-consuming and tedious ongoing process that needs to be carefully thought out and executed.

Page Structure

So let's look at the most important elements on each page that will require attention. To understand these concepts, it helps to have some basic understanding of HTML. HTML is the language that Web browsers and search engine spiders read and interpret.

The first set of tags to look at are meta tags, which often have the mystique of being the magic solution to get top rankings in search engines. Not. The best value you will get is the ability to control to some degree how Web pages are described by some search engines. So let's take a closer look.

Meta Keywords and Description Tags

The meta keyword and description tags allow you to influence the keywords and description of your page in some of the search engines. These tags are typically located in the <HEAD> section of an HTML page and look something like this:

<head>

<title>Search Engine Marketing Tips & Search Engine News - Search Engine Watch (SEW)</title>

</head>

The meta keywords tag is sometimes useful as a way to reinforce the terms you think a page is important only for the search engines that support it. That's it.

The main benefit is to help reinforce what your page is about. I recommend no more than two to three keywords in each tag for each page of your site. It's also important that any keywords listed are directly related to the content on that particular Web page.

For the meta description tag, the text you want to be shown as your Web page description goes between the quotation marks after the "content=" portion of the tag. Generally, 200 to 250 characters may be indexed, though only a smaller portion of this amount may be displayed. Again, the idea of good meta keywords and description tags is simply to give the search engine some "help" in determining what a particular Web page is about.

The general idea here is that time is taken to interview or otherwise get to know the visitors that will be coming to your site and anticipate their needs and integrate this knowledge into the design and structure of your site. Search engines love sites that provide a great user experience. So as you consider your site structure please do not leave this out. You will reap great dividends by doing so.

Keyword Optimization

Hopefully you have taken the time to go through a keyword research project and have come up with keywords that you feel will perform to your liking. If not, please take a look at my article on Keyword Discovery 101 for ideas on how best to do this. Armed with a set of 1 to 3 keywords per page, you will embed these keywords on the page to help emphasize what the page is all about. In part 1 of this article, I discussed the proper use of meta tags. Now we will look at the other, more important tags that will help you do this.

<Title> Tag

The Web page title tag is one of the most important places to put your keyword phrases. Many Web sites suffer poor rankings simply because they miss this step. This is crucial to search engines and how they may decide to rank your site. Whatever text you place in the title tag (between the <Title> and </Title>) will appear in the top bar of someone's browser when they view the web page. It will also be the "headline" of the page when it appears in the SERPs.

Keyword Emphasis

Just like the title of a document, header tags contain the main message of what your page is all about. In the html code you can use <h1> your heading here </h1>. You can also use h2, h3, etc., representing other headlines on the page. But h1 is always the best to place for your most important keywords, since that tells the search engines that this is the most important headline. Bolding or italicizing your fonts is another way to place emphasis on keywords. This again works for the search engines and visitors of your site.

URL Structure

When setting up your folder structure, focus on creating descriptive folders and filenames for the documents on your Web site. Not only will this help search engine spiders crawl and understand your site better, it will also create URLs that are easier for others that want to link to your site. For example, if you were a user (or a search engine spider) which of these URLs would you be most likely to link to:

http://www.myreallycoolwebsiteimademyself.com/pages/01bde3assef/x2/1234dse33sew.htm

http://www.my-website.com/movie-reviews/Ironman-2008.htm

The content of these pages might be identical, but the second one is obviously better for search engines and Web site visitors, who will both have an idea of the page content from the URL itself. This will lead to better search engine rankings as well as potentially more incoming links.

Site Navigation & Internal Links

One of the most important aspects of SEO-friendly site design is the structure of your navigation and internal links. Make sure that there are easy to follow links to every page of your site that you want the search engines to see. A site map can help improve the ability of the search engines to crawl your Web site. Avoid embedding your site navigation in Javascript, Flash or other code that the search engines typically ignore or can't interpret. Include key search terms in your link text and focus on making your site easy to navigate for both users and search engines.

Finally, consider adding an XML sitemap to your site, which can be submitted to search engines to provide "hints" about the content and pages of your site. To get started with XML sitemaps, see: XML-sitemaps.com.

Armed with these basic guidelines and tips, you will be on your way to developing a great site that will bring you in good standing with search engines and also to your visitors. Talk about killing two birds with one stone.

Should I invest in SEO during Website Development? Atlanta SEO Company Vayu Media.

Vayumedia

on July 14, 2009 8:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

E-commerce applications for Web sites can take thousands of hours to build, and require patience and determination on the part of the organization awaiting its "new toy." The end result of such a project can be beautiful, much like a custom motorcycle or hot rod may look to an owner once completed.

Unfortunately, these product-shuffling and category-dealing applications can also wreak havoc for automated search engine crawlers out to index sites leveraging these applications. This can lead to less-than optimal performance for the site's pages within search engine results for related queries.

As with large-scale Web site designs and redesigns, putting SEO off until after the fact can be a costly mistake. An internal case study showed an example where a site owner could have saved in excess of $100,000 by incorporating SEO into the interactive design plan instead of going back and making changes to an existing site to implement SEO best practices.

Over the past few months, our SEO team has worked on redesigns of three sites using IBM Websphere Commerce for e-commerce functionality. We've also advised on Microsoft applications being developed for clients, in order for the end product to be "SEO-friendly."

It's important to clearly delineate between "SEO-friendly" and "optimized," because statements of work have to be explicit in describing the final product. Typically, SEO-friendly means that the application will be scalable should a full SEO initiative be launched in the future. Optimized means enterprise-level SEO was performed during the development of the application, and the finished product is more likely to rank within search engines.

Let's look at three high-level topics to consider if you plan to include SEO in business requirements for the development of an e-commerce application: internal process, out-of-the-box functionality, and content equity.

Internal Process

Unique teams from our Java/IBM Practice and our Search Practice work on all three of the Websphere Commerce Projects, with a little overlap at the management/executive level. Naturally, it's difficult to easily transfer learnings and experiences from one team to another in real time, but the common SEO bond has helped speed up some of this sharing. Post-project feedback sessions are crucial to for future efficiencies.

Each of the project teams has slightly different internal communication dynamics, but one common bond is the use of tracking tasks and their corresponding owners.

Some businesses rely on documentation of business requirements clearly explaining the "what" prior to getting to the "how." If there's no smooth system to ensure that issues are being resolved, it could be a nightmare for a project manager to stay on top of things and properly prioritize. Without this order, it would also be difficult to work in the SEO requirements and best practices because developers who don't have the skill set may overlook SEO ramifications.

Out-of-the-Box Functionality

Some e-commerce applications developers actually pause to consider SEO, and they're often rewarded when they find that many systems, including Websphere Commerce, have some additional functionality that they describe as "SEO-friendly." Using these out-of-the-box (OOTB) features can certainly be very helpful when it comes to designing a more search-friendly application. However, they aren't silver bullets. Our technical engineer has openly questioned some of the OOTB recommendations of some applications as being potentially more harmful than helpful.

If you plan to use the OOTB SEO features of any e-commerce application, run the ideas past an engineer with deep and current SEO technical knowledge. Although many features are helpful, some are potentially risky from a Webmaster guidelines standpoint. Websphere Commerce has an OOTB URL rewrite that, if done properly, makes the URLs look much cleaner than most WC sites. However, in terms of a continuum, the OOTB rewrite is still several stages away from the optimal optimized URL.

Content Equity

Content is still king, albeit sometimes ruled by his queen, linking. At the root, many e-commerce applications simply collect and distribute related products onto a dynamically generated page. Often, there is no consideration made for HTML content that describes the particular product other than the database-driven short and possibly long descriptions.

Unfortunately, in many cases this content is essentially "stock," and already has been published on countless pages across the Internet. Taking the time to create unique product descriptions can be very valuable.

At the category level and higher, place additional descriptive content on each page. This should help you gain traction within the search engine results for category-type terms.

Content equity is an idea I use to describe how this content actually ends up on a page. Most would think that every bit of content should be able to be controlled (as in the physical placement of the content on the page) by one system. Although in some cases this is true, there are often multiple areas on the backend that could be used to enter text onto the page.

Without getting into the technical specifics, it's important to understand that not all content is equal, and that it may need to get on to the site through a CMS or be coded into the page through a developer.

There are hundreds of considerations when building an e-commerce application, and SEO should be on that list, if you plan to rely on search engine-referred organic traffic. Ideally, the application should be at least SEO-friendly, if not fully optimized, when it comes off the showroom floor.

About Vayu Media:

VayuMedia.com

Vayu Media is the premier company for local internet advertising using search engine marketing and local search engine optimization. Vayu Media is taking advantage of the consumer shift from traditional media to internet based marketing. The company's focus is local online business marketing and web design services. The company's strategy to get out into the market place and consult with local businesses face to face has allowed it to make local business owners aware of the opportunity that exists online. In order to stay relevant in today's market every local business must have an online marketing strategy and Vayu Media can help.

Media Contact:

Jennifer Dunphy, Vayu Media LLC, (800)-456-1563 , info (at) vayumedia dot com

Does Search Engine Marketing make a big impact on businesses with a strong brick-and-mortar presence?

Vayumedia

on July 14, 2009 8:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Bankrate's CEO invested in search engine optimization to bolster revenues and profits. Wayne Gattinella, WebMD's CEO and president, values SEO as a key driver of his internet marketing strategy.

There's no question that Bankrate and WebMD live or die by their Internet strategy. What about more traditional companies? Does SEM make a big impact on businesses with a strong brick-and-mortar presence?

Let's look at three companies with varying degrees of digital presence: La-Z-Boy, D&B, and UTI. Each CEO took time during recent earnings calls to discuss their digital strategies with Wall Street analysts.

President and Chief Executive Officer of La-Z-Boy, Kurt Darrow, reviewed his company's initiatives to leverage the Internet during the F3Q08 (Qtr End 01/26/08) earnings call.

As is the case with most savvy companies, Darrow understands that SEM requires continuous improvement. He spelled out his initiatives and backed them with hard data. One measure of his success? Traffic to the site increased by double digits during the past several months. Online registrations also increased dramatically during a two-week period.

"First, we are increasing our traffic to our Web site through improved search engine optimization and paid search marketing. These actions, combined with our new marketing campaign, have increased unique visitors to our site over the last few months by more than 35 percent. Second, we are implementing tools that will encourage our customers online to provide us with their contact information enabling us to regularly send them information on La-Z-Boy products, services, and sales via e-mail.

For example, during our recent armchair quarterback national sales event we had more than 60,000 register online during the two weeks of that promotion. The third piece is to ensure the experience we provide to our consumers on the Web meets their expectations."

Consumers are looking for more than Flash animations and pretty pictures. Online retail consumers want value. They want information on the products they're researching.

"We are working on a strategy to leverage our site with online pricing and sales capabilities. With more and more consumers using the Internet to either look at furniture before purchase or to actually make a purchase, we are excited about the prospects of ecommerce and believe it will not only increase our visibility, but make it easier for the consumer to do business with our company."

Other companies are turning to the Internet for key acquisitions to drive their digital strategy. For example, D&B recently purchased AllBusiness.com after the successful acquisition of Hoover's.

The President and COO of Dun & Bradstreet, Sara Mathew, cited Hoover's as a model acquisition during her Q4 2007 earnings call. The reason she's bullish on the AllBusiness.com buyout has more to do with search marketing than almost any other factor.

Hoover's has proven to be a model acquisition for us and we will apply these lessons to ensure similar positive results from AllBusiness.com, which we acquired last month. As a reminder, AllBusiness is an online media and e-commerce company that operates one of the premier business sites on the Web. It leverages a proprietary publishing platform and a broad range of content to help users run their small businesses better.

And it brings a number of exciting new capabilities to D&B, including expertise and search engine optimization as well as search engine marketing. With the combined power of AllBusiness, Hoover's and First Research, we are confident in our ability to continue to drive strong double-digit revenue growth from our Internet segment in 2008.

The President and Chief Executive Officer of Universal Technical Institute, (UTI) Kimberly J. McWaters highlighted SEM during her recent Q1 2008 earnings call. As a business that relies on the Internet, UTI targets a young audience and measures daily unique visitors and site traffic. She stated:

In late December 2007, UTI launched a new Web site, UTI.edu, designed to relate to the critical Gen Y audience and key influencers on a more contemporary level. Early indications are optimistic, as traffic is up 104 percent versus a year ago in terms of visits during the month of January. Unique visitors are up 85 percent. This growth is attributed to a complete Web site redesign supported by a national advertising campaign promoting the URL, UTI.edu.

More important than traffic, though, is how UTI is driving visitors to their flagship site. Again, search engines play the key role. In fact, Ms. McWaters describes "natural search" as a "critical area" of her business strategy.

In the critical areas of natural search, UTI site visitation is up 800 percent versus the same period in the prior year. Given the reliance on premium price lead vendors, the success in obtaining free visitors to the site has the potential of growing into a competitive advantage for UTI. The growth in natural search visitation is attributed to the new SEO strategy employed at UTI.

About Vayu Media:

VayuMedia.com

Vayu Media is the premier company for local internet advertising using search engine marketing and local search engine optimization. Vayu Media is taking advantage of the consumer shift from traditional media to internet based marketing. The company's focus is local online business marketing and web design services. The company's strategy to get out into the market place and consult with local businesses face to face has allowed it to make local business owners aware of the opportunity that exists online. In order to stay relevant in today's market every local business must have an online marketing strategy and Vayu Media can help.

Media Contact:

Jennifer Dunphy, Vayu Media LLC, (800)-456-1563 , info (at) vayumedia dot com

Top Recommendations from Atlanta SEO Experts Vayu Media

Vayumedia

on July 13, 2009 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While Google offers advice on hiring SEO consultants, there's not much information about how to get the most value afterwards. There's an impressive amount of information and resources for webmasters on SEO related topics, but I'm pretty sure Google as a company has never hired a SEO agency and therefore isn't in the client/vendor relationship advice business.

The SEO client/vendor relationship must be a win/win or it will go bad/bad. For some companies it's not enough to get the results expected (or more) but to receive a certain type of service or support as well. For others, education to bring SEO work in-house is most important. Some companies want to outsource the whole thing with little or no involvement and others want the agency to justify and build a case for each specific code/content edit or inbound link.

Here are a few tips on finding and engaging SEO consultants for the long term:

1. The first thing is to find a good agency team. On the surface, this looks easy since just about every agency in the interactive-PR-advertising-webdesign-ITconsulting-marketinganything space also happens to "do SEO".

If you've worked in a particular market and industry, chances are you've already established relationships with various consultants. Word of mouth referrals are often times the best for all when it comes to search engine optimization or digital marketing work. Personal experience with a company is important, but it's worth noting that not everyone in a position to hire a vendor is capable of managing them. The same is true for people calling themselves consultants and their abilities to deliver services. Word of mouth referrals deserve some level of qualification.

Getting a new job or project that requires outside expertise often drives the search for new consulting resources. This is a scenario where it pays to be networked.

Obviously, a company shouldn't just hire whoever gets recommended to them. There need to be criteria and objectives, which I'll describe further in tip #3. Some companies like to use a RFP to describe the nature of the engagement and to define the specific criteria/expectations for vendor selection. RFPs for SEO with the expectation of being able to make apples to apples comparisons are tough since there is no "one right way" to solve every SEO problem. Regardless, the word of mouth referral from a credible source as well as fundamental expectations and goals should be enough to find a good agency in most cases.

2. Remember the Golden Rule. Consultants should be respectful and honorable to clients/prospective clients and vice versa. There are many reasons why people act abusively or rudely to consultants when they're trying to outsource. Sometimes corporate staff carry a bit of "baggage" from a past bad experience or they're simply annoyed at having to outsource at all. In other situations certain people become used to abusing vendors to look good to their superiors. Regardless, a client/agency relationship needs to be mutually respectful.

In the current economic environment, it's pretty amazing what some companies will do in negotiations for services. The video below makes a bit of fun of that:

Let's be clear that agencies are not immune to bad behavior. I've heard stories of SEO companies that develop networks of sites to boost client search rankings and then take all those links or micro sites away when the client disengages. Still other situations involve consultants that employ risky tactics without informing the client or never really disclosing what they're actually doing or reporting on what the company is paying for.

Besides holding one's own behavior and intentions to a higher standard, the way to ensure equitable treatment is through a structured agreement. A proper scope of work and project plan should be in place defining expectations and roles for both client and agency as well as mutual respect for expertise and meeting/exceeding customer expectations.

3. Think Through Your Objectives and Resources. Many companies don't have a great understanding of the mechanics or even strategies behind successful SEO or social media programs, which is understandable because that's why they need to hire an outside consultant. A clear set of internet marketing goals is essential for getting the most out of an agency engagement.

Many digital marketing agencies are certainly capable of engaging in a discovery process with companies to determine what goals are realistic. But reacting to the competition, acting on a CEO's whim (aka "ego search") or as a result of a well oiled pitch by a consultant are not great reasons to start a search engine optimization effort.

Understanding what business goals are to be reached is critical for a successful search marketing program. This means more than measuring rankings, traffic and sales because holistic SEO can both increase revenue and decrease costs in areas such as Customer Service, Recruiting and Public Relations. SEO isn't a "try it and buy it" situation. It takes a commitment in time and resources, especially content creation, promotion and analytics.

When a company can communicate objectives and has an understanding of resources available, a good consultant will have the information they'll need to leverage analysis for project recommendations. It's a lot harder to "score" or win the game if you don't know where the goal is.

4. Honesty Trumps Hiding SEO Skeletons and Abilities . Some companies have been left with bad decisions in the past ranging from hiring a lowball fee SEO consultant that "guarantees" specific search visibility to instances where certain SEOs used questionable tactics to shortcut results only to end up losing the value of those efforts or worse, being penalized.

If a past SEO consultant has been hired and performed questionable tactics, it will save a lot of time for everyone involved, if those efforts are shared up front. Most, if not all, of such tactics will be discovered by the new SEO anyway. Informing a new consultant of past efforts will speed the work it will take to employ any fix efforts and if necessary, steps towards reinclusion.

On the topic of honesty, it's even more important that internet marketing consultants be up front about their capabilities. Remnants of software companies selling "vaporware" still exist within many tech and IT focused SEO consultancies. However, saying yes to every project results in "over promise and under deliver" situations. Delays, miss-communications and overall dissatisfaction inevitably result.

It's better to be fully aware of capabilities and be open about what can and cannot be done at the service levels required. Doing so allows the consultancy to do their best work for clients that expect exactly that. Internet marketing agencies with a good grasp of their areas of expertise decline many projects that require services outside their specific areas of expertise. In some cases, the situation can be solved by partnering with other agencies. In others, it simply makes more sense to recommend another agency with the specialization the company requires. The goodwill generated pays dividends many times over in the long run.

5. Win or Lose with Implementation. One of the most common issues in the SEO industry involves situations where SEO recommendations are not implemented as intended , not completely or at all. This is a bit ironic, since, companies pay for the advice but there are many reasons why it happens. Some companies cannot justify the expense of making major changes to their content management systems or the potential effects do not justify the changes in content creation processes.

In other cases, the nature of the SEO engagement is structured as an audit and delivered as a report of recommendations to the client. Implementation is up to the client's web development staff or agency, copywriters and other marketing personnel without SEO consultant oversight. Some companies do this to save money or more often, because they see SEO as a web development/IT project and not as a marketing project. Client side staff can easily get tasked with many other responsibilities and the SEO recommendations may not all get implemented before other projects take priority.

Link building and content promotion are the most common victims where there is a lack of ongoing SEO consulting. In fact, many SEO companies are not particularly skilled at ongoing site marketing and link building let alone companies who do not market web sites as a specialty. On top of implementation issues are training and staying current with SEO best practices. As staff within an organization change, knowledge of SEO goes with them. New staff need to be trained or they will not continue with the ongoing content optimization and link building necessary for maintaining and improving search engine visibility.

About Vayu Media:

VayuMedia.com

Media Contact:

Jennifer Dunphy, Vayu Media LLC, (800)-456-1563 , info (at) vayumedia dot com

How Much is a Google Top Ranking Worth? Atlanta SEO Company Vayu Media

Vayumedia

on July 13, 2009 1:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

But how much exactly is a top ranking on Google worth? What can a top ranking on Google do for your business?

If your website isn't sitting at the top of the search engines, you're letting thousands of dollars worth of potential sales slip right through your fingers... it's that simple.

Here's why:

Over 40% of web users only look at the first page of their search results (the top 10 websites listed)...

So if YOUR business isn't listed on the first page, you're losing TONS of sales to your competitors who are!

Paid search results are worth $37.7 million per day

Google published its earnings last month. Google-owned sites (i.e. mainly the search results) generated revenues of $3.40 billion in the first quarter of 2008 (that's about $37.7 million per day).

Advertisers wouldn't pay Google so much money if they didn't profit from it. The dollar amount indicates how much it is worth to be listed on Google's first result page. And these numbers only represent the value of the paid search results.

Listings in the natural search results are worth even more

An iProspect study showed that 60.5 percent of Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL users selected a natural (unpaid) search result over paid search result as the most relevant on a sample query. 60.8 percent of Yahoo! and 72.3 percent of Google search engine users chose a natural search result as the most relevant

That means that you will get many more clicks with an natural search engine listing than with a paid listing.

In addition, studies by Enquiro and iProspect revealed that 60.5% to 70.0% of users trust organic results while only 30% to 39.5% of users trust paid results.

In late 2007, information about an internal Google tool that assigned dollar values to the search results leaked:

It turned out that the Google tool was used by members of the AdWords sales team to help prioritize new customer acquisition.

Natural results deliver a higher return-on-investment

As you can see above, a listing in the natural search results is worth much more than a listing in the paid results:

web surfers click natural search results much more often

web surfers trust natural search results more

Although natural search results generate the most amount of targeted high quality traffic, there is still a great deal of companies that continue to spend their entire marketing budgets on pay per click advertising instead of investing in natural search engine optimization.

Optimizing your websites for high rankings in Google's natural search results provides a much better return-on-investment than pay per click ads. The value of a listing in the natural search results quickly pays for the investment you have to make in natural search engine optimization.

About Vayu Media:

VayuMedia.com

Media Contact:

Jennifer Dunphy, Vayu Media LLC, (800)-456-1563 , info (at) vayumedia dot com

How Do You Improve Your Website Conversion Rate?

Vayumedia

on July 10, 2009 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Question 1.

What do you mean by conversion? Do you mean getting someone to answer the simplest call to action such as "read more here" or actually selling a product or service?

What you're talking about here are two different ways to measure your website. "Read More Here" is what I would call a variable affecting your conversion rate. I call these kinds of variables "Micro Conversions" because they are all small (microscopic even) steps toward a full conversion. A micro conversion is something that you should test and measure. "Read More Here" might get a worse click-through rate than "Click here to find out how to win a month's supply of vintage wine." So by improving this click through, you get the person browsing to take another small step toward your final website goal. By doing this, you improve your overall conversion rate, which in this case is to get someone to register or subscribe to win a month's supply of vintage wine. Micro conversions can be tracked by measuring the click through of links, or the read time for content, or the bounce rate for headlines and copy. Full conversion is persuading your visitors to do what you want them to do. In my example, it would be registering to win wine, but it could be subscribe to a newsletter, download an audio file, buy a product, sell a service or whatever, but it should reflect what your website's business objective is.

Question 2.

What strategies would you suggest when there is no "online" conversion possible? I need them to call me for more info, to learn more and to eventually give them a proposal.

There is no such thing as "no online conversion". You're looking for leads who will eventually phone you but the visitor is the one with the power. If you don't give your visitors a reason to let you continue to have a dialog with them, then they won't. Using opt-in is one answer. If, for instance, you ask for a name, email address and telephone number from your visitor so that he can then get useful information from you in the form of a free report or audio file, you do two things. First, you qualify the visitor as someone who is interested in your services, and second, you get permission to contact him/her again. You need to build into your website a powerful reason for your visitors to give you permission to email or talk to them rather than expect someone to pick up the phone. In your case, you say they need to ring you to learn more. Put what they need to learn into some form that they can opt in to get, such as a white paper, report or audio file. Then you have a conversion rate that is the percentage of people who give you permission to continue the dialog with them by giving you their email address or phone number so that they can learn more about your offering. People visit a website to get information, so give them the means to get it.

Question 3.

What if the product you sell is also sold by several others on other websites? How do you get someone who is browsing the Internet to notice your site and want to order from you?

In offline marketing, a successful tactic is differentiation. It's no different online. If you stand out from your competition, then you get noticed. What makes you different (not necessarily better, just different) from your competition? A USP makes an enormous difference to conversion rates. We improved subscriptions by 11% per month for six months by differentiating ourselves. The second point is that your site should be of use to your visitor. The one thing that all people online have in common is that when they browse they are looking for information. So give your visitors what they want in the form of education. If your potential customers become educated about your offer and take away something useful from your website, they will remember you over your competition.

Question 4.

How do you get the address, telephone number and name of the owner of any company that you're trying to get in touch with to see if they would be interested in what you sell?

You need to get permission from the visitor to get that information. It can't be done with any tracking tools available. There is a very good reason for this and it's called privacy. If you or I went online and could have our names, addresses and phone numbers tracked by software, it could be potentially dangerous. Imagine if you were online and were talking in a chat room about going on holiday in a faraway land for the next few weeks and your personal information could be gathered. The person who sees that information then knows when to go to your address and rob you while you're away. It's OK to track browser behavior because no personal details are ever tracked. I for one hope it stays that way.

Question 5.

What should one look for in the web logs to determine conversion rates?

Web log files are a problem because they record everything. Web logs record every request to your site's pages from search engine indexes, to email harvester software, link harvesters and visitors. So first you need to filter out from log files the information that isn't relevant to visitors. Then you're looking for unique visitors (not visits) or unique sites. Once you have that filtered figure, you have the approximate number of visitors coming to your site, still not close to 100% because of proxy servers recording multiple visitors as one browser, but it's as close as you can get with log files. Then you divide the number of people who complete the conversion action by the total visitors. That is your conversion rate. If you can get software that doesn't use logs like IRIS Metrics or log software that works out the filtering like Web Trends, it makes your job much easier.

Question 6.

What factors have the biggest impact on conversions on my web site?

The short answer is differentiation, target marketing, your site's relevance to your desired audience, measurement, experimentation, and most importantly trust.

Differentiation is the first step in the process. You must find a way to stand out from the competition. It should start with the domain name, and continue throughout your entire website's strategy.

Then in your content, your copy and your design, you must smack your target audience between the eyes. You have to find out exactly what it is they want and answer the wants and needs of that audience.

Relevance is hugely important, too. If you're running a campaign on Overture or Google with certain keywords, your audience should land at exactly the right place after typing those keywords and finding your website. So if the audience types "Red Vintage Wine" into Overture and your link appears, on clicking through they should be taken to the page on your site talking all about and selling red vintage wine. They shouldn't land at the home page of your website which has a small link to the red vintage wine section and 5 or 6 other types of wine for sale.

Measuring and experimenting is then the key to improving conversion rates. You can't improve conversion without measurement unless you're making educated guesses or you're just plain lucky. So get a good measurement system, learn what it's all about, and test your changes.

Finally and most importantly trust. You can't sell anything if your audience doesn't trust you. You can help them to trust you by prominently displaying your privacy policy, your shipping procedure, the fact that you use SSL encrypted protection for the forms on your site, that hundreds of satisfied customers have already bought from your store, that you make it very easy to find contact information such as a name and address as well as support via email. You could educate via your website with articles and 'how to sections' or newsletters and instill trust over time. In short, your prospect must trust you to part with his or her money.

What's next?

In part two of this series, we'll be looking at measurement software tools, the pros and cons of logs versus ASP vendors, average conversion rates, why it helps to track visitor activity using the software which is available, and what you should test and tweak to improve conversion rates.

About Vayu Media:

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Media Contact:

Jennifer Dunphy, Vayu Media LLC, (800)-456-1563 , info (at) vayumedia dot com

Keyword Research is Key!

Vayumedia

on July 7, 2009 1:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The more I perform search engine optimization tasks for myself and my clients the more I realize just how important keyword research is. It is so important that I wouldn't think of doing anything online until I have performed thorough keyword research and I'm satisfied that after having done this step of the process that I can settle on a particular niche or sub-niche based on my findings. Just to be clear, I wouldn't go any further into the marketing process until I was sure that I had done enough keyword research.

Whether you are going to use your research for search engine optimization or pay per click advertising campaign, it is a vital step in the process. Even if you are conducting social media marketing, keyword research can be helpful. You don't want to leave it out.

Here are some of the things that keyword research can help you make decisions on before you even start your marketing:

-The specific niche you want to serve

-Are there any lucrative sub-niches within your niche?

-What the most powerful and profitable keywords within your niche are

-What keywords your competitors are focusing on

-Keyword trending over periods of time

-You can identify keywords that are not useful to you at all

-Potential negative keywords for use in PPC

-How much you can expect to spend on your marketing efforts with the keywords you are planning to target

-Which keywords can easily be placed into groups for more effective management

As you can see, identifying the right keywords is very important - and, I might add, profitable. This step of the marketing process is so important that I wouldn't even think about marketing online until I've done it to satisfaction.

Website Business Models & Strategy

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on July 6, 2009 1:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The term "business model" became popular in the late 1990s, during the Internet boom, in part because many website businesses seemed to plan for generating traffic without a clear view of how or when traffic would generate revenue and profits.

The term itself is a bit too trendy, in our opinion. Talk of the business model ought to be recast in more standard business terms, such as sales, costs, expenses, and profits. As you develop your strategy, focus on how your website will benefit your business. What is its payoff for your business?

The easiest payoff to understand is sales and profits, but there could be many others. Some websites exist just to support sales by making a buyer's decision easier, some reduce costs, some improve customer satisfaction, some substitute for telephone communication or sales collateral.

While the classics below are fairly obvious, in reality there are infinite numbers of possible business models for websites. You might have a commerce site, content site, community site, portfolio site, or something else entirely. The main point is that there should be a payoff for your business. You don't develop a website just because somebody says you should. You develop it because it has a business or organizational purpose.

The portfolio site: like a business card on the Web

These sites offer information. Their target users go to them to find out more about a business. The sites don't specifically sell anything, but they do support sales by generating leads or making the viewer's buying decision easier.

What we call portfolio sites are the millions of websites that don't really sell anything but present the equivalent of sales literature on the Web. The restaurant sites that post their menus, the legal and accounting practices that post professional biographies and related information are just a couple of examples. The Web started with these kind of sites because they are relatively inexpensive to produce and provide significant benefits.

The basic commerce model: sales and profits

The simplest website business model is based on making sales and profits. A classic commerce website like Amazon.com or Buy.com sells products, takes orders, charges credit cards, and ships goods. Software and some information sites have the advantage of being able to deliver what they sell online, at the time of the transaction.

These sites normally offer their target customers the benefit of ease of use and selection. Amazon.com, for example, set the standard for commerce sites by offering a huge selection and a wealth of additional information on the products it sells.

The content model: based on advertising

The content sites work economically like mainstream network television in the United States, free content to users paid for by advertisements that users put up with. This is also a lot like the classic newspaper and magazine business, content paid for mainly by advertisers, with the exception that most magazines and newspapers sell for a small price while getting most of their revenue from advertisers. The "business model" isn't really new, just the fact that it is offered over the Internet.

Consider Yahoo! And competing Internet portals, newspaper and magazine sites, entertainment sites, and other types of sites that are free to browsers and make money by charging advertisers or sponsors for banner advertising and sponsorships. These are content sites that depend on Internet advertising for their revenue.

Community sites

Consider the business value of the bulletin board in a local supermarket. The market doesn't charge for posting notices on the board, nobody pays to read them, but the business takes the trouble to manage the board. The underlying business benefit, we guess, is that the sense of community builds traffic and loyalty.

This value is similar in the Internet community site. A typical community site offers email, bulletin boards and forums, a common focus for some group that has a common interest. Community sites are often started by groups, clubs, and government organizations. Some of the best of them, however, are sponsored by businesses that want to take advantage of the common interest. For example, a rock climbing community site might be sponsored by a local store.

Most sites are really hybrids, combinations

In truth most sites offer a combination of target user benefits. This site, bplans.com, for example, combines content and community with a touch of portfolio and commerce. Amazon.com combines commerce with content and community; Yahoo.com also combines content, community, and commerce.

Business model summary

How will you turn users of your website into money? Is there a plan for it? How will you measure it? For a hybrid site you need to make sure you explain how the hybrid will make revenue. Will you have a commerce portion? Will you be depending on sponsorships and advertising? Will you be selling services to your users? Make sure that you think about how you will ultimately make your website venture bring in real money.

Try to think of your website benefits in monetary terms. This is a good time to your sales forecast. The sales projected might actually be business benefits instead of sales: increased closing percentage, increased customer satisfaction, or increased retail traffic. Think about how those benefits might fit into a sales forecast, because then you'll be able to compare monetary benefits to expenses.

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