SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION SEO COMPANY

Whenever someone talks to me about moving online and starting a website, particularly an online store, do you know what the first thing I mention to them after they have shared their product/service/business idea?

It’s to make sure you look good, and look trusted. It’s the double up that is so important and often neglected.

Our partner BrightLabs have done a great job in explaining exactly what you need to have a good looking eCommerce website

But the other great point they mention is some elements that you should steer well clear of (we are looking straight at you blinky flash/animated gifs) which for one reason or another will not die.

So jump over and have a read and see if you can improve or be inspired for your own online shop.

For all those in the know - and especially those who aren’t, there is one strong commandment that you should live your online life by. What is this you ask?

CONTENT IS KING!

Content must be part of any Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy - and there must be sufficient, unique text on each page of your website. There should also be a strategy in place so that you can continually increase the page count of your website and a content management system is the easiest way to do this.

However, the benefits of great content extend beyond the realm of SEO and can be the primary way to build your brand awareness as well as conveying your key messages to your target audience.

There is also much debate in relation to how this content should be written - for the user or the search engine?

Well, content should always be written with the user in mind - however are there certain steps you can take to ensure that this content is also beneficial from an SEO perspective.

Writing keyword-rich content is an integral part of ensuring your website ranks well on search engines.

Now, there is a fine line in terms of what constitutes “keyword rich” the key is to think of the key phrase you want your page to rank for and centre content around that.

No need to get a calculator out to ensure your key phrase appears X times - but keep this phrase in mind as you generate your content and what you will find is that it appears naturally within the body of that content anyway!

Any reputable SEO firm will be able to guide you in terms of what content should appear on the website and will do the grunt work in terms of ensuring that the key phrases appears in all the areas that search engine’s look for. These key area’s tend to be your website’s navigation labels, page titles, header tags, alt descriptions (for images), image titles, anchor links and file names.

Traffic first - conversions next!

As your organic rankings increase, so too should the organic traffic numbers to your website. However - the important aspect to remember now is that you must lead this traffic to perform the action intended by your website.

Your calls-to-action should offer compelling benefits. Write them using action verbs and commands that convey a sense of urgency, such as ‘Discover’, ‘Sign up’ and ‘Buy now’.

Short and simple wins the customer

Most visitors to websites quickly seek out words and images of interest to them! It is important that your website caters to this style of reading so that you do not lose your potential customers interest

1. Write short, hard-hitting sentences

2. Keep your paragraphs concise and to the point.

3. Use sub-headings highlight and draw your reader’s attention to the main messages within your text

4. Use bullet points to help make your copy easier to readand to break up the text on your page

I’d love to hear any feedback or stories of success you have been able to achieve for your website with the addition of content.

This article is dedicated to all of our clients who decide to move/change/upgrade their web hosting. It contains information to help them through this difficult and arduous task. As simple as it may sound, there are many important steps that are crucial, miss one and you’re in trouble!

For whatever reason you need to migrate, whether your business has outgrown its current hosting, your current hosting is poor or you just feel like a change, follow these simple tips to reduce your headaches.

1. Find yourself a good web host and ensure that it can meet your needs. Check this wikiHow article to help you choose.

2. Ensure there is enough space and bandwidth to prevent down times and meet your needs. Also, make sure that there is enough support and an adequate number of email accounts and auto responders.

3. Back up all your files on your server to a few local storages (i.e. hard drive and DVDs). Make sure you also backup your entire database, email and other website files.

4. Upload your database and all files to the new server and be sure you retain the same file permissions and settings that were on the previous server so that you don’t end up with any scripting errors.

5. Ask your new web hosting service to test the database, scripts, and contact pages before making DNS changes.

6. Make a game plan for possible downtime as a result of updating the DNS to point to the new site location. Generally, it can take up to 2 days for all DNS servers to be updated.

7. Let your regular visitors and customers know of the planned upgrade to avoid putting anyone out

8. Do the migration when your website is the least busy!

9 . Reduce the likely downtime of your site and make DNS changes before moving the domain. Beforehand, make sure that your mail server is running properly on your new web host so that you don’t lose any important emails.

10. Take care if your web site is dynamic, delays on DNS update can cause complications. Some visitors may see the old site version while others can access the new one. To avoid any major issues, put up notification on a static page while the migration is being made. It’s possible to use a synchronisation tool to handle changes made to your old site.

11. Check and double check for any application incompatibility issues between new and old servers.

12. If you have more than one domain name to migrate, ensure you have enough time to spare when starting the migration process as the DNS updates may take hours or sometimes days.

13. Be sure that all redirects are working perfectly with the new hosting before terminating your contract with your old web host. You may like to keep both websites up and running concurrently for a period of time before cancelling your old contract as security for any unforseen issues that may arise.

Often I see clients who are caught up in the rankings and traffic trap where they can’t see the forest for the trees, the trees being rankings/traffic and the forest being the website objectives. We can get caught up looking at traffic statistics and fussing over individual keyword rankings that we can forget about putting effort into want we want website users to do. A big piece of the puzzle but an often neglected part of a solid online marketing campaign is conversion ability

A ‘conversion’ can be a sale, newsletter signup, completed contact us form or request for more information, or one of the main different possible actions you might want your site users to take. In the words of one of my favourite self-development writers Stephen Covey, “Begin with the end in mind”. Knowing is half the battle and the rest is reporting and clever design.

Why put all this effort into the conversion friendliness of your site? Simple maths.
Let’s say your site receives 3000 hits per month and has a conversion rate of 2%. This equates to 60 leads. With those 60 leads you might be successful at making 20% of them satisfied customers, leaving you with 12 of these a month. Therefore, if you could double your website’s conversion rate to 4% then you could in theory increase your leads to 120 and double your monthly sales to 24!

How do I do this you say? How can I double my monthly sales from online marketing? Check out these pointers and put them into action:

1. Make your content easily understood and user friendly. Put your content in subsections which concentrate on the benefits of your products/services, not the features.
2. Simplify your contact/lead form. Only ask of your customers what you need from them in order to consider them a lead.
3. Make smart decisions with smart data. Your website’s analytics data will offer a lot of useful data that you can leverage to improve the performance of your landing pages.
4. Make good use of images when creating landing pages. The use of images on landing pages can be powerful as they attract the eye and can help keep a user on the page.
5. Leverage landing pages for extended user engagement. Do you have a Facebook fan page, a blog, press releases, a newsletter or an RSS feed? Invite your users to connect with you through these mediums as they seek solutions to suit their needs.

For more information check out Christopher Wallace’s blog here.

It’s a simple question to ask, but one very few organisations have a clear answer when I ask. The reason I ask this is because of the way web pages are designed. They are designed as pages - not as an entire website.

Most of us when asked to plan the website would first think of what pages need to be included (a homepage, about us, services/products, and contact us is the default). And so you sit down with a designer and a programmer and work out how to build each individual page, and when we mention “page” you probably mean customising templates for each section.

And I am not saying that is not the right way to build a website - in fact, I think it’s a very important aspect that needs to be thought about. However, where you are missing out in that methodology is the fact that you haven’t really given much thought to the user experience.

User’s come to websites to complete an action, not to look at pages.

So when you go to do next revision of your website, or if you are starting one from scratch, rather than design pages, plan on how people should use your website.

Ask questions such as:

• How will we announce to people the special offer our business has each month?
• Where will new visitors/potential clients go to find out about us and what we are about?
  • Then - where do they go after that?
• How can someone make an enquiry?
• How can they find us on social networks? Do we even want that?
• What is the steps I would like them to follow to make a purchase? Where should they go to make it easy to use as well as informative?
• What should I blog about to encourage people to regularly visit the website?
• How will I monitor and track the performance and determine what needs to be changed next?

By stepping into that frame of mind and then have a discussion with your team, you will end up with a much better result.

What Inspired This Post?

Earlier today I was looking to have a discussion and make an appointment with a bank manager about a particular situation. I will not name any particular banks, but there were a couple where it was extremely difficult to find the local number of the branch, whether or not that branch offered the particular service, and whether I could actually make an appointment rather than spend time speaking to a call centre or wait in a line.

Many of the websites were pretty, informative, but severely lacked the ability to give me any direction. I think I’m pretty good at navigating around websites, and yet the simple process of locating the phone number for the local branch proved extremely difficult.

So please consider the experience of your website’s users. Test it on family and your friends (especially your Mum or Grandma) and then make sure they are having an enjoyable and useful experience.

An important skill to foster when doing business online is the ability to look at your product/service through the eyes of your customers, but this is more difficult than it sounds. Without being able to observe and experience the usual physical interactions as you might in a normal store, how do you respond to your customers’ behaviours and plan for future trends in these behaviours?

It’s a complicated affair which could benefit with mastery in psychology and sociology and a little ESP wouldn’t hurt either. One method which is a little more accessible to us all is to use ‘personas’. The use of personas in design goes back to early 1980’s where a pioneering software inventor, Alan Cooper, started to observe and interview potential users of his software and to build products that served them and not the other way around. He watched them work, defined their typical day, and observed how they interacted with computers and how computers integrated with the rest of their lives in order to create valuable and functional programs.

Nowadays it’s been coined as ‘goal-directed design’ and Cooper has written many books on the topic. Kim Goodwin, Director of Design at Cooper, speaks about why they use this method in their design process:

“We use personas because they are powerful design, measurement, and communication tools. We use them in design to help us avoid the elastic user problem–where “the user” is a total novice one minute and a technophile the next–as well as self-referential design, because designers are seldom representative of a product’s target audience. Personas also help cut through assumptions that certain tasks are necessary; if a task doesn’t directly help accomplish a goal, we can try to eliminate it. We use personas in scenarios to help us refine and test the design at the whiteboard, which lets us involve a “user” long before you’d be able to do a usability test. Personas help us communicate with each other and with our clients. It’s easy to explain and justify design decisions when they’re based on persona goals as well as solid design principles.”

Click here for a great little cartoon on how you can benefit from this method specific to web design. This technique is also very applicable when writing content for a website. Important questions to ask yourself in order to make your site more applicable and therefore more valuable to your potential customers are:

• Who are the users of the website?
• What are the users’ tasks and goals?
• What are the users’ experience levels with the website, and websites like it?
• What functions do the users need from the website?
• What information might the users need, and in what form do they need it?
• How do users think the website should work?

Whether you are designing a brand new site or simply creating a small blog post like this one; by putting yourself the mind of your typical customer and designing to their personality type could completely change the way you view your business.

It is amazing how often URLs are overlooked as part of the web design process. It is probably one of the most important aspects of a website as it’s sole purpose is to match a page on the Internet to a location. You would be amazed at how many development meetings I have been in where they have not even been discussed.

So what I propose with this series of posts is to outline the role of the URL, how they are constructed, and what happens when they change.

The Role of a URL (Uniform Resource Locator)

If you think of your own house for a moment and how important your address is (number, street, suburb, etc) for people to be able to locate your home, you can begin to grasp why it should be a part of every website development discussion.

Would you ever receive a piece of mail, or a visitor, if your house did not have an address? Think about how frustrating it is when you have taken down an address incorrectly, realizing only when it is too late. Or have you been in a situation where in a particular street, many of the houses may look the same – how do you locate the one particular to your situation?

All those above examples outline that there should be a clear address for your home on the Internet. Wisely, those that were a part of developing the Internet recognized the fact that we as humans remember names and words much better than a string of numbers, so they created URLs (Uniform Resource Locator/s).

What this enabled them to do is mask the true identify of the server computer (identified uniquely by an IP Address – a topic for a separate discussion) with a string of words. So in our case the IP address of E-Web Marketing is something like 122.200.85.129, but that is not what you type into your browser – you type www.ewebmarketing.com.au to find our website. How nice!

Can you imagine the confusion then, if your website has 2 different address that lead to the same location? Imagine if everytime you invited your friends to your home, you gave them 3 or 4 addresses, each with a different name. How would they ever find your house?

The same thing is true with URLs. There should only be one address to one particular page – it really is that plain and simple. So many fall into the trap of having multiple URLs for one particular page, and we as humans can fumble our way through and piece together the fact that we have arrived at the destination that we wanted to be at. But the search engines have a different issue. They follow addresses, and when they find 3 or 4 addresses all leading to the same page, how does it decide which one to choose? That is a very interesting and important question, and many SEOs have their own ideas and opinions.

I personally like to make it as easy as possible for the bots, and have implemented code and redirects to make sure that they know exactly what address they should be using.

What can you do to make sure your website has the same?

Speak to your web development or online marketing firm to implement the following:

• 301 redirects - when relocating old pages and capturing external links so they never 404.
• Canonical tags on key pages
• A standard across the whole website regarding the format of internal linking.

Your visitors and search engines will thank you. I promise.

Next week, we will look at the actual construction of the URLs and how we can change it to help the search engines and your users.

When it comes to determining how effective specific landing pages on your website are, it’s important to remember that conversion success can be dramatically increased when needless alternatives and disruptions are removed from the equation.

What does this mean? If a visitor lands on one of the pages of your site and is bombarded with too many alternatives and options the likelihood that they will actually enquire/buy will significantly decrease. It’s essential to remember that the design of the page should highlight the call the action you want your potential clients to take – make it simple and clear.

Ensure each page has one purpose
What is the particular objective of this page? Once you can define this, you can then drive your traffic to this page and with a clear message outlined – lift your conversion rate.

Remove distracting objects that may stop visitors completing your objective
Ensure each element on the page, such as images and photos lead visitors to complete your desired actions. If this is the case – then remove these elements as they will hinder visitors to your site from potentially converting.

What’s your call to action?
Highlight this, make it clear and test what works. If something doesn’t work for your visitors – then it’s time to try something new.

What about pop-us?
These can either work for you or against you. If you require users to fill out information or personal details taking them off-site to a new window or launching a pop-up can disrupt the visitor. Too many clicks can lead a potential client to abandoning their trail of thought and can lead them to disengage with your message.

In the current era of Internet usage, it’s still amazing that some websites don’t understand how to serve their customers, and make people jump through hoops to get in contact with them. Combining that with an overuse of new technologies, it is a recipe for consumer frustration.

The inspiration for this post came from when the author was trying to discover the location of a Sydney based company with some 30 stores across the greater Sydney region. After battling through a poorly designed website to find the ‘store locator’ button, the real nightmares began. The store locator failed on multiple levels:
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“Return on investment is easy to measure. You put money in, you measure money out, divide and prosper” - Seth Godin, an online strategist.

What about return on design? We hope that the money time and creativity gone into our designs yields an investment for our business.

It is easy to spend allot of money and time in design but not elevate in benefits the way we might expect. A product may have a better design then a competitor, but it doesn’t make any more business, or any more sales.

Godin explains the different impacts design can have on business:

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Negative Return

Some businesses have designs that actually harm their business. For example, the local store with the boarded up window, the drooping sign and the peeling paint is watching their business suffer because they have a design that is negatively impacting - that actively gets in the way of the story this business tells and the utility the local store delivers. The local store is ultimately losing money, customers and market share.

No Impact

Godin believes most designs fall into this category. While aesthetically important design is a matter of taste, not measurable revenue. You might not like the way the liquor store looks, or the label on that bottle of wine, but it’s not having any affect on sales. It’s good enough.

Positive Return

Positive return in design is dramatically increasing. A soft drink bottle to an online web service can generate incremental sales and better utility as a result of smart design.

The Whole Thing

Some products where smart design is involved are the products reason for being. For example, a Porsche 911 is purchased because the owner loves the design. Therefore the importance of sales is based on a breakthrough design. With the need to spend far more time and money then your competitors who are merely seeking a positive return.

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Evaluate your products against the above table, if you have a negative return on design maybe consider putting some time and effort into a fresher look and a well-run design. However don’t spend too much so that you are over capitalising and overinvesting unnecessarily. Watching a local store build a stellar custom building is the perfect example of an ill thought out design campaign.

Be smart in your planning, don’t skimp on a design. If you are aiming your products at a particular demographic, think about your design first. Who would purchase a poorly designed and unattractive looking boat over a sleek and modern design? When you rely on a design to make sales, skimping on this process would be foolish.

Godin teaches us to find the correct balance between what you are offering and your design. Being aware of the four impacts of design will help you make strategic business decisions.

Seth Godin