March 26th, 2010 — General
In our first article of this two-parter, we covered the issue of maximizing your sales revenues by either increasing traffic to your site or improving the conversion ratios. Of the two, improving the sales conversion ratios for the traffic you already have is the fastest and most profitable way of achieving revenue optimization.
There are two broad categories for techniques to improve sales conversion ratios – we dealt with traditional sales copy strategies in Part I, many of which have been borrowed and adapted from the direct copy advertizing industry, which traditionally handles “hard copy” or “old” media such as newspaper and magazine advertizing, or television and radio commercials.
Here with Part II, we shall cover online and on-site strategies which you also need to consider to get the most out of your website traffic. Continue reading →
March 23rd, 2010 — General
Part I – Traditional Sales Copy Strategies
Traffic is flowing through your site and all the indicators are pointing to good numbers from search engines, increasing return visitors and a lot of buzz, energy and excitement is generated. Now you have two things to look at to increase revenues – increasing traffic while maintaining conversion rates, or improving your conversion rates with the traffic you currently enjoy.
Of the two, increasing the rate of conversion is the simplest and fastest win for your site – it is cheaper to achieve and the results are immediate. It’s simply easier to sell to a customer who is already standing in your store than one who has yet to learn you exist! Continue reading →
March 15th, 2010 — SEO
Google has been collecting and storing users personal search histories going back for the previous 180 days; until December 2009 only signed in Google users had this feature enabled, but now we all do (unless we disable it).
Google says: this delivers search results tailored to your own tastes which are determined from what you have been searching for, and sites you have been visiting, in the last 6 months. If you are into dinosaurs, then when you search for “raptor” you are less likely to get search results based on the USAF fighter plane and more on the Jurassic Park theme. If you search for wines a lot, then typing in Bordeaux will get you more results aimed at the drink and not the French town.
Is this really a good step forward for Google? Continue reading →
March 11th, 2010 — General
PageRank is Google’s measure of link value with respect to your website – it evaluates the links to your site and allocates a value to them which is aggregated into a PageRank value between 0 and 10 (usually abbreviated to PR0 thru’ PR10). You can see a graphical measure of PageRank in the bar icon which is enabled in some web browsers, but this is almost always out of date (so ignore it).
You really need to understand what is going on behind the scenes to understand why PageRank is so important to your site success. Continue reading →
February 23rd, 2010 — Onpage Optimization
SEO techniques are broadly divided into on-site and off-site categories: off-site SEO deals with the techniques and strategies used away from your site, such as building links from other websites to yours. On-site SEO covers anything which has to do with optimizing your website itself to promote the site in search engines, and as such, it is firmly within your control. After all, you own the site and have full access and discretion over what is on the site and how the back-end is set up. Continue reading →
February 22nd, 2010 — Onpage Optimization
Your keyword research will have uncovered a number of keywords and key phrases, which you will be interested in targeting to optimize traffic generation from search engines. The difficult questions are whether you should be targeting multiple keywords on one page (typically the home page), or whether you should be diluting the same keyword across multiple pages of the site. In addition, should you be aiming for similar keywords and phrases within the same page or should you be splitting them up as well?
Continue reading →
February 18th, 2010 — General
Matt Cutts is a software engineer at Google and, in a recent interview, said that many people at Google believe speed should be a factor in determining search engine rankings. Web site designers and owners want fast loading website because it dramatically improves user enjoyment and minimizes abandonment of the website by surfers. As Matt points out, Google feels that when a user clicks through a search engine page to a website, that the user experience should reflect the faith and trust surfers have in the search engine to return relevant sites for their use. Continue reading →
February 16th, 2010 — General
An SEO maxim is “Fresh content means higher search engine rankings”, but is this really true?
Certainly generating fresh content is a great idea from the perspective of attracting and informing human visitors, but do search engines (and realistically we mean Google) give higher weight to new content compared to old?
The straight answer is that there are numerous benefits from ensuring your web site continues to have updated, relevant and fresh content. Human readers like fresh content, but search engines love it provided it is optimized, original and relevant. In fact, top search engine rankings without new content is a practical impossibility which shows just how important fresh content really is.
Continue reading →
January 26th, 2010 — General
Website usability is crucial because it assesses how visitors find your website from the point of utilization. If a website is user-friendly with potential customers able to find what they want and make the purchase easily, you are going to develop a loyal customer base. Visitors who find your site difficult to use will quickly leave and go elsewhere.
Website usability involves human test subjects being asked to perform certain operations on your site, such as proceeding to check out and payment. Usability tests allow you to check how easy it is to use the site, to catch glitches and issues causing visitors to be inconvenienced, frustrated or simply downright unhappy. Continue reading →
January 25th, 2010 — General
Web analytics uses visitor data captured for the purpose of analyzing behavior and helping to determine what aspects of a website are working and which are not. As a set of tools for helping site owners to tweak their sites and adopt strategies for maximizing the return on investment, web analytics plays a vital role in achieving and maintaining commercial success.
There are several vendors offering solutions but we are going to look at three solutions we think are the best on the market. Continue reading →
