Though most marketers focus a lot of attention on traffic, site visitors alone will not make your site successful. You can improve site effectiveness by following your marketing programs through to their end results and comparing them with your expectations. It helps to think of a web site as a science experiment, complete with hypotheses. If you implement campaign A, then result B happens. By measuring your actual results against your goals you can make incremental changes to your site for greater conversion.
In order to hit your goals, you’re going to need to make a plan. Your web site should have a maximum of two or three goals. Any more and you’ll be spreading yourself too thin. For each goal you can come up with a general strategy to achieve it, comprised of highly-specific programs. You can experiment with these programs to find out what works best.
In order to come up with these programs, it’s best to take a retrospective view, as if we had already accomplished the goal, and think of ways we might have taken to get here. For instance, we start with a result, say achieving $10,000 in online sales of dog leashes in the first six months of the site. Then we think of a general strategy we might have used to accomplish that, such as informing veterinarians and kennel clubs of your product and website. Finally we think of specific programs to achieve that goal. In this case, you might ask veterinarians office if they will hand out free coupons to customers, exchanging free product for reviews, etc.
By using this funneled approach you can better evaluate the effectiveness of any program. An important point to note is that for each program, you need to put some thought into how you will measure performance. Measures will differ by program, but should be quantitative and meaningful to allow you to improve site performance.
Archive for the ‘Search Engine Friendly Web Development’ Category
Internet Marketing Tips: Planning Your SEO Friendly Web Site
Friday, January 20th, 2012A Site Re-Design Can Help Boost Your Site’s Traffic
Monday, November 21st, 2011Optimizing a website is certainly nothing new for online businesses, and more bloggers and tech journalists are incorporating keywords and relevant topics into savvy content aimed to generate buzz. But web optimization doesn’t end nor begin with key phrases, inbound links and other tricks, it actually begins with your website’s design. Is it visually appealing to your visitors, and will it work well with
search engines to provide as much information as possible? There are some strategies you shouldn’t live without, while other designs are doing nothing for your website.
Keep your website simple and easy to use. Advertisements are fine, but they should never block any content or become the center of attention in a website. Your services and features are the most important sections of your website, and it’s what brings people back for more. With that said, splash pages (intros, loading screens) and Flash have got to go. Because your home page rests at the top of
your website’s page hierarchy, it is usually the address with the most inbound links. When search engine bots scour for relevant sites, your splash page will offer little to no information about your page. Likewise, Flash doesn’t help your website’s appearance to search engines. As mobile use on the web continues to increase, Flash becomes invisible to many users, as well.
Design your site with a common theme. Attract your visitors and engage interaction with something they will want to regularly use. If you need some guidance in creating simple yet effective web design, use a blogging service such as Blogger or Wordpress. Headlines and body copy are your best sources for search engine text crawling, as these bots cannot pick up text embedded in background images.
Blogging services also let you develop site-wide font themes, include metadata for search engine communications and manage pages and posts more easily than any other sites.
How to Beat the Fear of Incorrect HTML for SEO
Friday, July 1st, 2011Confused by those 2 acronyms in the title? HTML and SEO? These 2 terms are imperative for your website to be indexed properly within the search engines and for visitors, customers and clients to find your site instead of your competitor. One site is making it easier than ever to decipher and decide which markup language is best for your website, Schema.org.
Schema.org is collaborative effort between the top 3 search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) much like the 2006 collaboration of sitemaps.org, which was an effort to standardize Web page submission and feeds.
Let’s break these 2 terms down into cookie crumbles:
Example of HTML behind a webpage.
HTML = Hyper Text Markup Language – code name for all the gobbly-gook numbers, letters, quotes, carrot marks and other unusual characters on your keyboard that make up the meat and potatoes of your website design and functions. For those who are not website designers and developers, this markup language is important and needs to be configured a certain way so search engines can find your website.
SEO = Search Engine Optimization – the secret to getting your website on the first pages of the search engines, powered by the protein of specific words and phrases.
Schema.org, according to a Adchemy blog post,
“with the Schema.org markup codes, they can identify specific products, services, people, locations, or events contained within their content. This will result in much more relevant organic search results.”
Great news for web developers and SEO firms across the country, who need a specific recipe for the search engines. But is it enough dough to get the results you need to get the blue ribbon?
