Creating Effective Web Sites
Does this ever happen to you? You design a new site. You love it. It’s the hottest thing you’ve ever made. Then you close the Photoshop file for a couple days. When you open it you hate it. What happened?
You were too close to it. You couldn’t see straight. Closing the project and revisiting it a couple days later gives you a fresh perspective. It allows you to be more objective.
Unfortunately, the same thing can happen at any point in the design and development process. It can happen with the writing, the layout, the programming or the marketing. The good news is that the Internet is fluid and nothing is locked in stone. If something needs to change, you can change it, because it’s digital. One of the best ways to get this distance is to just remove yourself from the equation. Even after a couple days you can still be so close to a project that you can not see it objectively, like someone who’s never seen the site before. That’s why assembling a group of people to test the site can prove invaluable. Preferably, use people who are in your target market. If you’re selling video games, don’t bother asking your grandma what she thinks. Find people who would likely use the site. But don’t just get their feedback. Actually watch them as they surf the site. See where they click first. What paths do they follow through the site? Are those the paths that lead to your desired action, like a sale through a shopping cart?
It doesn’t have to be a formal thing either. Many marketing companies spend millions on testing with control groups, and that’s not a bad thing, but if your budget won’t support that, then just do what you can. Asking five other people is better than not asking anyone at all. These informal straw polls can reveal glaring issues that otherwise may have gone unnoticed.
Try not to get offended. You’re obviously going to hear some negative feedback. Your initial reaction will almost always be defensive. Don’t try to explain why things are the way they are. Just take the criticism and evaluate whether or not it’s worthy of further discussion. Sometimes taking a couple days to digest the information can also be helpful, so you let your defenses down. If you’re even a little bothered by the results of the critique, just put it on hold and usually a few days will allow you to accept the feedback as a positive thing rather than a negative thing.
Hope that helps.
SEO Tips
As the ecomomy seems to worsen, more and more people are turning to SEO for their marketing efforts. SEO has proven time and time again to provide the highest ROI compared to any other form of marketing because of the global exposure that can be gained when a site is found in the search engines. But search engine optimization isn’t always inexpensive. In fact, many SEO companies are charging tens of thousands of dollars every month to help position their clients’ sites at the top of the SERPs. So how can something so expensive provide the best ROI? Simply because the return is proportionate to the amount spent. Sure you might spend a small fortune, but if your business model is designed correctly and your margins are sufficient, you should profit from the exposure. So how do you avoid spending too much?
Let’s take a look at a basic example to figure out how much is too much for SEO.
Let’s say you sell something that’s a pretty popular item, like iPods. There were 24,900,000 searches last month for that phrase. I suppose if you captured just a small portion of those people you’d be happy, right. So let’s assume that you spent $100,000 on SEO to get your site ranked at the top of Google when someone searches for ipods. If you could get half of the people searching to click on your listing that would mean that you’d get about 12 million visitors/month to your site. Not everyone is going to buy an iPod from your site so let’s shoot really low and assume that only 1 out of every 500 people buy from you. That’s 24,000 sales. Even if you only make $10 on each iPod, that’s $240,000 profit/month or $2.8 million/year. Don’t you think that the $100,000 spent on SEO would have been a good investment?
Let’s look at another example and see if the formula always works out.
In this case, you’re selling a map of the Denver metro area. Sure tourists might like it but only 1000 people per month are searching for maps of Denver and frankly, most of those people are getting their maps for free from the Internet. So if you were to spend a chunk of change to get your site listed at the top of Google when tourists are searching for “Denver maps” would you be able to make money. If you could get even 500 of those 1000 people to visit your site and even if 1 out of every 5 bought a map, you’d only sell 100 maps/month. Let’s say they sell for $12 each. That’s $1200 per month or $14400 per year. When you consider your costs for printing the maps you may only make $3000. Looks like you can’t spend much on marketing in order to sell your maps. When you have a small niche like maps in Denver, in order to profit, you also have to have an extremely high sales conversion rate. No amount of SEO can make more people search for your product so you’re stuck. You have a fixed number of people searching for your product. You have little control over that. Unless you have limitless marketing budgets, creating demand for a product is difficult at best. We always say that you can’t make a market. But you can serve an already existing market. Keep that in mind when you’re looking for opportunities. First find a market that’s underserved, and then find a way to fix their problem.
SEO Tips and Tactics: Google PageRank Trivia
Most people think that Google PageRank actually refers to the rank of the page. It does, sort of… While PageRank gives you an indication of how your page may rank, it could just as easily be called Larry’s Rank. Confused? Here’s a funny tidbit of trivia. Larry Page, one of the founders of Google named the PageRank after himself. PageRank isn’t talking about your page’s rank. It’s Larry Page’s rank. Did you know that? I bet you didn’t.
Until later.
Chadd Bryant
SEO Tips and Tactics – Inbound Links
It’s no secret. Inbound links are huge. Google loves ‘em. Every site that links to your site essentially gives your site a vote that helps to raise it in the search results. However, here’s the mistake that most people are making: They’re not paying attention to the text that is linking to them. You know, the blue underlined text? That’s called the anchor text. What it says it crucial.
Here’s what I’m talking about…
If you click on a link that says “internet marketing” you can expect that you’ll end up on a page that’s all about internet marketing, right? So Google realized that the anchor text that other sites use, is a pretty good indication of what a page is about. But if you get a bunch of sites that link to your site with a link that says, “click here” you’re wasting your big card. All that does is tell Google that your site is all about, “click here.” Does that really do you any good? Do you want to find customers when they search Google for, “click here?”
Not many sites want to rank well for that phrase. But they don’t know any better. They spend countless hours getting other sites to link to them and it’s all a waste of their time. Imagine if you simply asked the other sites to link to your site with the phrase “internet marketing” (assuming you have a site about internet marketing). You’d begin raising your rank on Google when people are searching for internet marketing. Now that’s time well spent. Miss that one little point and everything is a waste. I hope that helps!
Chadd Bryant
Internet Building Codes
SEO Tips and Tactics – Nested Tables
The use of tables has long been a no-no in the SEO world because of the need to use bloated, nasty code to describe each cell. However, the use of tables gets exponentially worse when you nest tables within tables. It’s not uncommon to see a table with another table in one of the cells. The problem with this is two-fold. Not only are you increasing the amount of code required to create the page, you’re also creating a deep-crawling nightmare for Google. Remember a couple days ago we were talking about deep crawling and how Google doesn’t like to search deep in folders that are buried within other folders? Well the same is true for tables that are “buried” deep within other tables. For some reason, Google hates to look deep into folders and hates just as much to look deep into tables. While you shouldn’t be using tables in the first place because CSS uses far less code to make the same page, definitely avoid the use of nested tables. Remember to steer clear of nested tables and Google will reward you.
Chadd Bryant
Internet Building Codes
