your link to better business solutions

GOOGLE MAP API

by on Dec 12, 2008 (1) Comments

Let’s get lost!

Thanks to the Google Maps. Satellite based imagery and point to point detailing of terrains as well as route planning, that is what Google Maps is all about.

Imagine you go on a hiking trip, you are not sure of the terrain and you wish to explore. Google Maps shows you the terrain and plans the route. It is a free Web mapping service application from Google that powers numerous map-based services.

Google created Google Maps API to help the developers in integrating Google Maps into their own web sites with their data points. Developers just need to apply for an API key from Google, which is bound to the web site and directory given whilst creating the key. If you want to create your own web page you need to include Google Javascript into your web page. The Javascript functions add points into your Mapping application.

Initial Google Maps API lacked a geocoder. One had to manually add points, latitude and longitude but now it has been rectified.

One of the main adopters of this API was the real estate mashup sites. Today even the weather stations use it for local weather predictions.

The Google Maps API has been now integrated with the Google AJAX API Loader which creates a common namespace for loading and using multiple AJAX API’s. This allows one to use the optional google.maps.* namespace for all classes, methods and properties that are being used today into Google Maps API. This replaces the existing G namespace. This framework allows to load one API key for all supported Google AJAX API’s and also gives a common namespace for each API. This allows different Google API’s to work together.

Generally, people familiar with Javascript, object-oriented programming and Google Maps will be able to work with Google Map API.

Google Maps API adds support to Mapplets, i.e. Map + Gadgets, which allows the developer to embed externally hosted applications within Google Maps. The Mapplets run within their own iFrames that help developers to create mixed code from multiple sites.

The Google Map API uses the browsers preferred language setting when it displays textual information.

20 Ways a Company can Retain Website Visitors

by on Dec 06, 2008 (2) Comments

A company’s website plays an important role today. Companies today have an active strategy to attract customers to their website. A company often spends vital resources to maintain a professional website. It is common for a company today spend resources to market its website. It is hence important for a company to ensure visitors remain on the website long enough to generate sales or leads for the business.

A conversion rate refers to the percentage of visitors who take or complete a desired action on a company’s website. A company often uses conversion rate to measure the performance of its website. It is not standardised and it varies from company to company. It can include anything from a direct sale on website, lead, customer enquiry or online registration.  Achieving a higher conversion rate is one of the key objectives of an effective website strategy. Retaining visitors on the website for longer has a direct impact on conversion rates. The longer visitors stay on the website the greater the chances of conversion.

There are a number of factors that affect conversion rate of a website. A website’s usability is important as it ensures users remain on the website and are able to find the information they are looking for. This article discusses the important factors that can improve a website’s conversion rate.

There are many ways for a company to attract visitors to its website. Studies show that a majority of the visitors will navigate away and leave the website. Retaining visitors on a website is thus crucial for a company in order to increase conversion and generate sales or leads.

Here are some essential tips a company can use to keep visitors on its website for longer:

1. Simple Professional design of the website. A simple but professionally designed website encourages visitors to stay and read its content. The trend today is for simple, appealing & minimalist designs. Attention to detail is important to build trust among customers.  The design of the website should reflect the market it targets. Different designs may suit different situations and context.

2. Quality of content. A simple objective of a successful company website is to keep visitors on the website long enough to generate sales or leads for the business. The internet today is full of websites that offer poor content of little value to readers. In order to encourage users to remain on the site for longer, it is vital for the website to offer quality content that is well researched and presented.

A combination of mediums such as text, images, videos or podcasts can be useful to present content effectively and make it interesting for visitors. Simple issues such as spellings and grammar can be easily overlooked and have a negative impact on conversion.

3. Offer up to date & fresh information. Visitor loyalty is important for the success of any website. Very few websites rely solely on new visitors only. If you want your customers to visit the website again it is important to update the website frequently and offer new up to date content. After all a visitor will seldom find the reading the same content again and again of little value or interest. Adding new articles and content to your website will keep your existing users interested whilst attracting new ones.

4. Provide detailed information on products or services. Promoting products and services is one of the key objectives of a successful company website. Research suggests that offering detailed descriptions and images about a product tends to improve the chances of sale via the website. This especially important on the internet as customers have to decide based solely on the product information available to them. It is better to provide more information rather than provide only the important ones. If there is too much information it can easily be separated into brief and detailed descriptions for the products.

5. Offer free resources or benefits. Offering resources or other benefits for free on the website is another effective method to attract visitors and convert your prospects into online customers. Offering free tips and articles related to your business can make your company’s website more appealing to customers who can get additional information related to your products and services. Offering related tips and articles can supplement the information on your products.

6. Offer simple navigation. The navigation or menu on the website plays an important role in usability and ensuring visitors remain on the site and are able to find what they are looking for. Many studies have shown that poor or complex navigation drives visitors away to competing websites and thereby negatively impacts conversion rates.
Navigation should be clear and prominent. It is also important for navigation to be consistent across all pages so users do not have difficulty in finding it.

7. Provide pictures where appropriate. Pictures can speak a thousand words. From design point of view pictures make the site appealing to users and thereby encourage them to stay for longer. However graphics should not be overused as it can have a negative impact. If you are selling a product then offering product pictures is crucial to promote the product and encourage sale.

8. Add a blog. This is related to some of the points discussed earlier. Blogs can be beneficial for the website in more than one way. Blogs offer an easy way to add new content to your website and encourage participation from users. Blogs are very easy to add. A web design company can add a bespoke blog to your website quite easily or you can create one free within minutes using one of the many free blog platforms such as blogger or wordpress.

9. Provide Testimonials. Testimonials are effective in building customer confidence in the company. Confident customers are more likely to be retained or buy products or services.

10. Engage the customer. A successful website takes a number of steps to ensure visitors remain on the site and spend more time. There can be few better ways than to allow customers to interact with the website and the company.  Blogs, forums and other Web2 areas have proved effective. Simple techniques such as customer feedback form or guestbook are also effective in involving visitors. If you are selling a product then allowing customers to review the products is another useful method.

11. Offer Variety of Information. It has proven effective to offer a variety of information on the website and not just information about your company. As much as you may want to promote your products and services directly; your website visitors will not remain on the website to read pages and pages of information about your company and products. If you want retain visitors for long and revisit the website again, your company’s website should offer a mix of information. It is a common approach for successful company websites to offer a range of independent information related to their market. In order for a website to be successful and build a community, a company’s website should not only offer self promoting articles but also independent well balanced information that adds value for visitors.

12. Encourage opt-in email registration. Collecting email address of your website visitors can be an effective marketing tool for your company. This can be achieved easily by offering email or newsletter registration feature on in a prominent place on the website. The list can then be used for a variety of purposes including newsletters or direct marketing.

13. Allow visitors to bookmark your website. Providing a simple link or graphic ina prominent place of the website can have a surprisingly great impact on number of visitors bookmarking the website. This is very easy to do and will promote repeat visits to your website.

14.Offer something new. An average internet user comes across a wide range of information on a day to day level. There are over 40 million websites today and new ones are launched every day. Whilst it may not be possible for every aspect of your company’s website to be completely unique and innovative, there should be something new or unique on the website. Offering something new to your users can be important for conversions as it adds interested for your users and will encourage to visit again.

The internet today is full of marketing gimmicks and piles of hyped up information content to make it attractive to users but ultimately failing to deliver something of genuine value to the end user. Offering new information or services that have genuine value for users will build confidence in your customers and prove an effective branding technique even if the information is not directly selling your product or service.

15. Provide a site map. It can be quite difficult to find information on large websites. Any website can grow large with time.  Providing a sitemap clearly accessible from all pages of the website promotes usability and prevents users form getting lost. It prevents users from leaving the site due to these reasons. Sitemap also promotes better indexing of pages on search engines which can in-turn lead to improved conversion rates.

16. Respond to statistics. Many free website statistics and reporting software such as Google Analytics provide useful information on visitors but also and content on the website. This information can be used to monitor and test the effectiveness of the various website elements. The information should be used to determine what features are appealing to users and what are not.

As we have discussed in this article once our website starts receiving visitors it is important to retain visitors on the site and generate sales and leads for the business.

Remaining points to be added.

SEO: GOOGLE PERSPECTIVE [Part III]

by on Dec 04, 2008 (0) Comments

In the two previous parts of this post, I discussed mostly about the general factors that help in getting a site optimized to the highest order of ranking on the Google search pages. In this last part, I will concentrate more on some of the technical factors.

Images used in a site should have separate “alt” attribute: After going through this sub-head, those who are not that sound technically might have a question that what is this “alt” attribute? Well, to be precise and simple, the “alt” attribute is the alternative text for the images that are used in a site.  Suppose, a user is watching your site on a browser, that does not support images, and as a result, the user will be unable to see the images you have used in your site. In this case, the description used in the “alt” attribute will help to give information about the image, to the user. Apart from this, you can even use the image as a link, and in this case, the content of the “alt” text will function similarly, as the anchor text does. If you have planned to do something like this, you should always fill the “alt” text with a brief and simple description of the image. This helps Google to understand better about the page, to which the image link is directing to. However, it is advised not to use too many images as links unnecessarily, especially, when the same purpose can be fulfilled with simple anchor text or text links.

Proper use of robots.txt: Using robots.txt properly can help the search engines to know whether they can access a particular part of a site or not. The file for robots.txt is normally placed in the root directory of a site. You may not want some parts of your site to be crept by the search engines, may be because they might not help the users if shown in the search results. In that case, you will have to create the robots.txt file for that. There are certain other ways to prevent some parts of your site from showing in the search results. You can add “Noindex” to the robots meta tag, or can even use some of the Google Webmaster Tools to eliminate the parts that have already been crept.

Use of rel=”nofollow” for links: You might have a site with a blog, which is open to public commenting. In addition, these blog commenting pages are highly at risk to spamming. Therefore, in order to avoid this, nofollowing the links that are added by the commenting users, can guarantee that the reputation of your site is not hampered. In case, you want to assure for the user added links, you can avoid using “nofollow” for the links. However, while doing this, you will have to be extra careful. Because, you might link to sites, which Google believes as being spam, and as a result, the reputation of your site might be at stake.

These are the factors that I find as most important about SEO from Google’s perspective. I hope, by now you have a clear idea about how to go about optimizing your website in the highest order of ranking in the Google search results. So, do not waste any more time and get going with your SEO plans!

SEO: GOOGLE PERSPECTIVE [Part II]

by on Nov 29, 2008 (1) Comments

My previous article involved the discussion of certain basic aspects that need to be kept in mind while you are optimizing your website to be ranked higher in the Google search pages. I discussed about title tags, description meta tags and proper framing of the URLs. So, in this post, I will continue from where I had left off and will discuss few more points in this regard.

Content should be proper and of high quality: Websites having good quality content in it will definitely attract more users. Among all the points I discussed till now, I think, this is THE most important factor that helps in optimizing websites. Users can very well differentiate between good, mediocre and bad content. In order to make your content better, make sure its free from any grammatical, spelling or some other errors. Try to incorporate words or phrases in the content, which you think, users will mostly use as keywords while searching for a particular topic.

Anchor text should be given equal importance: Those who do not have an idea about what exactly anchor text is, let me throw some light on this. Anchor text is clickable texts you see as link, in a page. Many of you might take this point as “not so important” one. However, if anyone asks me, I will surely say that it holds equal importance, as the anchor texts help users and Google to know about the page it is directing to. You can have an internal link on your page, which is directed to some other page of your own site, or you might have an external link as well, which is directed to a page of some other website. Whatever may be the case, your anchor text should be such, that the users, as well as Google, can easily follow it, in order to have an idea about the page it is linking to. It is always good to use a bit descriptive, creative anchor texts of two-three words, or a phrase, rather than using some common words or text as “click here”.

Use of heading tags properly: What a heading tag typically does is to highlight the  content of a web page. As known by all, heading tags appear to be bigger in size than the normal text and this helps the users to locate the important components of a page very easily. However, one should know about the definite ways of using these heading tags. One can use multiple heading tags in a single page, and if they are used in a proper way, it gives the page a hierarchical framing, which in turn, helps the users to go through the contents with ease.  At the same time, use of too many headings unnecessarily not only makes it unprofessional, but at the same time, it makes Google and users confused as to where the content started and where it ended.

However, this is not all. There are few more important aspects, which I think are equally important that requires further discussion. So, do check out my next post.  I am not done yet!

The Complete Guide To Google’s Website Optimizer

by on Nov 24, 2008 (0) Comments

Why is it that some web sites are golden, compelling visitors to buy while similar web sites, perhaps even offering the same products at similar prices, fail to make the grade? It may be dumb luck on the owner’s part, but a more likely explanation is that the golden site is the result of careful design, testing, tweaking and testing yet again. Testing has grown into a core search marketing activity, but strangely, it’s also an activity that many search marketers either choose to avoid or don’t even consider at all.

And that’s a mistake. Good testing can not only help you get rid of stinker ads and landing pages, it can also help you optimize winning campaigns, improving their conversion rates and making them even more profitable. And testing needn’t be difficult or time-consuming, especially if you have the right tools. One of the best tools for helping you test and refine your search marketing campaigns is Google’s Website Optimizer. Even better, Website Optimizer is a free service.

Google deliberately designed Website Optimizer to be easy to use, even though the tool allows you to run complex, multivariate tests. At its most basic level, the tool lets you test different pages or combinations of elements on a single page to see how well they perform against a “conversion outcome” that you define. Google even claims that “you can launch a simple test in five minutes” in the video tour of Website Optimizer.

The problem is that to be effective, tests should be carefully planned to measure your desired outcomes. Another problem is that the results of your testing need to be interpreted properly so that you can be sure that any implementation based on the results will perform as expected. Testing is as much art as science, and it shouldn’t be done in an offhand or cavalier fashion.

Not sure where or how to start? Try Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer, by Bryan Eisenberg & John Quarto-vonTivadar with Lisa T. Davis. It’s a comprehensive guide to Google’s free testing tool, written for search marketers who are more interested in enhancing the performance of their search marketing campaign than in the analytic joys of multivariate testing. The authors don’t shy away from technical explanations when necessary, but the focus is always on the “whys” of testing even when looking closely at the “hows.”

The book is divided into three parts. The first part is a general overview of website testing and tuning using Google’s Website Optimizer. The first few chapters focus on the tool itself, but after that the focus changes to case studies drawn from the authors’ own search marketing campaigns. These are valuable not only as examples of how to test, but because the authors also share the processes and best practices they have developed to maximize the impact of the testing process.

Part two “What You Should Test” looks at more than 30 key factors that can impact conversion rates. These factors differ based on how conversion is defined, which also differs for publishers, retailers and lead generation web sites. Most of the chapters in this part follow a similar format, with sections on “questions to ask,” an exercise, “what to test” and “apply this to your site” tips. This is one of the best—and most thorough—guides to the overall website testing and optimization process I’ve read.

Part three, “Diving Deep For the Technically Challenged” goes into even more detail about the testing process, how things work, behind the scenes details of how Website Optimizer works and more. Meaty stuff for the more advanced search marketer who wants to know everything to gain a competitive edge.

The nice thing about Google’s Website Optimizer, apart from being free, is that it can be used to test campaigns running on Google or any other search engine. And the general practices discussed in the book can be applied to any testing tool, not just Website Optimizer.

Always Be Testing is an excellent book that tackles one of the most important aspects of successful search marketing. If you aren’t currently testing and want to know how to start, buy the book. Even if you are already testing and tuning your sites as part of your search marketing efforts, the case studies and best practices discussed in this book make it worth far more than the cover price when you apply the principles to your own campaigns.

SEO: GOOGLE PERSPECTIVE – Part I

by on Nov 20, 2008 (0) Comments

A few days back, I came across a blog post in a particular site, which had a poll comparison between the top three search engines. And guess what! Google was rated as the “most frequently used” search engine and the most popular one among the others. That was an easy guess as it is true that there is a bit of Google within all of us. The way in which Google has dominated the “search engine” scenario of the web, it is quite evident that, most of the website owners would want to have their site ranked the highest, on the Google search pages.

All search engines have their own parameters and ways to rate a site higher in the order of rank, in their respective search results. Google has it too. Most of you might know about the factors which would ultimately help a site to achieve that apex position, but you may fail to make the most out of these.

  1. Page title should be accurate and unique: When a site is displayed in the search results, its title appears in the first line. Therefore, the title should be such that, it can be easily recognized by the user and Google search engine and should clearly state the name of the site/company or the type of products/services it provides. The basic formation of the title tags should clearly reflect the entire content of that particular page. Moreover, your website can have N number of pages, but each page should have a unique title tag, so that, it becomes easier for Google to differentiate among all the pages of that site. Another important thing to keep in mind about title tag, it should be short and enlightening, because in case of long titles, Google only shows a small portion of the title.
  2. Try to add “Description” meta tag: Like title tags, description meta tags are equally important as Google uses them as a clip in the search results. The description can be of one or two sentences, or even a small paragraph. Each an every page of the site should have a suitable description meta tags. These descriptions (or clips) help the users to identify easily whether the content of that particular page is exactly what he/she is actually looking for.
  3. The URLs should be proper: It is always very important to have proper framing of the URLs. The pages should have URLs with words that are easily understandable to both the users and the search engines. URL of a particular page, in the search results, is placed just below the description or the clip. Therefore, if it is framed properly, it helps to know about what the page actually contains.

These are some of the important things to keep in mind when you want to optimize your website for Google search engine. However, as I mentioned it before, it’s not that easy. There are a lot more in this regard, that I shall continue in my next post. So, do keep checking this blog for the next part of this post. Thus, the best way to end is by saying…To be continued…

A Cure Is In Our Reach

by on Nov 19, 2008 (0) Comments

This week we launched a new site ACureIsInOurReach.org, for a Non-Profit , The Life Raft Group. It’s for a great cause.

Here is a little bit about the project:

“The Life Raft Group (LRG) launched this website, What does a cure mean for you? to find out exactly that…

We want to know what a cure actually means to those people who are dealing with cancer every day.  Unfortunately, cancer has touched us all in some way – whether you’re just concerned about it, you or someone you love has cancer, or you have lost someone to cancer.

We also want to show the scientific world that their work REALLY means something. We want to remind them that we are here, we are counting on them and we are real people.”

http://www.webdatamation.com/Portals/0/Images/ShowCase/cure_large.jpg