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Content and Conversion: Don’t Miss The Boat With New Visitors

by on Jul 31, 2008 (0) Comments

Don’t “miss the boat” when it comes to new visitors and increasing website traffic. The competition is fierce for attention and user engagement, and you only have one chance to make a first impression.

Don't Miss the Boat With New Visitors and Online Traffic, by SEO Design Solutions.

Each person online has a unique way they move about the web with a plethora of digital options. Some surf for fun, others for business, others for research, shopping or communication. However, regardless of the reason, the one unifying aspect that remains the same is, they browse with emotion.

So, before you break everything down to hits per page, site-wide impressions, start analyzing user engagement time for each page to get a better idea of what readers respond to, so that you can improve it if your conversion and click through rates are dwindling.

Rather than let your hits spiral into obscurity, perhaps it is time to see your site with “new eyes” to see things for what they are. If the content is mediocre, then call it how it is. Your visitors are honest enough to stay when something rivets them to their seat or leave when they lose interest, but let’s face it, there is competition for roving eyes and unless your go further than the competition, your website will only be an after-thought.

Content is the glue, your site either has the “It Factor”, the “It Factor” meaning that “visitor comes, visitor sees and visitor stays” or “visitor hits a snag and bounces away” to find a better deal. The last thing you want, at the end of the day is to sound like uncle Charlie telling the fish that got away story for the 100th time. Wouldn’t you rather provide a solid foundation instead that readers will link to and share as a vital resource (if that is your websites’ purpose).

Google Analytics: The Cool Tool

by on Jul 31, 2008 (0) Comments

So, you have set up your website (or blog), have put together a wonderful product to sell, and have devised a careful strategy to drive tons of traffic to the site/blog. Now, you are waiting for the cash registers to ring.

Is that the end of your efforts? Well, not likely!

Like every good marketer, you will want to monitor the performance of your marketing efforts. For a marketer using the internet, it boils down to tracking the trends regarding traffic to your website/blog. In essence, you will need to answer the following questions:

  • Locations of your visitors (Geographical Data)
  • Source of traffic (Whether from SEs, PPC advertising, display advertisements or E-mail marketing campaigns)
  • Keywords used to get to your site
  • Absolute number of visitors, and how they behave once they reach your site
  • Other miscellaneous information ( e.g., browsers used )

Of the variety of tools available for this purpose, Google Analytics is arguably the most popular and the simplest to use. Most site owners use some form of tracking for visitors. Google Analytics is unique in two respects. First, it is geared towards use as a tool for marketers, rather than a tool for webmasters. Secondly, it provides the trends regarding the traffic on your site, rather than data for individual visitors.

So, how does Google Analytics help you, an internet marketer, in your efforts? Well, it simply answers the above mentioned critical questions regarding your website. Subscribing to Google Analytics is easy, similar to opening an Adsense account. You are provided with a snippet of code which you need to incorporate into each and every page of your website. Once it is updated, Google Analytics provides simple and easy to decipher graphics on your dashboard. The data relates to—

  • Total number of visits
  • No of Page Views
  • Page views per visit
  • Bounce Rate
  • Average time on site
  • New visitors
  • Traffic Sources Overview, and
  • Keywords Report Screen

Needless to say, the statistics are absolutely critical to any marketing effort. It will help you to determine which of your campaigns is performing the best, which parts of your site need reworking, which ads are working the best, and whether you are getting the desired ROI on your marketing efforts.

All these cool features at an affordable prize: $ 0 (Oh yes, it’s FREE!). So what are you waiting for? Go ahead, and use Google Analytics to provide the much needed teeth to your internet marketing efforts.

How To Get New Web Sites To Rank Quickly

by on Jul 31, 2008 (Comments Off) Comments


100% Organic - A Column From Search Engine Land What is the difference between an unremarkable no value add thin ecommerce site, and a top ranked site? In some industries the difference is simply site age. Sites that were around a few years ago had fewer competitors, so it was easier for them to rank. As they aged they got trusted more, and some of those top rankings lead to many self-reinforcing links.

If your site is brand new and you want to compete against established sites directly on their most important keywords then you need to be good at public relations, have a better brand strategy, or have some remarkable feature that makes people want to talk about you. Without conversation and links it is hard to pass up sites that have been accumulating links for years.

But what if you could roll back the clock, and quickly grab market leading positions? You can.

Click to continue reading…

10 Reasons to Elbow Into New Web Directories

by on Jul 31, 2008 (Comments Off) Comments


New directories are a valuable tool for Web sites that need that extra boost in search engine ranking or in their number of visitors. They make for a great way to increase Web exposure and expand your Web site’s advertising. Since many of the top Web directories are quite expensive and take time to be edited, I have made a list of the benefits that can be acquired through new directories. Listed below are some of the many of the benefits that can be achieved by using new, unestablished Web directories.

A Small Business Marketing Success Story: K9cuisine.com

by on Jul 31, 2008 (Comments Off) Comments

Being small is hard enough. But being small and in retail? That’s like having two strikes against you before the game even begins. From setting up relationships with banks, to finding trustworthy suppliers, to building a loyal customer base, being a small retailer is a challenge many businesses can’t meet. And if you’re an online-only small retailer? Well, that adds a whole new set of pros and cons into the mix.

K9cuisine.com is one such business that’s so far been able to meet all the challenges of being a small, internet-only retailer. The nine-employee company sells premium pet foods and accessories from a warehouse in the remote town of Paris, Illinois — about 100 miles west of Indianapolis and 200 miles south of Chicago. Owner Anthony Holloway launched the company in May, 2007, because he was frustrated with trying to find quality dog food locally and online. After opening K9cuisine.com, he learned there were a lot of other pet owners sharing his frustrations. “Our business took off quickly and has grown at the rate of 50% each month for the last year,” Anthony says. The web site, he says, currently gets close to 5,000 unique visitors per day, and has generated about $2.5 million in sales in the last 12 months.

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Adobe: Flash gaining traction in the enterprise – infoworld.com

by on Jul 30, 2008 (Comments Off) Comments

While most people know Flash as primarily a multimedia delivery and development technology for Web sites, it is catching on as a front-end UI technology for business applications, an Adobe manager said Wednesday.

With Microsoft pushing its Silverlight technology as an alternative to Flash on the Web, Adobe has been promoting the use of Flash and its development framework, Flex, as well as AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) — a companion technology that brings Web-based Flash applications to the desktop — for use among businesses.

Peeking Into Google’s Use of Data

by on Jul 30, 2008 (Comments Off) Comments

Many things are scarier when they are in the shadows. This is especially true when it comes to the ways big companies gather and use data about us.

Google is showing users how it takes data from their history of searches and their location to customize the results it displays. So far it is not displaying similar information about data it uses to target advertising.