High Bounce Rates Mean It's Time To Revise Your Website Content
Updated: Feb. 2015 A bounce rate is the percentage of single page visits to your website where the visitor left from the same page that they entered. A bounce rate for a website can indicate many factors. It can be an indication of user experience and satisfaction, as a high bounce rate could mean that the reader didn't find the information valuable or what they were searching for at all. It can also be a sign that your landing pages or content aren't enticing enough to keep potential...
Pubcon 2007 Take Aways - Buying Links, Video, Buzz
I finally found a few minutes to blog after returning from Pubcon to an over-flowing inbox, voice messages, and rescheduled meetings. It was a great time, as always, with lots of knowledgeable speakers. Here are 3 points that seemed to be stressed by multiple speakers and attendees alike: 1 Buying links is not a good long-term strategy. Google and the other major search engines according to Matt Cutts are cracking down on sites who buy and/or sell links. Will buying 1 link get you black-listed...
5 Keys to Planning Your 2008 Digital Marketing Strategy
As 2007 comes to an end and 2008 is just around the corner, now is the time to review just how far you and your business has come. Did you improve your website, adjust content, include conversion, develop tools that benefit your audience; are you getting more out of this 24 workhorse than you did a year ago? If the answer is no, you need to start looking making changes. And if the answer is yes, then you are most likely already planning changes for 2008. So Where Do You Start to Plan Your 2008...
Google’s Did You Mean
You surely have seen it, or you might even use it as a spell checker daily. If you search in Google and spell your word or phrase incorrectly, Google will ask, Did you mean…? with a suggestion link to an alternative search result page. Sounds like a great idea, and usually it works very well. However, let’s imagine a scenario where your brand name is close to an actual word. If my company name was ‘Fintastic Fins’, and a potential customer heard about me and searched on...
Keyword Expectation: How Do You Rank?
Article Updated: Feb. 2015 Keyword expectation is precisely what you’d think, which is kind of the point. It is the expectation a person searching online has based on the meaning of the keyword or keyword phrase they type in. The closer you are to meeting the expectations of these searchers, the higher than chance that they will visit your site, stay on your website, and convert. While this is a simple concept, many businesses are often surprised to learn that they have been mistakenly...
Using Web Site Behavioral Clickstream Data As An Email Targeting Tactic
Using web analytics can help you better understand your customer’s needs and help you market to them more effectively. It has been found that emails generated from clickstream data saw a 9x improvement in revenue and 32x more in net profit versus undifferentiated broadcast emails The ROI of Email Relevance, Jupiter Research. Who has not completed a transaction? Use your web analytics to see which customers have abandon your shopping cart. After a few days send a reminder email...
Increase Web Site Traffic by Eliminating These 5 Web Site Mistakes
Web designers, programmers, IT specialist and business marketing departments are all involved in the development of wonderful, and functional web sites. However, few of these professionals are able to understand the ways to get your website to rank in search engines and how important that can be your website sales. If you want to increase website traffic, you need to see if your site makes any of these website mistakes and then take action to correct them. 1. Flash Home Page / Web Site Nothing...
Keeping Offline and Online Branding Consistent
Updated: Feb. 2015 The importance of having a consistent message should never be overlooked. Especially when it comes to your website. Recognition that carries over from print or traditional media to the Internet will greatly strengthen your branding and can result in brand recognition or perhaps the beginning of brand loyalty. If you are planning to update the your website design in the near future, here are some points to keep in mind to help ensure your message is clear and consistent: 1...
Small Website Changes That Can Add Up to a 50% Sales Increase
Updated: Feb. 2015 It was 10:43 p.m. last night when I logged in to check the daily e-commerce sales. The results; ip 20% for the day and for the month, up a whopping 50%! "Yes!" I said. This would seem routine if I worked or owned the company, but I don’t. I am their Digital Marketing Manager and live hours away from their business. I was ecstatic. All the little changes and adjustments we have been working on all year are now paying off, as they are swamped with huge sales increases...
The Importance of Domain Name Extensions: .Com vs .Org and the Others
Article Updated: Feb. 2015 Domain name buying, selling, and brokering can be big business. People will scoop up the good ones and hold them ransom or auction them off to the highest bidder. Your whole business model may be cut down when you are forced to buy ‘i-wanted-this-in-a-dot-com-but-they-only-had.org’. But how much will it affect business? Generic Top Level Domains gTLD According to Google, if you want to compete in search engines, having a gTLD is important. This becomes...
Business Benefits of Blogging
Updated: Feb. 2015 Often times, to a business, a blog may have an undeserved negative connotation. By now, most of us are aware that it is no longer exclusively for teens to hobnob about their weekend events. Blogging has become a powerful Digital marketing and business tool, when used properly. How to Start Blogging Perhaps a blog on your site still makes you a little squeamish. Do you prefer a newsletter, events page, industry articles section, or a press release section? Well, in all...
Template CMS Based Websites
There are many companies out there offering very attractive hosting and website solutions. They promise to give you 99% uptime and tools to build your own website in minutes for a low monthly fee. Many of these services are focused on certain niches such as golf courses, churches, hotels, etc. These are great solutions for businesses who just want an online presence and a url to put on their business cards. However, these template type systems generally have some huge seo drawbacks for those...
Mergers, Acquisitions and Websites
Recently we have seen several of our clients purchase additional businesses or be purchased by another company. My first question to my clients is "What is going to happen to the web site?" This is often followed by a "Huh?" and a statement like "We buying a business and not a web site." and that is where I reply you are buying both.
In many cases people know how to value a business but not how to value a web site or even understand how a successful web site plays into the success of a...
How Google Sees Your Site
In order for Google to even begin seeing your website, it needs to be able to send it’s Google bots to crawl your website. The way that these bots crawl your website is determined by a file called robots.txt. On most websites, there are pages that utilize CSS and/or Javascript, which are often external files that are linked to from your HMTL. In order for Google to access these, and fully understand your webpages, these files need to remain unblocked by the robots.txt file. Google...
The Importance of a Good Hosting Company During Website Launch
When you're ready to launch a new website, it is easy to forget the little things, like search engine rankings. Enamored by the glitz of a fresh looking website and new images, often redirects are overlooked and the old site is just forgotten. However, Google does not forget so easily; unless properly told so. Why Use Redirects Your old website and Digital marketing efforts worked hard to climb up the rankings, slipping past competitors and nestling on the first page. Often the old...
Website Asset Rather Than Expense
Updated: Feb. 2015 There seems to be a misconception by many businesses that a website is an expense. Of course this is true to the extent that a properly built and marketed website costs a decent amount of money, but so does a new building to facilitate your employees and day-to-day business. As a CEO or business owner, it is easy to see why a building, the equipment used, and your brand name and logo are assets to your business, but a properly optimized business website is now just as...
Importance of a Good Internal Linking Structure
A website’s internal linking structure is simply how each page links to other pages on the site. Seems simple enough, but surprisingly, many business owners or Internet marketers overlook how important it is to search engine optimization efforts to properly display and name internal links. How to Use Internal Links Each page on a website should link to many other pages on the site. The most common place to accomplish this is in the footer. It is out of the way, yet if users get lost on a...
Online Marketing: Before or After Website Development?
It’s not altogether uncommon; a prospective client calls in and says, We just finished our website and now we are looking for a marketing firm to drive in new business via search engine traffic and media buys. The first thing we do is take a look at their newly designed website after asking for their domain name. Sometimes, no matter how hard it might be for the client to swallow, we have to say, "You have a beautiful website that showcases your product/service as a high-end prestigious...
What exactly is a PING and how do I do it?
A Ping is a basic internet program that allows one to verify that a certain IP address exists and can accept requests. Pinging acts as a notifier to search engines that you have updated your RSS feed on your site. Once a search engine receives the ping they will typically schedule an immediate refresh of your feed so they have the latest content. This is the easiest way to get your blog or RSS feed indexed by the search engines. There are two easy methods to ping a search engine. You can use...
What’s a Title Tag? Why Does It Matter?
A title tag is coded into each page of a site and is meant to define what a page’s content is about. It appears in the title area of a browser window and will be the default name when you go to bookmark a page. It’s defined in the underlying HTML coding of each page. Title tags are a critical part of search engine optimization, or SEO. While not as important as the content of a page in gaining rankings in the search engines, it does get heavily factored by the search engines...