Archive for May, 2010
5 Essential Website Success Tactics for 2010
May 27th
Right now we’re going back … to the future! We spend a lot of time talking about the timeless SEO and internet marketing tactics. Here are the up-and-comers for the year that will continue to be important for the rest of 2010.
Google Local
It’s like ordinary SEO, only smaller and easier! Get onto that Google Local page and start prettying it up if you haven’t already done so.
Load time
This new SEO ranking factor might not carry a lot of weight, but it really is a no-brainer. Get a good host, and keep your pages lightweight.
Do your Facebook/Twitter/MySpace pages
Everybody else is on here … and if your business has dedicated fans, they are probably actually searching for your profile.
Create a mobile site
Even small, local sites need a mobile version to cater to users-on-the-go searching for goods and services through their smartphones.
Check your analytics
There’s no sense throwing money at SEO without knowing what results it is creating…
Most Internet Businesses Fail. Why?
May 25th
There are a lot of stories on the web about ultra-successful businesses … the ones that fail don’t get anywhere near as much press. The reality is that the unsuccessful businesses outnumber those that survive by about 15 to 1. It isn’t all down to their web marketing or SEO – here are three important reasons most internet businesses fail.
You weren’t doing what you were good at
The only people that millions of dollars with any scheme are those that have a talent in that area. If you aren’t a natural born seller, you’ll just join the 99.87% of people that lose money on the next Amway wannabe scheme.
Investing too much without income
Invest a little – wait til you see income from it. Repeat, and increase. Throwing a heap of money at something is a great way to lose a lot of money.
Information overload
If you’re trying to learn about business on the web, find an SEO company help you … and stick with them. Information overload can lead to fuzzy goals and ill-targeted strategies. And all the SEO in the world won’t help you then!
5 Quick Tips for Website Hosting
May 20th
Hosting – one of those silent SEO factors that can have a major impact on your rankings if it goes wrong … but because it goes right so much of the time, we tend to undervalue the importance of having reliable hosting. Here are WME’s top five tips for getting your website hosting right, and not jeopardising your web marketing results!
These gals know about hosting!
- Don’t host your website at the same place you registered the domain name. Most businesses are specialised for one or the other.
- Cheaper is not better. If hosting is cheap, you’re most likely sharing low quality resources which will cause site lag.
- Consider a dedicated server if you have a large, complex, frequently updated site. Having only your own website info on a single server is a form of insurance.
- Host locally – this will help boost your SEO rankings for local searches…generally the sort that you want!
- Don’t forget your hosts when you change credit cards! If your hosts can’t renew your domain, they might be taken off the web without warning. Not good for SEO!
5 Website Development Stages For Usability Testing
May 18th
Usability testing has been the flavour of the week, and if you’re as fanatical about this ultra-useful web marketing activity as we are, you’ll consider doing your testing at every one of the following five stages of website development…
- Planning stage
Before you even have a rough idea of what your site will include, do usability tests on your competitors’ sites. If you haven’t already used these sites, you can even use your own team as the test subjects! - Sketch stage
When you have some rough (but not too rough) sketches on paper, take them to a user sample to see if they make sense, and if the titles are clear enough. - Site design stage
Once you have the proper design formalised, print out some sample pages and do the same as you did above. Ask your users to explain the navigation. - Prototype stage
When you have your HTML prototype up, check that your users can get around (as much as is possible) and they understand how to do key tasks - Dress rehearsal stage
When you have a complete usable version of the site, spend a fair bit of time testing before you finish everything off.
Top Excuses for Ignoring Usability Testing … and Why They’ll Cost You!
May 13th
We’ve been talking about usability testing this week – one of the internet marketing activities that most people don’t bother making the effort with. Here are the top 5 excuses we hear for not doing usability testing … and why (just like not having your homework done!) making an excuse only hurts you in the end.
Is that a REAL excuse?
- We don’t have time
If you don’t have time for testing, you’ll have to find time to redo parts of your site down the track - It costs too much money
Ditto above … besides, if you videotape your usability tests subjects, i=this internet marketing activity is actually very cheap. - We don’t understand what we’re testing
There are literally hundreds of usability and web marketing gurus to outsource this to nowadays! - I don’t know how to do usability testing
I’ll explain in a single sentence
. Grab a few people from your target market, ask them to perform the basic operations you’re expecting users to engage in on your site and give you a running mental commentary, videotape them doing so and watch where they had trouble later on. - We don’t have the equipment
What equipment? All you need is a computer, a desk and two chairs, at a minimum.
You see … there really are no excuses for ignoring the most important beginning internet marketing activity.
Focus Groups vs Usability Tests
May 11th
In SEO, analytics is the be-all and end-all. If something shows up in the numbers, it’s good … if it doesn’t, then it isn’t 
. However, you wouldn’t be the first person to realise that it’s smarter to try and test some aspects of your site before you implement them – the way you do that is with focus groups and usability testing. These two activities aren’t the same thing – here we check out the major differences in their web marketing purposes.
Focus groups
These are usually used in the design stage of a website’s development, or during a re-design. A group of users will all sit around a table and give their reactions to a page, or aspect of the site. They are better to have in the initial stages of website creation – they help sort out overall, abstract-type problems that could affect your internet marketing later down the track.
Usability tests
These are much more specific tests, aimed at getting a typical user to try to perform a task on your website. You’ll have to incorporate some usability theory into your website design long before you actually do usability testing. Here are some guidelines for good usability testing:
- Grab a couple of users to test VERY early in the picture
- You can’t test on yourself. It just doesn’t work.
- Remember that tests won’t ‘prove’ anything – they’ll guide you in a better direction. No company in the world has the budget, or the will, to actually ‘prove’ something in the usability arena.
Ideally, you’ll use both of these internet marketing pre-development tactics to ensure your site’s success!
5 More Hot Tips for Submitting to Directories
May 6th
There are a lot of people that have given up trying to get into DMOZ … which is a great pity, since it is still a very valuable link and a staple of internet marketing! Today we continue our list of tips that can greatly increase your chances of success in getting into ‘the project’, or any other human-edited directory. We looked at the most important things last time – so read yesterday’s post first!
- Contact information
It’s one of the hallmarks of a legitimate business, and one of the things directory submission assessors will check for first. - Corporate-type stuff
This would include having a privacy policy, a returns policy (if applicable), guarantees, etc. - Outbound links
Share the love! Link to high quality sites, and don’t overlink. - Images that work
Your images should display in all the common browsers - Java and HTML that works
It takes a while to get your site listed in DMOZ, and you need to maintain it perfectly error-free until the listing is approved.
5 Hot Tips for Submitting to Directories
May 4th
A listing in DMOZ is now one of the base strategies that almost anyone looking to SEO a large site, or one in a competitive industry, must do straight away. It takes a long time to get listed, though, and if your submission isn’t up to all sorts of standards it might never make it. Here’s our checklist for DMOZ, and any other human-edited directory submission!
DMOZ - The new Yellow Pages
- Keep your content fresh
DMOZ cares, just like Google! Current prices, new blog posts. - Intact links
Make sure that you update links whenever you delete or move a page. Users hate broken links (you know that!), and directory submission evaluators do too. - Appropriate category
Not all businesses fit into a neat category. If you have competitors online, you could check which categories they are listed in as a guide. - Titles and meta descriptions
Make sure they are complete, relevant, and succinct - Domain names
If your domain name matches your site title, you will probably find it much easier to get listed … although even DMOZ knows that there are legitimate reasons for having a domain name different to your business name … for example, if your business is called ‘expertsexchange.com’!