web design
How to Redesign Without Killing Your SEO
Apr 9th
For most website owners, managing a redesign while keeping internet marketing rankings intact is one task that is just a bit too technical. What your internet marketing firm has on hand is the book “68 Best Practices for Redesigning a Site Without Loss of Rankings’. Today we give you the ultra-short version 
.
Changing URLs
It is not well understood that Google does not rank domains, they rank pages. So, if you change from a .asp platform to a .php platform, all of your URLs will change, and as far as Google knows, you are a completely new site.
URL changes are managed with 301-redirects on your old pages, and eventually your new pages will start building up their own Google juice. The way you manage the redirects depends greatly on your site size and purpose … expert internet marketing advice highly recommended.
Adding Flash
Your site is doing well, and you can finally afford to add some Flash. As long as you don’t go overboard, and don’t include basic, necessary info with in Flash, you should be alright.
Changing content
Do this with ultimate restraint, if you already had great rankings. If your site wasn’t showing up in the top ten or twenty, then you can rewrite with gay abandon!
5 Things to Remember About Designing Websites for Teenagers
Apr 5th
To both adults and children alike, teenagers as a whole seem like a separate species …homo sometimes-sapiens mostly sleepius. And guess what … when it comes to web design, there are different things to keep in mind for teens as opposed to kids or adults, as well. Today we check out what you need to keep in mind for web marketing success in websites designed mostly for teenaged users.
The boredom factor
Turns out the teens have a lower tolerance for boredom that people of the regular homo sapiens variety. Who knew?! In terms of your website design, though, this means that:
- Video is good
- Music is good
- Flash and interactive features are good
However, sites that are difficult to figure out are also ranked as boring. So make sure your navigation is extra-clear, if you’re designing for the 13-18 year old market.
If it’s worth saying, say it big
Teenagers are just as irked by tiny fonts as their grandparents. They may not have to pull out their spectacles, but it takes too much time to read. “Boring!”
The holy grails of teen web design
Sites that find web marketing success with a teen audience often have features like:
- Instant polls
- Quizzes
- Games
- The ability to share pictures
- Ability to make comments
Simply being aware that you have a teen audience and being mindful of that when designing will often lead you naturally in the right direction.
Slippery Websites – Do You Have One?
Mar 16th
I love the metaphor of ‘slippery’ for a website – I can just imagine the site trying to hold onto visitors that are like egg white … they fall apart in your hands and slip down your wrists. Or the site itself can be like a slide – people arrive at the top, and quickly make their way off at the bottom. If your SEO can get people to your website without a problem, but have trouble making the money you should, we look at some steps to take to slow the journey.
Is this how slippery your website is?
1. Find out who you are selling to
So, so many companies say “We sell to whoever needs our products”. This may be true – but every company finds that a large portion of their customers are derived from a certain demographic segment. They might be mostly women, they might be mostly of childbearing age, and they might be mostly located within your physical area. Demographic analysis of your current customers is the first step to getting rid of that slip.
2. Understand your market
Understand their preferences for colour, their design sensibilities, the way they search for information, etc. Then pander to those sensibilities in your website, whether or not they also appeal to you. Everybody is different … and the only people you need to please are the ones that are keeping you in business.
3. Do usability studies
Jakob Nielsen is the grandfather of usability (often the grumpy old man of usability, actually J), and his blog at www.useit.com has lots of good usability info, hints and tips for where you might currently be going wrong. Of course, there is no substitute for an expert eye in this arena … many web marketing specialists work on usability and web design as well as SEO.
4. Build trust on your website
If you don’t have SSL security certificates, a https: connection for your credit card entry page, security certificates for programs like Verified by Visa, etc, there are few customers now that would entrust you with their money.
5. If you have an ecommerce site, link to other products from many places
If consumers can’t quickly find what they want, or don’t see any indications that you might have what they want, they will often click straight off. Use Top Seller widgets, ‘Also Recommended’ sections, and include ‘Customers who purchased this item also bought’ sections, a la Amazon.
Conversion optimisation is a big topic and you can spend years refining it – but without it, every SEO dollar you spend could be wasted.
20 Teeny Weeny Site Features That Make You Look Like a Spammer!
Mar 15th
After you’ve been hanging out on the street corners of the internet for some time, you get to recognise the characters – the websites – you can trust and those you can’t. In many cases it involves purely judging books by their covers – none of these features taken in isolation would indicate a spam site, by any stretch of the imagination. But when you see a guy with dark glasses, dirty clothes, greasy hands, and a big hat on to hide his face … you don’t go giving him your credit card details, do you?! Have a look over these features that can make you look like a spammer – and think about whether they might be negating your good internet marketing work.
There's all sorts of Spam sites - don't let your site resemble one!
- Domain names like .info, .cc, etc.
- High ratio of ads to content … most quality sites prefer to sell their service or their info, not everybody else’s
- Spam keywords! Pharmaceuticals, gambling or adult related terms
- Few direct visits, as opposed to search engine visits
- Not registered with Google Webmaster Tools or similar services
- Does not have an SSL security certificate … especially on the credit card payment pages.
- Not listed in the Yahoo Directory – that link costs a couple of hundred dollars but is standard for most sites that are serious about being found on the net.
- Contains multiple hyphens in the domain name
- Do not contain a privacy policy or copyright pages
- No physical address or phone number listed on the site. If you are taking payments from your customers this is a must – many people will check to see that you’re a ‘real’ company before they even consider handing over their sixteen digits and expiry date.
- Not registered on Google Local
- No social media initiatives, like Facebook Pages, Myspace profiles or Youtube channels
- No links from domains with .mil, edu or .gov extensions. Obviously these are hard to get – but it is just another piece in the distrust puzzle.
- Domain is registered by a party that owns a large number of domains – people that have a ‘harem’ of domains.
- Contains malware, viruses, spyware and automated downloads. Of course sometimes legitimate sites get hacked and have viruses inserted too … but you don’t want to be around those either!
- Misspellings! Everyone slips up now and then – but if you don’t have your site professionally proofed and edited, you definitely run the risk of losing trust from your visitors
- Don’t usually pay for PPC traffic, or end up close to the bottom of the sponsored results.
- The content on the site does not require a high reading level, as measured by the Fleisch-Kincaid scale that ‘grades’ text according to who could understand it
- Contain a large number of snippets of duplicate content
- Not likely to offer content in the forms of PDFs, PPTs, Word DOCs, etc.
If your site matches many of these characteristics, and especially if you haven’t upgraded your design in quite a few years, you’re likely to be seen as a spammer by visitors, although you might have the best of intentions. Get a web marketing expert to help you clean up the site … and stop letting visitors go to waste!
Web Marketing with Neuroscience – Tip of the Day #5
Feb 26th
People’s brains can do all sorts of tricky things … keep bodies alive, create the internet , that sort of thing. And if you’re in the web marketing game, understanding how they work can be of enormous benefit to your site, and your business generally. Today we continue our ‘Web Marketing with Neuroscience’ series, looking at short term memory and how it affects our internet use.
The limitations of short term memory
Short term memory is also sometimes called working memory. If our brains were like computers (fortunately AND unfortunately, they are not), this would be our RAM. Our short term memory has been observed to be able to hold between 4 and 9 items, depending on the test and the subject. The time duration is highly variable, but averages usually run around 20 seconds. Given the amount of info that we are exposed to on the internet, it makes sense to work with our website visitors’ short term memory limitations as much as possible. So how do you do that?
Working with short term memory
This is actually easier than you might think, and you’ll probably recognise many of the best practice guidelines from other posts we’ve done on usability and web design. So, before you forget what we’re talking about (!), here’s is how you can work within the limits of human short term memory on the web:
- Make sure your pages load quickly: If it takes so long for a page to load that users forget why they clicked it, they’ll just as likely click straight off. Don’t tempt people to look at other tabs while they’re in the middle of the checkout process on your site!
- Change the colour of links that have been visited: This is a site-specific issue, not a browser or computer issue. Every site owner has the responsibility to change the colour of visited links, so users know where they’ve been and feel like they’re running in circles.
- Categorise well: Try to create narrow categories and narrow pages … although not at the expense of maintaining a manageable menu structure.
- Provide a link to the homepage on every page: That way if people forget where they are, there is an emergency link to reset their search.
- Use breadcrumbs: Although, only if appropriate. Not all sites will naturally suit breadcrumbs.
- Offer Live Help and other assistance links within the body of the page: If people have to navigate to the Help section and then back to where they were, chances are that you’ll lose either a purchase or a visitor.
We recommend you check out the rest of our Web Marketing with Neuroscience posts as well … the brain is a fascinating thing, but especially when it could be making you more money .
Web Marketing with Neuroscience – Tip of the Day #4
Feb 12th
There are so many studies that rely on our understanding of neuroscience – marketing is perhaps the most prominent of these (outside of brain surgery!). Today we are looking at how you can improve your connections with customers, your web marketing in general, and of course your SEO performance, by paying attention to how your customers minds work and tailoring your website to make them take action.
Redback spider's mating ritual effectively combines all three important elements ... mating, food and danger!
Can I eat it? Will it eat me? Can I ‘mate’ with it?
The neuroscience: Whenever our brain encounters something new in the world, it tries to determine three things of it. These three things are closely linked to both personal survival and the survival of our species, which is an innate drive:
- Can I eat it?
- Will it eat me?
- Can I mate with it? (alternatively known as ‘Will it mate with me?’)
The web marketing tactic: Where you can, try to incorporate elements of each of the three ‘items’ these questions represent into your web content and marketing for it. If you can relate your product to food, love or danger, your visitors’ brains are wired to instantly pay attention. They will be more likely to read more content, more likely to explore the site further, and more likely to engage with your message than if you have a dry, corporate site. To incorporate food, love and danger into your website, you can do things like:
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- Use photos of attractive women or men in your marketing – or even ordinary women or men with suggestive expressions or poses
- Use a little lateral thinking to connect pictures of food or people eating with your products or services. Happy people are usually a good illustration for a wide variety of products – juts pop a little food in their mouths!
- Use a little lateral thinking to connect pictures of dangerous things with your content
- Highlight in your web copy how your products either help you become more attractive, avoid danger, or remain able to feed yourself (usually related to earning or saving money).
Of note: As with all of these neuroscience tips, don’t overdo it. People can see straight through it when you stretch logic to fit one of these characteristics in, and it usually garners more derision than genuine interest.
3 Ways to Improve Ecommerce Web Marketing Success
Feb 10th
Ecommerce sites have created some of the greatest success stories in the world wide web. Just think Amazon and eBay, and you’ll start to get an idea of how many dollars are generated through ecommerce and the associated web marketing. It’s actually likely that the cheapness, availability and choice that buying on the internet provides, actually boosts the number of dollars spent worldwide and shores up the world’s biggest economies.
How healthy is your website's shopping cart?
So how do you get a slice of the pie?! If you have an ecommerce site, today we are looking at 3 big tips to make life easy for your customers, and therefore sell more online.
1. Look at what happens after the click
There aren’t many actions that you should take without first investigating them. When it comes to ecommerce, it is vitally important to see what visitors do after they land on your site. What is your bounce rate like? What pages do they go to most? What pages do most people exit from? This information forms the building blocks of a successful ecommerce site.
Smart ecommerce sites (and those with a reasonable marketing budget) can also gain plenty of benefit from customized usability testing, eyetracking studies and heat mapping.
2. Add ratings and recommendations … and personalize them
The easiest way to understand this tip is to think of how Amazon interacts with you. If you have an ecommerce site of your own, but no experience with Amazon, go check it out now! While there are some complaints about their site, they generally represent the embodiment of best practices in ecommerce.
Amazon provides personalized recommendations for new products based on what a user has viewed before, and what they have bought before. eBay now does the same.
You can also provide ratings from other users based on a person’s behavior on your site – don’t wait for them to click through to a product page to find out that other people love a product.
3. Add a Live Help function
Most of the problems that people encounter with ecommerce sites can be overcome, or at least mitigated, by offering a Live Help service. When something happens that a consumer isn’t expecting, they don’t have to go searching for their product all over again at a different site. That is actually a lot of work – though it is possible. Live Help keeps customers on-site, even if:
- There isn’t enough product information on a description page
- An error occurs during checkouot
- Return policy is not clearlt stated
- People need to enquire about shipping
- The product is expensive
Web Marketing with Neuroscience – Tip of the Day #2
Feb 5th
One of the best-selling books of all time is Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’. Everybody wants to know how to get inside other people’s brains and make them do what we want them to … even when we get past adolescence! Today, we are giving you another tip for that very purpose. We’re looking at web marketing with neuroscience; how you can use the quirks and peculiarities of the human brain to get people to take specific actions on your site.
Brain cells - the only real marketing tools!
Put the most important thing to your business first
In our minds, what comes first is unconsciously regarded as the best. This may be driven by our largely hierarchical society, which has retained that basic structure since the time of our furry ancestors. Or it may not. However this quirk came to be, it is a very real phenomenon in our minds. The number one result in Google gets a whopping 56% of the clicks, according to one study – not the 10% you would expect if all the results on the page have roughly equally valuable content. In many cases content is equal – but our perception of value is different. Whenever you have several items on a page, and one is more important to you than the others, put it first. For example: Of note: If you have a not-so-good product or blog post in ‘first’ position on your site, and visitors go to it expecting to get an optimal example of what your business is like, you are doing your business a major disservice. Your visitors may leave and never come back, believing that the lower quality item is the best you have to offer. A professional SEO Company like us, can improve content quality and top rankings to ensure you get more traffic and enquiries.The web marketing tactic:
Web Marketing with Neuroscience – Tip of the Day #1
Feb 3rd
You can do a lot of things with your brain. In fact, without, you can’t do anything at all . You can also do things with other people’s brains, if you have a basic understanding of how to engage certain neural circuits in ways that favour your own ends. This is all sounding a bit mad scientist-ish for internet marketing, I know! It will all become clear very soon. Today we are thoroughly exploring one tip for using the quirks of our human brains (neuroscience) to help get people to take action on your website.
Brain cells - great web marketing tools
Tip of the day: User ratings and reviews
The neuroscience: People are social creatures. It is how we have evolved, and one of the most prominent reasons that we have come to dominate the planet – our ability and drive to cooperate. That drive to fit in, to cooperate rather than confront other humans, can be stimulated by showing your visitors that there is a community that has been built around your product. If you can show other users that there are people that trust your product and believe in its benefits, you are much more likely to convince them.
The web marketing & SEO tactic: There are several ways to implement this strategy on your website.
- Enable ratings on your products
- Enable reviews on your products
- Make sure that people visiting the site, as well as people actually leaving reviews, know that reviews aren’t changed by you, no matter what they say. Writing something like “You can instantly publish your review – we do not moderate comments on our products”.
- Add demographic information to ratings and reviews (as an optional extra). People might relate more strongly to a review if they see that the reviewer has similar demographics – age, location, family status, etc – to themselves.
- Enable comments on your blog and respond to commenters
- Add an ‘Agree’ and ‘Disagree’ button for comments on your site
- Build a forum that can be an additional resource for site visitors
Ratings and reviews can help new buyers, as well as contributing to their sense of community and social validation. They can also help them rationalize purchasing something they haven’t seen in person – “It worked fine for them, it will probably work fine for me”.
Of note: Testimonials don’t really work for this purpose! Every savvy web user knows that they are selected, edited and wouldn’t be on the site if they weren’t positive. Don’t remove bad reviews, simply post a public response to them offering to clear up the problem.
Applying The Immutable Laws of Marketing in SEO, part 1
Jan 21st
People have written classic books as recently as 1993 – amazing, eh? I thought the only worthwhile thing created that year was hypercolour t-shirts . The classic I’m referring to is a book called The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, written by Al Ries and Jack Trout. It is aimed at marketers in general, but all of the concepts contained within are applicable to internet marketing. Today we are taking a selected look at the laws in a web marketing context.
The ‘First’ Laws
Ironically, the first laws in the book are all about ‘firstness’. Laws 1 through 3 are:
1. It is better to be first than it is to be better.
2. If you can’t be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in.
3. It is better to be first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace.
In an SEO and web marketing context, one of the most important of this set is number 3 – it is better to be first in the mind than first in the marketplace. As concrete business advice, you can take this to mean “If your competitors are lagging behind in their SEO efforts, you’d better hop on your horse quick to take advantage of that!”. You can have competitors, not be the first in your niche and still succeed – if you see that little opening.
And if you take it a little more literally, you could say that it is better to be first (in the Google rankings) than it is to be better … and you’d have a highly profitable view of business on the web!
Battle of Perceptions
The law we are talking about here, number 4, is : Marketing is not a battle of products, it’s a battle of perceptions.
In the real world, it refers to the importance of brand-building. You should have a brand that is both recognizable and respected. In web marketing this is less important, because consumers are more apt to research and choose, than blindly brand-follow.
Yet, you should always focus on maintaining good perceptions of your business, as well as maintaining good products. If your website looks a little shonky, or you link out to bad neighborhoods, or your website is listed in dodgy directories, you lose in the battle of perceptions. SEO specialists can help determine exactly how those perceptions are best ‘massaged’.
By the way, we’ll be looking at more or less all of the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing in an SEO context over the coming weeks … so stay tuned!