What's the best way to get vital decision-making information about what actually converts your website visitors into customers?

A reliable web statistics toolkit can help you gauge success by telling you: Referrals - Where people found your site, such as links from other websites, search engines and keyword phrases, online ads, bookmarks, etc.

Visitors - The number of people who visited your site during a specified period - and not just "hits." Some stat tools call this "sessions."

Pages - Shows which pages of your site visitors clicked through, from the page entered to the page exited. Also called "paths."

Time on Site - Measures the length of time visitors stayed on your site. Visits that last 20 seconds or more is what you want, since most customers spend longer amounts of time in order to check out products.

Downloads - The number of times your white papers, videos, podcasts, trial software, etc. has been downloaded.

What other marketing collateral allows you to see this kind of data? None! Analyzing your web stats on a regular, ongoing basis is the only accurate way to track how you're doing against your strategic marketing objectives; it then allows for knowledgeable testing and modifying marketing campaigns, as well as efficiently allocating your investment dollars.

Some key performance indicators:

Conversion rate - the probability of web visitors delivering the most wanted response, which is buying from you

Percent of new (or unique) visitors on your website

Ratio of new to returning visitors on your site

Amount of time a visitor remains on your site during an average visit

Page "stickiness" - the landing pages' probability to successfully retain a visitor

There are several good web analytics tools available: Click Tracks, Google Analytics, Omniture SiteCatalyst

• 0 comments »

SERP-White Hat

Internal Linking

By far one of the easiest ways to stop your website from ranking well on the search engines is to make it difficult for search engines to find their way through it. Many sites use some form of script to enable fancy drop-down navigation, etc. Many of these scripts cannot be crawled by the search engines resulting in un indexed pages.

While many of these effects add visual appeal to a website, if you are using scripts or some other form of navigation that will hinder the spidering of your website it is important to add text links to the bottom of at least your homepage linking to all you main internal pages including a sitemap to your internal pages.

Reciprocal Linking

Exchanging links with other webmasters is a good way (not the best, but good) of attaining additional incoming links to your site. While the value of reciprocal links has declined a bit over the past year they certainly still do have their place.

A VERY important note is that if you do plan on building reciprocal links it is important to make sure that you do so intelligently. Random reciprocal link building in which you exchange links with any and virtually all sites that you can will not help you over the long run. Link only to sites that are related to yours and who's content your visitors will be interested in and preferably which contain the keywords that you want to target. Building relevancy through association is never a bad thing unless you're linking to bad neighborhoods (penalized industries and/or websites).

If you are planning or currently do undertake reciprocal link building you know how time consuming this process can be. An useful tool that can speed up the process is PRProwler. Essentially this tool allows you to find related sites with high Pagerank, weeding out many of the sites that would simply be a waste of time to even visit. You can read more about PRProwler on our search engine positioning tools page.

Content Creation

Don't confuse "content creation" with doorway pages and the such. When we recommend content creation we are discussing creating quality, unique content that will be of interest to your visitors and which will add value to your site.

The more content-rich your site is the more valuable it will appear to the search engines, your human visitors, and to other webmasters who will be far more likely to link to your website if they find you to be a solid resource on their subject. Creating good content can be very time-consuming, however it will be well worth the effort in the long run. As an additional bonus, these new pages can be used to target additional keywords related to the topic of the page.

Writing For Others:

You know more about your business that those around you so why not let everyone know? Whether it be in the form of articles, forum posts, or a spotlight piece on someone else's website, creating content that other people will want to read and post on their sites is one of the best ways to build links to your website that don't require a reciprocal link back.

Site Optimization

The manipulation of your content, wording, and site structure for the purpose of attaining high search engine positioning is the backbone of SEO and the search engine positioning industry. Everything from creating solid title and meta tags to tweaking the content to maximize it's search engine effectiveness is key to any successful optimization effort.

That said, it is of primary importance that the optimization of a website not detract from the message and quality of content contained within the site. There's no point in driving traffic to a site that is so poorly worded that it cannot possibly convey the desired message and which thus, cannot sell. Site optimization must always take into account the maintenance of the salability and solid message of the site while maximizing it's exposure on the search engines.

• 0 comments »

First off, its quite natural to have a slow down in traffic.

We bloggers watch the traffic like hawks I know, but isn’t it very unrealistic to have your traffic always go uphill ? The real growth is always reflected by a wave in your traffic graph. And waves always have ups and downs, which is why they are called a wave in the first place.So, apart from panicking, what are the other things that you can do to overcome the slowdown ?

1. Re-Work on the titles of your previous posts, that fail to get traffic

Sometimes, even if you write great articles, the use if incorrect titles will hinder the post from getting popular on the search engines for the keywords they are supposed to rank for. Check for such posts and rework on their titles, making them SEO friendly ones. Believe me they work.

2. Use the social media to get some immediate attention to one/couple of your popular posts.

The social media is a great tool to give you not only traffic, but motivation during a slow down. Get an active social media user friend of yours (or yourself) to tweet/share a few stories from your blog that are popular. There’s nothing wrong in trying to get some extra traffic to your archives using the social media. Make sure your friend don’t spam but do it wisely.

3. Write a couple of articles for the week ahead that are social media friendly

Clearly, you need a traffic booster at this point of time and what’s better than the social media ? Study the popular articles by other blogs from your niche and try to do something as close to as what they’re doing, if you fail to get original ideas. Social Media friendly content is sure shot success and it can definitely give you some attention if not huge.

4. Increase your posting frequency with more quality articles over the weekend

Finally, do a study on your posting frequency, see if there were fluctuations recently. Mostly, traffic slowdown can be attributed to lack of new content. So plan ahead to increase your posting frequency, and get ready with some new posts in your drafts. If you have been writing lengthy articles, try writing shorter articles but more in number.Publish them over the weekend.

5. Find out the posts that have “dead traffic” and re-work on the content

There would be a lot of posts in your archives that you thought were super hits but aren’t. Dig them up, find what’s wrong and try to calibrate them online with the SEO tools you have. They may have gone down in the SERPs because of newer competition. Find it out and re-work on the content to beat your competition. These posts should get some “movement” after the edits. Something is better than nothing !

So there you go. Five super simple alternative strategies to create that buzz and get going during a traffic slowdown. Hope it helped.

• 0 comments »