Best Strategy to Increase Website Traffic

March 16, 2012 by woodstock939 Leave a Comment

What are the top sources for Website Traffic?

We have seen vast sways in traffic generation strategies over the past 17 years. From the original search engine Banner Ads on Excite and Altavista to Organic Listings, Pay-Per-Click and Social Media. All in all, there are dozens of opportunities to gain or increase website traffic.

So what are the top ways to get more traffic? The answer to the question can get very complex and diverse. It can depend on product vs. service offering, whether a business is B2B or B2C, demographics, need vs. want product and service types, and competitive nature of the sale.

In this article we are comparing what most mavens consider the top two best sources; Organic and Content/Social Media.

Organic Traffic driven through a committed and professional search engine optimization (SEO) strategy will increase traffic. The quantity and quality of traffic will depend upon the selection of the correct keywords and keyword phrases, writing quality titles and meta descriptions, competitive analysis, and identifying the best niches or upside opportunities.

The down side to organic listings is that they aren’t ever permanent and shouldn’t be thought of as evergreen. Any competitor that’s worth their weight will be pursuing the same organic listings as everyone else in a given business sector. Therefore, it takes work to maintain the top listings when and if you get one.

The largest untruth about search generated traffic is that it accounts for most if not all website traffic. The reality is that search traffic only accounts for 45-55% of traffic depending on type of business, product, or service. Concentrating on search traffic alone could be costing you 50% of your online revenue!

Content/Social marketing encompasses many individual components that, when compounded, can pick up the majority of the remaining revenue!

So what is content/social marketing?

Content can be comprised of text, video, images, and infographics, depending on how they are presented to the reader or viewer. Social Marketing is normally thought of as Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin but can also include Quora, Pinterest, and other social oriented channels and sites.

Another element that is playing role in the rise in popularity of content and social marketing is the changes that Google has made to it’s indexing and ranking algorithm in the past 1-2 years. Google is single-handedly forcing the use of higher quantity and quality of content. Business owners, managers, web design, and marketing firms are feeling the pain of getting punished for duplicate content, thin content, poor quality content, poor web designs, and lack of proper use of calls-to-action and stickiness factors.

Where is the first place to start?

If your an Ecommerce company we recommend reviewing your existing content. Make sure your using original short and long product descriptions as well as technical specifications or additional product information. Remember that your main product or category landing pages should be written to be read and should coincide with the originating traffic generation element.

All websites should have a blog! Blogs not only generate their own traffic but they also increase search engine rankings for search marketing campaigns. Blogs play a valuable role across most content and social marketing channels. Blogs are compounded with Social Channels, RSS Feeds, Directories, Blog Listings, and even Email campaigns.

The largest advantage with Content/Social Marketing is it’s built in Evergreen capability. Blog posts or articles, when well written and distributed, will survive online for months and years to come. They can also be repurposed and renewed in the future to reenergize their affects of traffic generation and SEO.

Search marketing only lasts as long as your listings are at the top of the search engines. When they fall, so does the traffic.

So what is the take away from this article? It is hardly ever wise to rely on just one form of advertising or marketing. Search marketing is well worth the time and investment and should be pursued by any company that has a serious online strategy. However, in addition to search marketing, content/social marketing should become an important and almost necessary strategy as well. Remember that your competitors are most likely too lazy to attack both marketing opportunities…

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: blog, google, search marketing, seo, social marketing, social media, web design

Important Internet Updates March 15 2012

March 15, 2012 by woodstock939 Leave a Comment

Will these Internet Updates affect your business?

This is the first in a new series of Internet Updates meant to keep our customers and readers up to date with the constant flow of changes and announcements occurring across the world of Internet Business.

PayPal

PayPal, the worlds largest online digital wallet money handler, announces major changes in their dashboard and processing. The company introduced a new set of digital wallet tools at the SXSW conference in Austin, TX. It’s the first time in the company’s 13-year history that it’s redesigned and re-architected the system’s payments experience, Sam Shrauger, PayPal’s vice president of global product and experience, tells Fast Company.

Google Webmaster Tools

According to Website Magazine

Several rather significant enhancements are being rolled out in Google Webmaster Tools this week. Google announced that it now detects and reports several new types of errors, is showing which errors are most important, and is letting webmasters dive into the details.

Google will be splitting the types of errors reported in GWT into two types – site errors (those which affect an entire site, e.g. DNS resolution failures) and URL errors (those where Googlebot tried to crawl a URL but failed, e.g. a 404 error). Google now tracks the “failure rates” for each type of site-wide error and will try to send alerts when the errors become frequent enough to warrant attention.

Perhaps the best part of this round of enhancements is that Google is helping webmaster prioritize the errors. Webmasters could previously see up to 100,000 errors of each type but there was no way to sort, search or mark the progress made in correcting those errors. Now, Google is showing what they think are the 1000 most important errors up front, enabling webmasters to indicate to Google when those errors have been fixed, and even view details about them – and that’s where things get really good. Clicking on an individual error URL will show a detail pane with information including the last time Google attempted to crawl the URL, when the problem was first noticed and a brief explanation of the error.

Email Usage Report

According to InformZ

Informz releases results of their 2012 Association Email Marketing Benchmark Report and it’s definitely worth a look.

What may surprise Internet marketers is that the day of the week had little effect on open and click rates, and that while mobile email usage is on the rise, desktop emails results in better performance.

It is important to note that the Informz collected data from over 700 large and mid-sized “associations” using its platform, which sent over 600 million emails in 2011 consisting of newsletters, appeals, surveys, and event-related emails. While not a purely commerce-driven, the data does reveal some interesting insights. The most notable in my opinion is that as with Informz’ 2011 results, this year’s study found that the day of the week sent had little effect on the open and click results.

A few additional finding from the report include:

- The average email metrics for associations include a 98.28% delivery rate, 34.33% open rate, 19.49% click rate and a 0.052% unsubscribe rate.

- Emails sent in the morning resulted in the highest open rates at 39.2%, while mid-afternoon reported the highest click rates at 21.0%.

- Shorter subject lines continued to outperform their longer counterparts. Fewer than 10 characters achieved the best open rate at 58%.

- 49% of emails sent were read by recipients (opened for longer than 10 seconds) while 35% of emails were opened for less than 3 seconds.

- Survey-related emails had the highest combined open and click rates with 36.60% average opens and 33.39% clicks.

- Appeal-related emails had the lowest click rate of the emails studied at 14.63%

“The results from this year’s report support the idea that the relevancy of an email’s content has a greater impact on email results than factors like email timing,” said Joe Tyler, CEO of Informz. “This type of information can aide associations in creating email programs that deliver better results.”

Twitter Buys Posterous

In a report by Forbes.

Twitter disclosed in a blog post that it has acquired the blogging site Posterous. Twitter said that the Posterous site will continue up and running without any interruption.

Terms were not disclosed.

Here is the text of Twitter’s post on the deal:

Today we are welcoming a very talented group from Posterous to Twitter. This team has built an innovative product that makes sharing across the web and mobile devices simple—a goal we share. Posterous engineers, product managers and others will join our teams working on several key initiatives that will make Twitter even better.

Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption. We’ll give users ample notice if we make any changes to the service. For users who would like to back up their content or move to another service, we’ll share clear instructions for doing so in the coming weeks.

The Future of Web Design and Internet Marketing

March 14, 2012 by woodstock939 Leave a Comment

Are Rich Snippets and Microdata in your future?

We were scheduled to publish a blog about Rich Snippets and Microdata this morning but we checked our friends blog first. Look what we found!

Visual Guide to Rich Snippets on SEOmoz created by BlueGlass Interactive.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: conversion, micro data, microdata, rich snippets, seo, web design

How does Google use Page Age in Rankings?

March 13, 2012 by woodstock939 Leave a Comment

So by now most people who use Google Search for their online research have found the ability to use the added functions or operators, located in the left sidebar of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), to further refine their results. (More on using Google Operators in the search bar later this week)

One of the most used operators is the time option. The search results can be further refined by selecting what date range you would like Google to return search results. As shown on the left, the date range can be selected by a preset range or a custom range.

So why does Google provide this function? Google feels that, at the speed of change in today’s markets, results older than 1-2 years are probably inadequate. However, given the nature of the search engines and some content that doesn’t often change, like scientific and logical, they prefer to keep the older listings in their index.

So exactly how does Google know the age of page? Although Google has many options to accurately date stamp a page, they commonly use 4 types of data.

1. Date Published : The date when a website page is first published and made available to the public on a public server.

2. Crawl Date: The date when the search engines first locate a web page on the server.

3. Index Date: The date which a search engine officially indexes the page into the search results. This date may or may not be the same as the original Crawl Date.

4. Date Stamp: The date listed in a pages code or on the page itself that officially lists the date the page was created. This is particularly available to content such as blogs, articles, and press releases. This date is commonly used by the visitor for the recency and freshness of the content.

So how can you find the Page Age when no visible date is present in the content? Google lists the Page Date within the search engine results page when possible.

Why is this so important to Google? Google believes that the person using their search is their customer, not yours. They want to make sure their customer comes back to Google to perform more searches. The only way they have to insure that Google is the dominant search engine is to provide their customer with the best possible results. Learn more about why Google uses the date or freshness of a web page here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/giving-you-fresher-more-recent-search.html

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: google, page date, search engine results, seo, web design, web development

The 5 Minute Website SEO Compliance Test

March 8, 2012 by woodstock939 Leave a Comment

How to test for quality Search Engine Optimization.

Now that Google has finally honed in on identifying scammers and black hat SEO tactics, it has become extremely important to properly design and optimize your website for SEO compliance. Approximately 98% of all websites fail to comply with the very basics for SEO.

Below is a “How To” guide for performing a 5 minute SEO Compliance Test on your website.

Long URL’s: Using your sites navigation, click through and view your website URL’s in the address bar. The best practice for URL’s is to have no more than 2 forward slashes (/) in the URL. We prefer a very flat URL structure that contains only 1 forward slash.
Bad URL’s: As your performing #1 above, check to see if the URL’s contain the main theme or page keywords for the page you are viewing. Also check to see if the URL is less than 5 words after the forward slash.
Title Tag: The Page Title Tag is not commonly viewed by a visitor. However, the search engines use each page’s Page Title Tag as a factor in their algorithm for ranking and use it to populate the title of an organic listing. You can easily see the a page Page Title Tag by viewing it’s source code. Click on View Source Code for instructions on how to view source code. The Title Tag should be located near the top of the Page and look like this; <title> The 5 Minute Website SEO Compliance Test </title>. The title should be less 70 characters long and, like the URL, should contain your pages theme or main keywords. The main keywords should be located at the front of the title. Company name should be located at the end of the title. Long Title Tags are frowned on by the search engines and will dilute the importance of your title’s keywords. Make sure you have NO duplicate title tags.
Meta Keywords: In past years Meta Keywords played a valuable role in search engine rankings. In today’s world Meta Keywords are of little use except to tell your competition what your site or page is trying to rank for.
Meta Description: The Meta Description is not visible to the visitor on your website. The Meta Description can be viewed by viewing the source code. It should be located near the top and should look simular this this; <meta name=”description” content=”Leading Web Design, SEO, Internet Marketing, Software Development, Mobile Applications, with over 17 years proven experience.”/>. The Meta Description does not directly affect SEO. However, a well written description will cause a higher click through rate thus indirectly affecting SEO. Click through rate is another search engine ranking factor. Descriptions should be less than 150 characters, include the pages theme or main keywords, and NOT be duplicative. If no description tags are present the search engines will scan your page content and select a meta description out of the pages content. This is not recommended. It is far better to write your own descriptions.
Heading Tags: Heading tags are used by search engines to help identify the theme or main subject of a page. In addition, they are also used by visitors to quickly scan for the subject matter of a page or paragraph. Heading tags are sized and coded as H1 through H6 with H1 being the most important and H6 being the least important. You can find out if your page has heading tags by viewing the source code and locating any tags that look like this; <h1 class=”entry-title”>Web Design Development</h1>. A page should not have more than one H1 Tag and hopefully it is located near the top of the page’s content.
Content: Read your pages content and verify that it is well written and coordinated to your page’s theme. Be careful to write content that a visitor will be able to easily understand and relate to the page’s theme. The content should contain a higher density of the main theme keywords, although SEO mavens can disagree to keyword density importance. The content should hopefully contain more than 400 words. An Ecommerce site will often contain content as product details or reference information. Paragraphs should be limited to 4-6 lines of text. Bulleted lists should be used whenever appropriate. Here is a good keyword count checker.
Overuse of bold, italics, and underlined words. Although not a major factor, search engines have proven to use bold, italics, and underlined words as ranking factors. Visitors can also get very confused and cause them to leave your page.

There are far more ranking factors than listed on this test. However all of these 8 basic items are a great place to start. Main Street Sourcing regularly performs On-Page and Off-Page SEO analytic services. Please contact us for additional information…

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: bing, content, google, guide, heading tags, keywords, search engine optimization, search engines, seo, test, web design, web development

Your Internet Marketing pants down?

March 7, 2012 by woodstock939 Leave a Comment

Don’t get caught with your pants down with Digital Marketing.

So what is the difference between Internet Marketing and Digital Marketing? Truth is not much, but most believe that digital marketing includes everything that is communicated using the internet while Internet Marketing does not include texting, emails, and etc.

The explosive growth in Digital Marketing has been well documented over the past 3-5 years. The surprise though is how wrong the forecasts have been. Forrester Research recently released a new forecast with a baseline of 2011. Take a look at how it compares to one that was previously released with a baseline of 2009. These graphs concentrate on the comparison between Mobile Marketing, Social Media, and Email Marketing.

And here is 2009.

So what are the take-aways?

Here are some quick bullet points to consider:

In 2014; Email growth will stay close to 2009 forecast, Social Media growth will exceed 2009 by 11%, Mobile Marketing growth will exceed 2009 by 347%.
By 2016; Email growth will be 63%, Social Media growth will be 214%, Mobile Marketing growth will be almost 400%.
Overall combined (email, social marketing, mobile marketing) growth will exceed the 2009 forecast by 42%

We have written extensively about the explosive growth and opportunities in Social Media. Email is a more obvious channel to understand since it has been around for over 15 years. However mobile marketing continues to be a mystery for most busness owners and managers. Here are some quick stats from Pew Research:

An estimated 12.3 million calls are made via cell phone every day.
50% of all emails sent are read via Mobile Technology.
The average rate of texts per per day is 41.5
31% of people who text prefer contact via text.
38% of people who text still prefer a phone call.
Apple has sold over 55 million iPads.
Apple expects iPad sales to exceed 100 million in 2012.

The subject of convergence of Internet Marketing and overall Digital Marketing is quickly moving to the top of most marketing organizations. The ability to drive visitors through sales and lead generation funnels that are multi-faceted between email, social marketing, mobile marketing, and the channels of internet marketing will soon prove to be the benchmark for internet marketing success.

What are your plans and budget for the future of Internet and Digital Marketing?

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: email marketing, internet marketing, mobile marketing, online marketing, social marketing, web design

Facebook Timeline Cover Design Recommendations

March 5, 2012 by woodstock939 Leave a Comment

Are you busy designing a cover for Facebook?

As many people in business know, Facebook rolled out it’s new Timeline for business pages late last week. Fortunately they are allowing the month of March as a voluntary change-over period. After March 30th all Facebook pages will be converted to the new timeline and the new cover or banner.

Do you really have the whole month of March to make the conversion? If you believe normal marketing trends and brand awareness rules, not really. Visitors to a Facebook page will soon judge the business owner on how soon or later they made the change together with how well it’s designed and draw there own opinions. Do you want to be the the one who holds onto the old timeline when your competitors are leading the field?

There are many changes to consider with the new timeline. Two of the biggest changes are the addition of the cover (banner) and the horizontal list of apps or favorites. These two changes need to work together since Facebook no longer allows the ability to select a default landing page or tab.

The biggest impact item is the cover. The cover is a large 851 x 315 pixel banner.

When designing the cover make sure you use the KISS theory; Keep it Simple Simon. Do not use multiple size fonts, complex messaging, assorted colors, or use it to display features and benefits. The cover can distract from the Facebook page and cause visitors to disengage and fail to read the content of your posts. Much more, an incorrectly designed cover can totally remove the favorites area from the visitors viewing ability. The favorites area is an important conversion tool.

So what are a few basic design parameters?

See more examples

First off, think of the cover the same way you would of a billboard. The cover represents more of a brand or single target product promotional tool. Just like a bollboard visitors will not or cannot take the time to read complex images and text.
A great way of considering whether a cover design is appropriate is to apply the same test as does a billboard designer. Print out the new Facebook page cover timeline. The timeline cover should be 851 pixels wide or roughly 8″ wide. Hold up the page or paste it on a wall. Now have someone, or yourself, view the page from about 12 feet away. Observe the page for 1.5 seconds. Does the page cover easily relay a thought or message or does it get confusing and distractive?

In addition to the cover, does the Features area get overcome by the cover? Remember the Features area is key to providing further guidance for sales or lead generation funnels and/or calls-to-actions, share campaigns, events, and special offers.

Finally, the cover should comply with your overall brand or messaging policy. Most websites and blogs do not use an area of 851 x 315 pixels on any given page. Be careful to to over design by thinking an area this big should be packed full of hyperbole, creative accents, and text.

Visit http://Facebook.com/MainStreetSourcing

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: facebook, internet marketing, social marketing, social media, timeline, web design

Is SEO killing your Conversion?

February 27, 2012 by woodstock939 Leave a Comment

Can SEO really affect Conversion?

To answer the question, as we have previously written, we need to clarify what conversion actually is.

Most web site owners and managers think of conversion as the act when a website visitor completes a sale of goods and/or services. That thought is true but it is only one form of conversion. Conversion is a term meant to describe the process or act in which a visitor completes the final stage in a process or funnel. The process or funnel is designed to guide a visitor to the eventual goal of a conversion.

So what are types of conversions? Sales of products or services is certainly high on the list of types of conversions. In addition is email lead generation, downloads, phone calls, or even social shares.
We try to separate conversions into two types; Defined or intermediate conversions and absolute conversions. Defined or intermediate conversion are conversions that occur ”middle of funnel” or are designed to be a subset of a larger sales or lead generation strategy. Absolute conversions are when a visitor completes the final step in a sales or lead generation process.

So how does SEO affect conversions? The Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, main goal is to generate traffic to a web site by using optimization to obtain higher search engine rankings. However during the process of performing SEO many conversion factors are and must be considered. Below are just a few.

Page Titles: Most SEO professionals understand that web site page titles are what Google uses to populate the title of an organic search result listing. These page titles affect rankings but also affect the click-through-ratio (CTR). The CTR is also used in Google’s algorithm as a ranking factor. So it goes full circle. Well written page titles equal higher rankings, a better click through ratio, and higher conversions due to higher quality of traffic.
Organic Listing Descriptions or Snippets: These descriptions provide little in the way of SEO assistance. However most SEO mavens agree that a lot of effort should be given to writing good meta name descriptions. The search engines bold any words in the description that appear in the visitor keyword search. Also, a well written meta description will entice the searcher to click on the listing. Similar to Page Titles, the CTR will be increased and the quality of the visitor will be further defined thus higher conversions.
Heading Tags: Heading tags are used by search engines as additional ranking factors. They are the larger and sometimes colored text that are used at the top of page or the beginning of a subset of the page theme. Heading tags start with H1 and go to H6. The heading tag is used as a page headline to alert the visitor and describe the theme of the page. A well written heading tag will prompt the visitor to read the page content. Bounce and Exit rates are therefore decreased and conversion rates are increased.
Landing Page Content SEO: Well written and defined original page content can do wonders for SEO, especially since the introduction of Google Panda algorithm. Google crawls a web site and places value on the content for ranking. Many SEO’s and web site owners and managers focus so intently on SEO that conversion then suffers. The content might be stuffed with keywords, too many bold and italicized words and phrases, and the page lacks any real funnel or sales process capability. As in #1 and #2, poorly developed pages can kill conversion and in the process increase bounce and exit rates thereby hurting a sites rankings as well.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: content seo, conversion, funnel, internet marketing, lead, sales, seo, web design

How to spot an SEO Expert Fraud

February 24, 2012 by woodstock939 Leave a Comment

The roles and responsibilities of an SEO professional have drastically changed over the past 3 years. Unfortunately most so called SEO experts are little more than meta tag and heading constructs or inbound link jockeys. The effect of these frauds on the reputation of the true professionals has been astronomical.

While meeting a customer for coffee at Starbucks recently, a young man in his early 20′s over heard our conversation about improvements on the customer’s SEO strategy. Immediate after the customer left Starbucks the young man approached us and asked to engage in a conversation about SEO. He explained that having graduated from college the previous year, as a writer, he had taken a job as a search engine optimization expert. (what?) He further explained that after 6 full months of being employed as an SEO expert he probably knew about 90% of what was required. (Ouch!) After asking him approximately 10 questions concerning the skills of an SEO expert he began to shrink in his chair. The recent graduate was not even able to answer one of them. I gave him my business card and told him that perhaps he needed a few more years of experience.

So what are the indications of an SEO fraud?

Here are some good examples:

During the first meeting the expert explains that they can get anyone or any business to the top of Google within 60-90 days. Anyone who truly knows SEO realizes that Google makes those decisions, when and how they wish.
The expert claims that they have a set strategy that has proven to work with any business regardless of whether the business is ecommerce, retail brick and mortar, service oriented, or manufacturing.
They claim that the website and it’s contents doesn’t matter for SEO. The important element of SEO is Inbound links. Google Panda finally laid rest to that malfunctioning strategy.
The failure to perform a detailed site audit and compare the results to the business objectives.
Opposite of #3 the expert claims that inbound links will take care of themselves and what is really important is meta tags, headings, and keyword density.
They don’t inquiry about and analyze previous SEO efforts.
No work is performed to understand the business model, keywords, content themes, and overall business objectives.
The so called SEO expert fails to conduct a proper competitive analysis.
The target audience is either not defined or ignored completely.
The expert fails to provide an understanding of the influences of the over 15 online marketing channels. In addition, they fail to analyze these channels for the business at hand and the potential impact on SEO.
Social signals originating from social media are not incorporated into the SEO strategy.
They do not explain and work with the client, short and long term, on the development, publishing, and distribution of quality content.

Obviously the list could grow even longer. The take-away from this article should be that a true SEO professional has had many years in training and experience. They should have a plan in place to stay up-to-date with current SEO techniques and strategies. The plan should always include a “best practice” provision to comply with Google and other search engine policies.

Above all, a true SEO professional builds in the necessary time to explain or educate the client about SEO strategy and establishes reasonable and obtainable goals and objectives. The client should be made aware that there are no guaranteed time frames for accomplishing their goals. Only realistic estimates.

Finally, a true professional SEO understands the absolute need to combine the SEO efforts with web design, web development, and marketing. The ultimate goal is to create a strategy for attracting quality traffic and converting that traffic to enable the client to fullfil their objectives.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: fraud, internet marketing, online marketing, search engine optimization, seo, web design

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