You’ve been optimizing away and now you have great rankings for your site and you’re getting lots of quality traffic, but wait, why is no one converting into a customer?

Oh yes, that’s right, I forgot all about usability.

As silly as this may seem, clients who are excited about search engine ranking often focus too much on them and how to generate more traffic when their energy may be better spent converting the existing traffic into clients.

Usability is a huge topic and should be addressed from the very preplanned stage of a website. A little footnote here, if you present your content in a user-friendly way, then more often than not, that is an ideal way for the search engine spiders to find and digest your content as well.

The Golden rule is to make sure that a user can find the information they are looking for with the minimal amount of effort. Keep that in mind and you shouldn’t go wrong.

On a more complicated level, this breaks down into a million sub categories. Take the simple task of adding pictures to your site. How many images do I use? What style is best? What format? What size? How compressed should it be? What is the ratio of text to images?

For example, if I’m buying a piece of jewelry, what is more important to the user — how it looks, what it looks like from a different view, the dimensions of it, how much it costs, or the size of it?

All of these are important but if all are presented with the same weight, the consumer would be overwhelmed.

Once you have decided how to present that information, did you take into account the users level of expertise? Now do I mean the user level of comfort navigating a website/using a computer or the user’s knowledgeablity of jewelry? Of course I meant both and both have to be factored in.

Suddenly it’s a lot more complicated than just putting up a picture of a broach.

There is a solution and it’s Us. That is DDA. We have more than a decade of experience in creating user-friendly websites, so stop by to check out our new building, and while you’re here, let us show you how we can convert your traffic into sales.

The tip of the week is for people launching brand new websites. Don’t launch one with a brand new domain name; well, don’t do that if you expect it to rank well.

Due to Google’s aging delay for all new domains, it can take up to six months just for your site to, and that is on the quick side. It is more like eight to nine months even up to 12.

The idea of the aging delay in Google’s eyes, is to stop people creating spam, like throw-away sites that can rank well for a few months before being blocked. If you have to wait six months, it simply takes those sites away from spammers as a tool for quick rankings.

But wait, we do have solutions.

1. The best one is to use your existing domian name. This name will already have links to it and a history of content.
2. Second best would be to use a subdomain, i.e leaves.trees.com would be a good site for your leaves branch of your firm if your main firm was trees.com. You don’t get any existing links but the domain is established in Google’s eyes.
3. As a good website is not built overnight, but is a project lasting several months, you could plan ahead and buy the new name as soon as you start to create a new site. Simply post up a quick brochure style site or holding page, so that Google can find the domain and it will enter the aging process as you and your website design company create your new site. Thus when you launch your full site, it will not have as long to wait to be ranked.

If you have already launched your site on a new domain, then don’t worry you will rank. You just have to be patient and wait for Google.

“My site doesn’t need to be search-engine friendly” and “I don’t need any SEO done on it,” are the oddest notions to us here at DDA, and yet we still hear it time and time again.

If you have a business that is off-line normally, you wouldn’t open it, hidden away down some poorly-lit back alley with no sign and blacked-out windows, which is exactly what you are doing if you choose to ignore Search Engine Marketing and in fact any type of on-line marketing.

In 2008, people still just want a 6-page “about us” brochure website that serves no real purpose at all, as most likely the only way people find it is by seeing the website address on the bottom of the brochure you just gave them.

I don’t even want to think about the amount of time we have used up trying to convince people of the benefit of having a site that brings you thousands of fresh viewers each month, all discovering your company for the first time.

What’s more, it’s so totally baffling that even after sitting down and thoroughly explaining the benefits of SEO and the traffic you get and how controllable it is, they will smile and say “Oh no thanks. I’m happy with my site. I just want it to look prettier.”

What is Bounce Rate?

Well lets say that it is the Brad Pitt of current website statistics. The textbook definition is this:

Bounce Rate – the percentage of single page visits, or better defined as visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.

Now there can be some technical nuances to this, like the minimum or maximum times by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur. If they sit on one page for over 30 minutes then move on, most software will count that as a second visit and therefore the first as a bounce. The actual stat for a website is saved as a percentage value — it’s the number of web site visitors who visit only a single page of a website per session, divided by the total number of website visits.

So why is it so popular? Well because it is very easy to understand or should that be hard to mis-understand? On top of that you can quickly see how your efforts can affect it. The lower the Bounce Rate the better, or more sticky, your site is.

What’s also good with Bounce Rate is you can use it to judge the quality of traffic from various sources.

You can measure the Bounce Rate of traffic just from Google, or from an email campaign, or maybe referrals from MySpace versus referrals from Facebook. And what could be even more important, you can use this to help gage the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns. You may get clicks from your ads but you’re not converting if they bounce straight off. At a glance you can compare terms against each other to see which one are under performing and which ones are wasting your money.

So have fun using this info to tweak your landing pages and watch that ROI rise, or if you want find a expert company to help you tailor those pages for maximum stickiness, say, oh I don’t know a company like DDA.

How well is your website performing? If someone asked you that question today, would you know the answer, or would you know even how to find out that information, and if so, what information is important to know?

Well, today’s lesson is about the number one mistake made by clients. “How many hits did my site get?”

What they are really asking is how many people came to my site, which itself isn’t really the most important question, but that is for another post.

The mistake they are making is in the term “hit.” Here we need a bit of technical explanation:

A Hit represents a request to your web site for a file such as an image, a html page, or a script. One web page may contain several related resources, and as a result, a visitor viewing one web page may trigger several hits. So this means that the amount of “hits” is next to useless criteria for judging how well your site is performing. The two more beneficial stats they are really looking for are page views and visits (which itself is split into two versions)

A Page View is a successful request for a file on your web site that is considered to be a page. These usually mean files with extensions such as .html, .cfm, .asp, etc. It will tell you how many pages have been viewed.

Visits represent the total number of times people have visited your web site. A visit is counted whenever a web site user requests one or more files from the web server. If the user becomes idle for more than a certain amount of time (usually 20 minutes), a new visit is generated when they come back. This is important because you can then determine unique visitors and find out facts like how many first time visitors, how many people came back, etc.

Now if you combine these two basic reports you get a very useful new statistic: Pages per Visit, telling you on average how many pages a user visits when they go to your site.

The good news for DDA clients is that we provide multiple reports to our clients, and more importantly, the expertise to understand and act on the information they provide.

Coming tomorrow… The son of Pages/Visit : The Bounce Rate

Google is now offering even more stats with new features in their Analytics software. This new information is Industry Benchmarking, where you can compare your website metrics against other similar websites. To do this, though, you must first opt in to the system and share your data with Google. This data is not shared with anyone, but it is made anonymous and turned into aggregate data for the system to create its industry benchmarking stats.

At the moment this data is limited, but as more people opt into the system, the information will become more and more useful for search engine marketing and for judging the performance of your website. The reports you can view include visits, new visits, page views, pages/visits, average time on site and the all important bounce rate.

Once you have signed up for the system, you are provided with a list of site categories that are available so you can then choose to view your site against any of the verticals you wish. It will be very interesting to see how far Google will add on these reports and how much data it will share.

A lot of what we do here at DDA is cutting edge, and it pushes the boundaries of what the internet can do for your business. Now this invariably means we are always utilizing the newest, latest technologies—sometimes things that we haven’t done before. This would make most worry, but not DDA. We embrace the excitement of new tools, and can’t wait to find a suitable project to showcase them.

Even though we don’t know right now what the next big thing will be, we enthusiastically look at future projects with renewed vigor and confidence. It is the confidence that comes with having a good skeleton or framework of knowledge, and skill sets to create whatever a client needs. If we leave bank spaces in the sentence of that project, we know we will be able to slot in impactful features as they become relevant to the client.

Everyday brings something new, and the exciting thing working here at DDA is filling in those blanks, and figuring out how to utilize all the new technology to our clients’ advantage.

What is a long tail searcher? Well…. you are, and what’s more, no one told you how to become one; you figured it out all by yourself.

Let me explain more by way of example. If you’re looking to buy an alligator charm for your gold bracelet, you go to Google and type in “gold alligator charm” and what comes up? Well, I already know the answer to this one, as it’s a site that sells gold alligator charms, exactly what you were looking for. Now why did you type in that long string of words? Because you have learnt over time that if you type in “charms,” you not only get results about jewelry but about bands and breakfast cereal, so you then type in “gold charms,” which brings up an array of jewelry stores, which is good, but you now have to go into one of those stores and search again.. which brings us to “gold alligator charms” and the end of your search.

Now if you think about this in terms of your site,  ask yourself which visitor do you want at your site—the guy who is searching “charms” or the guy who is looking for a gold alligator charm? Well, yes, you want them both, but who is the best value for your money? To get your site to rank for a one word term is possible but takes an extraordinary amount of time and money, whereas in competing for that 3 word term, there is a lot, a lot less competition, which means it takes you less time and money to rank high for it. And what really seals the deal is this: who is more likely to convert to a sale on your site? The random charm searcher, or the guy who knows exactly what he is looking for?

We here at DDA, along with our clients, know the answer. Just ask chains-and-charms.com, which ranks #1 for “gold alligator charms.”

Website browser compatibility or cross-browser rendering (which is a more accurate term) is a problem that has plagued website developers since the beginning of time, or 1994. 1994 being the year in which Netscape Navigator was launched, where it basked in its glory until 1995, and then the great Browser War started with the release of Internet Explorer. This lasted until the dawn of the new millennium, and during those dark times it was common for web designers to display “best viewed in Netscape” or “best viewed in Internet Explorer” logos. Websites could look perfect in one browser and be barely readable in another.

Even though Microsoft won that war, browser compatibility was still an issue as Internet Explorer did not follow the W3C Guidelines. So flash forward to 2008, and although Internet Explorer is still king, a strong following for Firefox and Safari means that you still have to be very careful when building a website to make sure it works well in all the major browsers.

For the most part, the resulting differences are a lot less noticeable from the dark days, and are mostly caused when correct formatting is not used and the browser fills in for what should be there. But care should still be taken to check that your site works well and is readable, if not the same, no matter what browser it’s displayed in.

Well, as we all know, a ‘Widget’ is a device placed in a container of beer to help create that authentic draft poured look and taste to your beer. The original Widget was patented by Guinness; it’s all got to do with tiny bubbles and surface area. If you want to learn more, see here.

But more recently the term Widget has been hijacked by the internet and his friends. A widget in these circles is now a term used to describe a small specialized desktop application that provides easy access to a frequently used function…. but hold on– while the internet and his friends weren’t looking, his younger, cooler brother twisted the term to now describe a pseudo-application of any functionality that can be embedded or plugged into a web-based application–like, for example, a social network platform like Facebook or a blog like Wordpress.

So now you know that, but you’re still not sure what a widget really is, so here is an example: Travbuddy.

This is a Facebook and MySpace app that lets users put a flash map on their profiles displaying the countries they’ve visited. The result being that travbuddy.com’s membership has grown a hundredfold in the last six months. If you find the right tool or niche, then a widget could be the biggest little thing to ever hit your company.