Online you only have a few seconds to capture your visitor attention before they fall victim to “back button syndrome”. It is a big fear of everyone who concentrates on attracting visitors to a web site. We all fail prey to the disease everyday we use the Internet.
I am sure you all can think of multiple occasions just within the last couple days where you were disappointed, overwhelmed, disillusioned and frustrated at results you got when surfing the net.
When users come to your site for the first time they immediately want verification that you are delivering what they are looking for – this happens within the first 10 seconds of landing on your site. In those 10 seconds you must impress, validate and earn their confidence that you are truly offering what they are searching for.
So what can we do to make sure your visitors are staying on your site once they have arrived? You can break it down into 4 segments and address each one of them on your own site to make sure you are making a great first impression and not creating more “back button syndrome.”
To begin with it is not always about the design of your site but encompasses many factors like SEO, Marketing, Design and Research.
Let’s break down the 4 elements of keeping a visitor on your site.
#1 SEO – The Pathway into Your Site
There are many different ways someone can come into your site:
They can do a search and find their way in from a search engine results page. -The most powerful way one can capture some ones attention is in the title that shows in the SERP’s (search engine results pages.) The title that you set on your Web page is the same title that normally shows in the SERP’s. This title is the first impression some one gets of your site before they have even visited it.
Think about the way you search…you type in a keyword phrase into a search bar and you scan the results on the first couple pages. You make your decision based mainly on what the tile says and you only click through once they have impressed you with the way they have described what you may find on their site.
You need to make your title jump off the page and stand out above all your competitors.
Your keyword phrase needs to appear in your titled but the clue to improving your click through rates is to include both a benefit and clicking trigger to the equation.
They can follow a link from a referring site. -The text that surrounds the linking text that points back to your site goes a long way in building confidence in your site. If you have industry related Web sites pointing back to your site it is a way of verify your information.
They can find you through paid advertising links. -As the same as your title in the search engine result pages your paid advertising must have a message that stops a web searcher and makes them click on your ad. Your ad must clearly state what the user will find when clicking through to your site. Your landing page must deliver what the ad has promised.
#2 – DESIGN
As soon as visitors first encounter your site, they will form an immediate first impression…usually within the first 10 seconds. Your goal for these first few seconds is to orient your visitor and make them feel that the site is worth exploring. Remember you are trying to impress, validate and earn their confidence in them sticking around. Your ultimate goal is to get them to click on a link and go deeper into your site.
Exciting designs are always a nice visual but unless they engage the visitor to crawl deeper into your site they will immediately suffer from “back button syndrome.”
Let’s talk about a few design elements that will help in keeping your Web site sticky enough to keep your visitors.
- Visual – Do your graphics match your target audience? -Graphics affect the user’s behavior when they first come to your site. The graphics should clearly portray which ones are interactive and help guide a visitor through your site. People are generally lazy and need text broken up but related photos or graphics.
- Are the colors of your site portraying the right message? It’s no secret that website color schemes are a vital component of web design. If you’re just beginning to design, I should say that it may become no secret when the website you’re building seems to have the right elements, the design works … but somehow it doesn’t look quite right. It may be that the color scheme is a bit “off”.If so, that’s what your website visitors will perceive. They may not know why, but it won’t look right to them. Thus, website color schemes form a vital part of your visitors’ impression of your website.
- Are your links easy to follow or does it take to long to understand what their next step should be?
Web visitors see so many messages these days that most rely on a site’s architecture to guide them through your site. You almost have to treat your internal links like a walk through the park. Hold your visitors hand and walk them through each step along the path. Make it easy for them to stay on the trail by creating breadcrumbs or clearly defined choices.
- Can someone figure out what the mission of the site is within just a few seconds?
I am referring mainly to making sure your visitor clearly knows what your site is about all above the fold of your home page. Convince your visitor that you have delivered exactly what they are looking for and they will stay on your site and crawl deeper.
#3 - MARKETING
Sales Copy – Writing Effective Sales Copy for Your Web Site A professional looking web site is a very important part of making sales. However, if your sales copy is weak, your web site will be useless. Writing effective sales copy is simply learning how to write persuasive words specifically written for your target audience. You must feel your potential customers’ needs and write your copy with passion, excitement and benefit.
- Writing A Catchy Headline - This is the most important part of your entire sales copy. Not only should you include your Keyword Phrase is your headline you also must write a headline that demands attention and forces your visitors to read on. Most of your visitors will only read your headline. If it doesn’t instantly grab their attention, they’ll soon hit the back button.
- Writing Your Beginning Summary - Once you’ve captured your potential customers’ attention, you’ll now need to direct their attention to your summary Keep your summary brief and to the point and let them know exactly what you are about to offer them.
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Use Plenty of Subheadings - Subheadings are basically just smaller headlines used to break up your text blocks. They also provide your readers with important highlights of your paragraphs. Use plenty of subheadings throughout your copy, as not all your visitors will read your copy word for word. They’ll simply scan it and only read what catches their attention.
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Build Confidence - That trust worthy feeling you get on a Web site goes a long way in keeping your visitors focused on your product. Provide a limited time free trial or download, add trust building logos, offer a money back guarantee all these will help build your potential customers’ confidence in you and put their mind at ease.
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Call for Action - Ask for the order and provide an easy ordering process. Continue to reassure your potential customer and lead them to your order page.
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Provide Testimonials - Testimonials provide another great way to reassure your visitors. Blend your testimonials in with your sales message. Avoid making your visitors have to click to another page to view your testimonials — chances are they won’t. By blending your testimonials in with your sales message, you can ensure they will be read.
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Writing Your Copy - Now, you’re ready to begin filling in the spaces. When you begin writing your paragraphs, get straight to the point, avoid negativity and hype, and write in small sections. Vary the paragraph sizes and limit each paragraph to four or five lines max. If you feel that your paragraph will be longer than four or five lines, try to use bullets to display important points.
In addition, write in an everyday language that everyone can understand. Make sure you use plenty of white space. White space is the empty space between your paragraphs and around your text. You don’t want to overwhelm your visitors with a solid page of black text. Nothing will make them click away any faster.
Pack your sales copy with benefits from your headline straight through to your order form. Make sure you don’t confuse features with benefits. Features don’t sell… Benefits sell. Your visitor wants to know exactly what your product or service can do for them.
#4 – RESEARCH – Focus Your Design on Personas
Before embarking on any website design project, it is important to understand the needs of your users. It is then possible to identify the features and functionality that will make the website a success, and how the design can support users with different goals and levels of skill.
Personas identify the user motivations, expectations and goals responsible for driving online behavior.
A good way to get a good handle on your visitors is to create two or three personas that would best describe the audience you are trying to attract to your site. A persona is a brief fictional biography that captures the individual you are targeting.
Large companies spend a great deal of time research and creating personas. But you can benefit from simple and quick personas based on your knowledge of your industry.
Once you outline 2 or 3 different outlines work into your design and sales copy these different marketable areas.
Think about your Web site…how many different personas do you currently market to?
Research Using the Internet
Personas are a powerful search marketing tool. You can use them as a common-sense model for audience behavior, and test your assumptions about keywords, different search engines and landing pages.
Here’s how:
Check Your Keywords - Sometimes a keyword shows promise because it gets lots of searches. But it may make no sense at all in the context of a particular persona. Check your keywords and phrases. Do they make sense for that persona? Keywords that don’t fit may still be relevant - you’re probably missing another persona that bears consideration.
Think About the Search Engines: Focus Your Effort - Which search engines do these personas most likely use? Different people prefer different engines. I won’t make any sweeping generalizations here - you can find this kind of demographic data on a site like Quantcast
Tailor Description Tags: Maximize Click through -Search engines use the description. META tag to format the snippets they show in their organic search results. If you already rank well for a few phrases, check and see which personas will use each phrase. Then see which pages are listed in the search results. Edit the description tags on those pages to best appeal to the relevant personas.
Think About Conversions: Pull it All Together - What’s your site’s goal? Will your personas, after finding you on a search engine under a particular keyword, and landing on a particular page, be more or less likely to convert?
Observe and Adjust - Watch how visitors behave when they come to your site from a search engine. Do they match what you expect? Probably not exactly. Adjust your description tags, landing pages, keywords and overall strategy accordingly. Armed with this knowledge, you can focus your paid search marketing (pay per click) efforts. You can also tailor your organic search engine optimization campaign to specific search engines.
As you can see it takes a multitude of factors to consider when taking that extra effort to keep someone on your site. Your main goal is to get in head of your visitor, deliver exactly what you are promising and make your site so that it impresses, validates and earns the respect of your visitor and try to do it within those valuable 10 seconds before the back button syndrome happens.
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#1 - Deliver what you’ve promised - Provide your visitor high quality content on your pages, especially on your home page. Google is looking for pages that contain useful information that will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site. Think if the words your visitors would type in to find your pages and be sure to include those words on your site.
#2 - Build your incoming links - By building your incoming links you’re are helping the Google crawlers to find your site and giving your visitors greater visibility to your site in the search results. When Google serves up search results they combine PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to display the most relevant pages. They are looking for natural industry related links pointing to your site. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of web sites when those sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful to their visitors to link to your site.Google can distinguish through their algorithms the difference between “natural links” and “unnatural links” that are specifically to make your site look more popular to the search engines.
#3 - Make your site accessible - Build your site with a logical link structure. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
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What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Most of the time when we see this, it’s unintentional or at least not malicious in origin: forums that generate both regular and stripped-down mobile-targeted pages, store items shown (and — worse yet — linked) via multiple distinct URLs, and so on. In some cases, content is duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or garner more traffic via popular or long-tail queries.
What isn’t duplicate content?
Though we do offer a handy translation utility, our algorithms won’t view the same article written in English and Spanish as duplicate content. Similarly, you shouldn’t worry about occasional snippets (quotes and otherwise) being flagged as duplicate content.
Why does Google care about duplicate content?
Our users typically want to see a diverse cross-section of unique content when they do searches. In contrast, they’re understandably annoyed when they see substantially the same content within a set of search results. Also, webmasters become sad when we show a complex URL (example.com/contentredir?value=shorty-george〈=en) instead of the pretty URL they prefer (example.com/en/shorty-george.htm).
What does Google do about it?
During our crawling and when serving search results, we try hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has articles in “regular” and “printer” versions and neither set is blocked in robots.txt or via a noindex meta tag, we’ll choose one version to list. In the rare cases in which we perceive that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. However, we prefer to focus on filtering rather than ranking adjustments … so in the vast majority of cases, the worst thing that’ll befall webmasters is to see the “less desired” version of a page shown in our index.
How can Webmasters proactively address duplicate content issues?
- Block appropriately: Rather than letting our algorithms determine the “best” version of a document, you may wish to help guide us to your preferred version. For instance, if you don’t want us to index the printer versions of your site’s articles, disallow those directories or make use of regular expressions in your robots.txt file.
- Use 301s: If you have restructured your site, use 301 redirects (”RedirectPermanent”) in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect users, the Googlebot, and other spiders.
- Be consistent: Endeavor to keep your internal linking consistent; don’t link to /page/ and /page and /page/index.htm.
- Use TLDs: To help us serve the most appropriate version of a document, use top level domains whenever possible to handle country-specific content. We’re more likely to know that .de indicates Germany-focused content, for instance, than /de or de.example.com.
- Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, make sure they include a link back to the original article on each syndicated article. Even with that, note that we’ll always show the (unblocked) version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer.
- Use the preferred domain feature of webmaster tools: If other sites link to yours using both the www and non-www version of your URLs, you can let us know which way you prefer your site to be indexed.
- Minimize boilerplate repetition: For instance, instead of including lengthy copyright text on the bottom of every page, include a very brief summary and then link to a page with more details.
- Avoid publishing stubs: Users don’t like seeing “empty” pages, so avoid placeholders where possible. This means not publishing (or at least blocking) pages with zero reviews, no real estate listings, etc., so users (and bots) aren’t subjected to a zillion instances of “Below you’ll find a superb list of all the great rental opportunities in [insert cityname]…” with no actual listings.
- Understand your CMS: Make sure you’re familiar with how content is displayed on your Web site, particularly if it includes a blog, a forum, or related system that often shows the same content in multiple formats.
- Don’t worry be happy: Don’t fret too much about sites that scrape (misappropriate and republish) your content. Though annoying, it’s highly unlikely that such sites can negatively impact your site’s presence in Google. If you do spot a case that’s particularly frustrating, you are welcome to file a DMCA request to claim ownership of the content and have us deal with the rogue site.
In short, a general awareness of duplicate content issues and a few minutes of thoughtful preventative maintenance should help you to help us provide users with unique and relevant content.
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I read a great article today that really details how important links are to your Web site success. I could not have said it better so I felt I needed to share the complete article with you. The article was written by Article Marketer, Mike Liebner from Article Underground.
To get a top ranking for a keyword phrase on Google and the other search engines, your web page should have that exact keyword phrase on the page itself PLUS it must have good links pointing at the URL (your web page).
If no links point to that URL - Google will assume it is a page with little or no value.
Taking this a step further - links are BEST when they have GOOD KEYWORDS in the LINK TEXT.
LINK TEXT : the text that is found within the LINK pointing at your web page.
A banner or image link is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, but even better is a good text link.
When they see a text link with your keywords in the link text - it helps them to decide how they will rank you when people search for that keyword phrase.
Putting the right words on your web pages pages is a step in the right direction, but if Google NEVER sees any of those words in LINK TEXT, either on your site or as linked on other sites, there is very little chance they will rank you on top for any of those keywords.
The solution is to to find out what PHRASES and keywords are on your pages and do your best to get links to your page with the exact words.
HOT TIP: Use the AUKDAT Keyword Density Analyzer Tool to find out what single, 2 word and 3 word phrases appear on your web page. Simply enter a URL and AUKDAT will tell you the words that are on your page (and also show you which words could appear MORE OFTEN! ie if a KEYWORD PHRASE appears more than 2 times it is more likely to bring you traffic).
Each time Google sees a word it will start to give your reputation a boost for that - it spills over to other word combinations too…
Example:
Free Web Traffic
If you have a few links with that phrase on pages that are indexed - Google will start giving you JUICE for not only that exact phrase but also for other phrases that have either
free
or
web
or
traffic
So every time a link has some of your words in it - Google will start giving you juice for the phrase and the words - tons of possible combinations will also get juice.
This is very complex and can be discussed at length… but the basic core concept is - if you want your web page to rank for a lot of keywords - make sure you have at least a few good links using those words pointing at your page!
One page can get top rankings for hundreds or even thousands of keyword combinations BUT that said - if you DILUTE the value of the PRIMARY PHRASE too much - that primary phrase will slip. So be careful to always your your most important keywords in the limelight.
What is a good linking strategy? I suggest you decide on your primary keyword phrases for each web page - 3 to 5 phrases are generally enough to target with emphasis.
Get a few links for each those primary phrases from other web sites than your own and then wait and see if your keywords rank on top and bring traffic - if they do rank and start to bring you traffic - focus on those exact phrases that bring you visitors so you can push them up to the top of the rankings.
Just make sure you have some variety in your link text so that you don’t have patterns showing it may not be NATURAL.
In the real world popular web pages have links with text that has LOTS of variety and even BAD LINK TEXT - because people who link to your page because they like it don’t always have GOOD SEO in mind - so the most popular pages on the web will naturally have a large variety of links pointing at it - not just a handful of keywords repeated over and over with no variations - that is not natural!
You need to be careful that when you read helpful tips such as those I am giving you that you don’t take them too literal. You need to see the nuances that are needed. Try not to be a robot and machine. Think a little and make your link text like that of real world successful web pages.
When you start promoting your web page with text links it is easy. A few links will not reveal patterns.
When they see only a few links, even with the same link text - they can’t tell it is an un-natural pattern - but if you HAMMER IT and get lots of links with those few exact keyword phrases - it will quickly become more obvious with the more exact links you get.
Because in the real world NO ONE PAGE gets 100 of 100 links with the same link text… it just does not happen.
Now, I know there are a few people thinking they are screwed…. it’s too difficult to keep track of the keywords… I suggest the following.
Start off slow. Build a nice web page and get a few good links pointing at it to start with a few phrases. Then work on other new pages and wait for your statistics to tell you which keyword phrases are bringing you traffic. These will be the core phrases you want to work on improving your rankings.
If you find a keyword phrase is bringing you traffic and it is NOT number one - simply get a few more links with those keywords and try to push it up the page! It’s easy!
You can do this for any phrase which is sending you traffic. Just keep in mind there is a possibility that when you have new text links out there with different words and combinations - it may harm some of your primary rankings. Often it won’t, but if you use some words too often Google will think your page is about those words and it can hurt your reputation for other words.
Don’t worry about this too much - just avoid having ONE PHRASE linked too often - when they see it the first few times they will most likely rank you on top - just chill - don’t link too much - if they see TOO MANY LINKS TOO FAST and not enough variety they will assume you are trying to pull a fast one on them.
An alarm will go off and you may get penalized.
The solution is to go slow and try to be natural. Just have some variety and don’t hammer any one phrase too much.
Never more than 75or 80% of your total links should have the same phrase. And always have a handful of phrases with variations. Add an extra word or two to your main phrase. This will help your main phrase get juice and at the same time show them variety.
This article was written by Article Marketer, Mike Liebner from Article Underground.
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Are you looking for a quick way to drive traffic to your site?
- Optimize your press release just as you would a page on your Web site. Include your most important keywords in the press release title and first paragraph.
- Hyperlink to your important pages on your Web site with suitable keywords as anchor text. When the press release is distributed these links will be picked up by distribution partners
- With Google’s Universal Search, Google has started showing press releases in its organic search results. If your press release is well optimized, it can rank in two or three days in the Google’s organic results.
Press releases can be extremely valuable for both long and short term purposes. One press release may not give you a great deal of exposure by if you dedicated yourself to writing one a month you are sure to drive additional traffic to your site fairly quickly.
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