What I’m talking about is teaching your content how to “engage”, “inform”, “speak” (call to action), and “convert”. Teach these tricks to your content and you’ll see a whole new level of performance on your website.

The first thing to train your content to do is not to overstay it’s welcome. Like a neighbor you enjoy having over occasionally, there comes a time when they must leave. In the same way, you can train your content to know when to stop talking and show the visitor the door to the next page or pages of your site.

Leave them wanting more… and then give them more

We often try to do either too much or too little with our content. The “old school” rules of SEO said you had to have a minimum amount of content. Is it 100 words…200 words? There is a minimum number of words you need per page, but it has nothing to do with counting. It’s the amount of content that is needed for the text to move the visitor to the next step.

There are three simple rules to training your text when it comes to the quantity of text to be used:

1) There is no magic amount. Some pages require a lot of text, but some don’t require much text at all. But, bear in mind, that all pages need some text. Text is what convinces, persuades, informs, and helps your audience decide that they want to buy from you.

2) Keep your text as brief as possible. This doesn’t mean your text has to be short, just that you don’t go for length when length is not needed or warranted.

3) Use no more words than needed to convert. Your audience isn’t just one person. It’s many people looking at many items for many purposes. Once you start looking at personas and personalities trying to target everybody on a single page can be daunting. But, you don’t have to hit everybody perfectly on a single page. Figure out what the next step is for each group, and provide that opportunity. It could be a link to an “About Us” page, a link to “Shipping Policies” or a “Buy Now” button.

The basic idea is to train your text to be minimalist while still providing ways for the reader to request an encore. They do that by clicking further into the site to get even more information, where, hopefully, that page is also trained to provide the audience what it wants as well.

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For those of you who don’t know, the breadcrumb is the small text usually found under the title on the page (not the HTML title). The breadcrumb shows where you are in the website hierarchy AND (this is the important part) it is hyperlinked to pass internal anchor text. I can’t stress enough how important it is that the words be linked.

With the exception of things like your customer service, privacy, and contact us pages, all of the pages should be under the main sections of the masthead we talked about previously. Unless you are going to have more than 150 pages in each section, don’t add an extra level. Yes, I know Google says 100 links, but you can easily stretch to 150 without much need for concern.

As an example: hotels in Disney World are divided up by which park they are closest to. So there are Magic Kingdom Hotels, Epcot Hotels, and so on. Resist the temptation to add an extra layer or crawling point (at least in the architecture–we’ll talk about the bread crumb in a minute).

Users are going to be likely to look at hotels based on which park they are associated with, so you will need a “Magic Kingdom Hotels” page. From an information architecture standpoint, however, you don’t need the extra layer. This really requires that you understand the topic. You want break things up for usability, but you want to design your architecture as flat as possible for the search engines to crawl. Adding extra layers to crawl through never works to your advantage … ever.

When linking to the home page many websites use the word “home” as a link to the homepage. You can do that but, if you do, you are missing the opportunity to focus a little more internal anchor text. Instead use an icon of a “home” and do an image replacement using the site name as anchor text. I have seen people use their primary keyword: use this with caution as it is a risky technique. The more the anchor text differs from the site name, the greater the risk.

When you are building the breadcrumb use the exact anchor text you are using in the masthead. The more it varies the less effective the technique will be. So ideally this is what you would want:

> Disney World Hotel Reviews > Magic Kingdom Hotels > Contemporary Resort Review

> Disney Vacations > Disney Vacation Promotional Codes

> Disney Information > Best Time to Visit Disney World

So what are the the takeaways here:

• Use breadcrumbs. Make sure they are hyperlinked and use internal anchor text to your advantage.
• Use the image replacement technique for linking to your homepage.
• Use a flat site architecture. Don’t add extra crawling layers.

That’s it. Once this is in place, you are telling Google what the important parts of your site are and using your internal anchor text to tell them what it’s about. Next in this series: How To Silo Your Website: The Content.

1. I love their landing page editor, it’s extremely slick and the ability to configure page elements / content is quite intuitive.
2. If you would like to capture leads, Unbouce can help you design a custom web form which collects the leads via a CSV file. The leads can also be emailed to you or posted to a custom URL.
3. It has a built in A/B testing framework whereby you can add and compare variants to your main landing page. The framework also helps select the ‘winner’ of the test.
4. Unbounce collects visits, page views and conversions. Conversions can be defined as form submissions or even link clicks. *Something I still can’t figure out is how I can see a report on individual conversions vs. total conversions (so if you’re reading this Unbounce team please let me know).
5. There’s a free version which allows you test your landing page against 200 visitors.

Below is a screenshot of my landing page results.

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]]> http://www.websitenotes.com/2010/08/09/a-diy-landing-page-solution/feed/ http://www.websitenotes.com/2010/07/26/how-frequently-should-you-post-content/ http://www.websitenotes.com/2010/07/26/how-frequently-should-you-post-content/#comments Mon, 26 Jul 2010 12:30:26 +0000 Beth Schillaci http://www.websitenotes.com/?p=207 When meeting with clients about blogging, they often worry about how often they need to publish to be effective. I did a post regarding my thoughts on a survey that basically says the more posts a week the better conversion of customers. To recap, I firmly believe that you should concentrate on the quality of your posts versus the quantity.

At the very least, you should plan on one post a week or you just shouldn’t bother with a blog. There have been weeks that I have not had anything to post, and that is going to happen from time to time, but you really should have a goal of at least once a week. We’ve already talked about ways to help organize this content, namely an editorial calendar and chunking your writing time, so you should be able to produce, at the very least, one post a week.

As you make blogging part of your routine, my hope is that you will be able to add more posts into your weekly schedule. It is true the more you can keep people engaged with you and your company, the better for your branding and positioning. The more you can produce quality content that your audience is looking for, the closer you get to achieving your blogging goals. Will it result in more sales? Honestly, results may vary and may take a little more experimenting on your part with topics, frequency, media type and time of day when you post.

Tomorrow I’m going to give you some ideas for coming up with content for your blog. I’m hoping that will give you more ideas to be able to post more often as you find your blogging voice and groove. In the last week of July, I will discuss some measurement techniques to track in order to know whether what you are doing is working or needs adjusting. I’ll leave you with this, be realistic about your time and what you can produce for content. As soon as you take on too much, you will begin to dislike the process and give up on your blog. Take your time, build a foundation, and then add on as you go.

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They had a genius bar where people could ask questions of WP experts. I spent about 2 minutes there and learned a trick that will probably save me 1-2 hours each time I set up a new WP installation for a new client project from now on.

Over the last year I’ve gotten comfortable with a set of plugins that I use for just about every project. And recently I attended a WordPress security seminar and a one-on-one security consult from WPSecurityLock – I learned much about securing a WordPress install and as a result added a few more plugins to my must-have list.

The problem is that getting those plugins installed and configured takes some time. I went to the genius bar to see if there was a way to make the process more automatic.

Here’s what I plan to do as a result of that 2-minute conversation:

• Create a dummy WordPress install on my production server
• Add in my chosen framework (at this point I like WP-Framework a lot)
• Install and adjust settings for my list of must-have plugins

Then when I start each new WP project, I can just export a copy of the dummy site’s database (after making sure everything is up to date) and use it for the new site.

This seems totally obvious to me now, but thanks to the genius bar I didn’t have to go through a lot of headaches to get here.

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By connecting your blog to the ever expanding world of Facebook, you are guaranteed that your blog visitors are reminded to go back to your blog when you have fresh updates. And thus, you retain a regular number of visitors and you can further attract more new readers, increasing your overall blog traffic by impressive rates.

And now, Typepad bloggers can celebrate as the Facebook Like button widget is now in all Typepad blogs.

It was April when Facebook has finally released the Like button application at the F8 Developer conference. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook has planned to spread the Like button not only on their social networking site, but also to other sites that would connect to Facebook via the Like button. When readers click the like button on an article or blog post, they can share your content with their Facebook contacts without your blog and so they can help you in publicizing your blog. Once readers hit the Like button, their Facebook friends can discover your blog since they can see your site is “liked” by their other friends in the News Feed. Now they are given the chance to actually look through your blog and “like” the site themselves, and so your pages get added to these users’ News Feed stream. This will result to a chain reaction that will give your site more referral traffic.

More and more Typepad bloggers have been utilizing the power of the Facebook Like button. More than 1,500 Typepad users have installed the Like button widget on their blog sidebars since the app was released last May. Adding the Facebook Like widget on your Typepad blog is really easy. You just have to go to the Settings and sharing section and follow the simple instructions. If you are a Pro user, you can actually move the widget around your blog template and place it wherever you want.

Typepad has also released another version of the Like widget that allows bloggers to put a Facebook Like button at the bottom of EACH blog entry.

Typepad has more than 2,400 users who are using this feature. According to the company, these blogs have experienced an incredible 200% increase in blog referral traffic from Facebook.

Truly, that little “Like” button can give you BIG results.

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Often, we think that we know what people are looking for, but we’re wrong. We think that people are looking for our product names or other names we call our products, but they might be searching for something else. People often use different words than we expect. I remember when I worked for IBM that we insisted on calling our computers “notebooks” even though “laptops” was the word that searchers used the most. So, if you spend an enormous amount of time optimizing for “notebooks” then you might be surprised when it helps a lot less than you’d expect. 

If this might be happening to you, you have another option: keyword research. It’s a high-fallutin’ name, but what it means is that you must use tools, such as Google ’s Keyword Tool or other similar tools. You enter the words you think you should be optimizing for, and see what the tools tell you. They might tell you add other words, which you can do. You can also try entering those new words by themselves, to see what they conjure up.

For some of you this is basic advice, but small business owners come up to me all the time convinced that search optimization doesn’t work precisely because they’ve skipped the step of keyword research. I think they do this, in part, because search experts (me included) sometimes spend so much time talking about optimizing title text and ensuring spiderability and attracting links and using social media that we forget the “marketing” part of “search marketing,” causing people to hear only the “optimization” message. If we don’t (as an industry) help businesses to identify their customers’ needs, then we are selling a cure for a problem they don’t have (yet).

Don’t assume that you (or your clients, if you are in the industry) know what people are looking for. Find out what they are really searching for before you optimize, because it doesn’t help to optimize for words that aren’t the right ones. You’ll attract mostly the wrong people, or perhaps no one at all.

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- A bunch of links to a thin site (e.g. without valuable content) doesn’t make that site a positive user experience. So don’t guest post at the expense/neglect of your own site.
- Google is getting better at detecting quality content (and presumably differentiating it from junk).
- More in depth sites are favoured for now.

You can probably come up with your own. In any event, it’s clear that this is a whitehat tactic, and Google’s John Mueller was just pointing out that new sites need good content.

Bottom line: When a well-intentioned but perhaps sensational SEO bloggers says something, don’t take it for granted – check the source yourself. It turns out that the following [conveniently ignored] quotations were also part of the interview:

“Q 12. What’s your take on articles submission websites? I do a lot of article marketing & distribution for my clients. These are original articles written and distributed through sites like eZineArticles and iSnare. Obviously besides the exposure my clients get as experts, I am also looking at the SEO benefit of earning backlinks from these posts. How do you treat multiple copies of the same article spread over different sites?

“John Mueller: As mentioned in an earlier question, it generally makes much more sense to create great content for your own site, instead of giving it to a large number of other sites to publish.

“Personally, I would recommend not looking at it with regard to the links; think about how users will view the content and the people who created it. Having high-quality content on your own site will make it stand out much more than if that content is posted all over the web. If the content is unique and compelling, it will generally attract links naturally over time.”

Furthermore, there’s this goodie:

“Q 23. I know that inbound links will help my site’s ranking in Google search results but is that true for outbound links as well? I always link to quality websites from my articles where my visitors can read more about that topic but do these outbound links aid search rankings as well?

“Kaspar Szymanski: No, they don’t contribute directly towards your site’s rankings; however they add value for your readership and they contribute to the community, so feel free to continue this good practice. On the other hand, being selective and preferring quality sites to link to might help in how Google perceives your site.”

Linking out is a good practice for users, so long as the links go to quality sites. If their content is good enough for your site, doesn’t that make their site good enough for a link?

I note also that question 11, which Rhys cites to support his view, is in reference to new sites. This supports my reading about not sending visitors to thin sites:

“Q 11. I have launched a new blog and it obviously won’t rank in Google because none of the reputable blogs are currently linking to it. Therefore, I am actively writing guest posts on other blogs as that gives me a chance to get a link from them. Is Google fine with guest blogging and do links ‘earned’ from writing guest blogs matter?

“John Mueller: Making and promoting a new site takes time and effort. In general I would recommend putting that work into your own site, instead of creating content for other people’s sites.

“It’s much better to create great content for your blog and to let other sites refer visitors to your site on their own. Good luck!”

@Rhys: you’re a bright fellow who I’m sure is already having plenty of success and will see more in the future – no need to get a little extra attention at the risk of misleading a LOT of folks.

“Proving to be a huge traffic source actually. Sent me around 100 visitors already today.

Ironcially they don’t do pingbacks, but must’ve got about 50 or 60 scraped links from it O_o ” – [Rhys' comment on Problogger.com]

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This is the page that introduces your company and in my experience also tends to be one of the most neglected pages on company websites. It is easy to think that this wouldn’t really matter much, but when you look at your analytics and page visits, you will probably be surprised to discover just how many people end up on that page. Actually, if you paid attention to your own web browsing, you wouldn’t be that surprised at all. See, we all want to know who we are dealing with. We seek to know and understand the backstory of a company, as I have often called it. The backstory matters, and it is not just your analytics or number of visits to your About Us page that prove that.

There are many ways to improve the backstory of your organization, but the one I will focus on today is how to reinvent your About Us page to be a better introduction to your company. The following are three tips on how you can make that page really do its job and sell the promise of your company and why a customer might want to work with you:

1. Create better and more human writing. Marketing writing is easy. All you have to do is use lots of words that seem like they feel “professional” and talk about your products or services in the abstract sense. The problem with that kind of writing is that it is too detached. No one responds to marketing writing. The writing they do respond to, though, is the kind of writing you watch on TV or in the movies. Screenwriting. So to make your About Us page better, you need to think like a screenwriter. This means that you write in a style of something you might actually say out loud. The best marketing writing is written to be said, not to be read. So give it a try, and then use the simple test of reading it out loud. If it sounds strange or unnatural, change it.
2. Use video to share your personality. Once you improve the writing on your about page, you might realize that it could be even more powerful to share an introduction to your company over a video. This could be a video of the founder, or a series of interviews with employees or even with your customers. Don’t worry if the thought of online video seems to complicated to do yourself … there are a host of companies like www.turnhere.com who can help you create a video to sell your business for a very reasonable price.
3. Leverage slide presentations you already have. If a video seems out of reach for budget or other reasons, you might also try to create a slide presentation to sell your business. Depending on the type of business you do, this might even be something that you already have in Powerpoint that you use when you make sales calls in person. By using a site like Slideshare, you can now upload that presentation and embed it into your homepage with just a bit of cutting and pasting. The benefit is that you can tell your story in a more visual and logical way, and perhaps even open the door to sales without all the effort. With Slideshare’s new lead generation feature, you can even measure the leads that your slideshow brings into your business.

Finally, for an example of a great About Us page, check out this page from Poken.

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The first variable I chose to profile was visit source – and right away I found a fairly significant difference between the target population and my chosen control group.

As you can see, my target population is much more likely to come Direct, from Yahoo and from key Financial sites than is my control group – and much less likely to come from Google. At the end of my last post, I made the point that the profile isn’t like a report – it’s more like a mini-analysis. This Yahoo discrepancy, in particular, begs explanation and so I wouldn’t leave it as is. I want my profile to explain how we’re getting these visitors and the numbers about Yahoo and Google are far from self-explanatory.

So my next step in building out this profile is to drill-down on the Yahoo numbers. In NetInsight, you can easily add a dimension to any report. I had this report which shows more Yahoo traffic than Google traffic:

 
By adding the Campaign Channel dimension, I get this report which shows almost no Yahoo campaign traffic:

NetInsight’s handling of missing values in sub-dimensions is confusing. When you add a dimension, missing values from the sub-dimension are simply eliminated from the whole report. So instead of seeing a line-item under Yahoo with no campaign channel, I see the Yahoo number reduced to the visits that have a campaign channel assigned. I sure don’t love that approach. But for our Profile, the important point is that it isn’t a known campaign driving the Yahoo traffic.

That’s puzzling.

So I went back to the original report and drilled-down to get the actual referring URLs. In NetInsight, I get this break-down just by left-clicking on a line-item.

I’ve blurred the actual lines here but what’s important is that 75% of the traffic came from a single page and the rest came from a long-tail of pages and Yahoo searches. So I clicked over to that page and lo and behold, I found a large featured ad for the product in question driving directly to the content I’m analyzing.

It’s a campaign after all!

It’s just not properly tagged so NetInsight isn’t recognizing it. Yes, it’s true: half (at least) of all the interesting findings in an analysis turn out to be data quality problems. But at least by drilling down, I’ve made sure my profile won’t reflect those issues.

My next step was to check those financial sites and see if a similar issue existed there:

It didn’t. These links from the #1 financial site were mostly long-tail news articles. There wasn’t one dominant source and there was no campaign.

So for my Profile, I classified the Yahoo traffic from the key page (only) as a sponsorship campaign and turned my attention to the Google numbers.

My first question about the Google numbers was simple – were they really lower than average or was the pie getting distorted by the Yahoo campaign. Look at it this way: suppose that for an average visitor in my control group, 35% are sourced by Google. Now suppose that my target group is completely identical in sourcing but I add in a bunch of additional people from the Yahoo campaign. My percentage from Google is going to fall in the target group and it will look as if visitors are less likely to source from Google. So I quickly re-calculated my percentages after taking out the Yahoo campaign:
 

Taking out the Yahoo campaign reduces the other Yahoo traffic so that the Target looks exactly like the Control. But Google is still way below average and Direct and Financial sites both well above average. We’ve learned that the Financial number is real and seems to be driven by long-tail news linkages to our product area. Score one for good PR. But what about the Google numbers?

To check Google, I looked at Google PPC sourcing for my control group. In that group, 14% of the traffic was sourced by paid ads. I did the same check for my target content visitor segment and found that only about 7% of the group was being sourced by paid ads. What about organic? Well, 25% of the control group visits were sourced by natural search on Google but less than 4% of our target group were sourced this way. A quick check of the relevant terms confirmed the problem – my key pages for this product are very poorly indexed on Google.

Here’s the final version:
  

At this point, I feel like I’ve built a pretty good profile of sourcing for my target population. This compact little section tells my audience how we’re getting visitors to the target area, how sourcing for these visitors compares to my broader control group, and even includes some built-in actionable directives. I’d have to eliminate those directives to fully automate this report. But if I’m preparing a profile for a presentation, this is what I’d like to have to describe where my target visitors come from.

There are a couple of points worth making about this exercise. First, building a profile takes work. I’ve only done a small part of it here but you can see that building a good profile of a visitor segment isn’t a cookie-cutter activity and it can’t be done well in five minutes. What I’ve done here is more valuable, more accurate, and more interesting than the original referring domain report. It’s also, and this is at least equally important, much less likely to be misunderstood or misused.

But to get to this point, I had to do a fair amount of slicing and dicing in NetInsight. That’s why those slicing and dicing capabilities are important in a web analytics tool!

Second, everything I’ve done is in comparison to the control group not the total site. That’s vital, and it makes the whole profile vastly more interesting.

Finally, when you do a profile well, it will be no surprise if you can start to suggest actions and insights right away. I picked this target area of our client’s site at random (truly). But in the course of building just the sourcing part of the profile I found one data integrity issue and came up with at least three reasonable improvement opportunities for the product manager. Pretty cool.

Done well, real analysis is a powerful thing. And good segment profiles are a powerful tool for good analysis.

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