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The Importance of a Vivid Web Design in a Fast-Changing Google World

November 25, 2011 By Nancy Evans 5 Comments

Thanks Nancy Evans for your contribution to Internet Marketing Source! Read on for this weeks guest post and to learn about Google, SEO and Web Site Design from the renowned technology and business writer.

For the average technology user, Google is a company that can do little harm. It offers email, maps, searches, books, images, and more – all free. And with impending upgrades to core programs like Gmail it will soon offer such services as business VoIP, which could certainly make it one of the web’s most accessible VoIP service providers.

But for those of us in the web design or search engine optimization world, Google is an all-powerful force that often makes our lives better but can also sometimes make them more difficult. For those who manage and worry about their website’s PageRank, every minute change in the Google search algorithm can have tremendous reverberations.

Along these lines, recent surveys have highlighted a change in Google’s search that hasn’t drawn much attention, either from SEO people or from web designers. For some time now, Google has offered users the ability to preview web pages when conducting an internet search. By just hovering your mouse over a grey tab that appears to the right of the search results, you can see a preview of the webpage that takes up about one third of your screen. The preview highlights and magnifies important pieces of text (ie text that matches your search terms), which thus allows users to see if the site interests them without even clicking.

The recent surveys show that this feature has had an impact on user behavior. People report that they click on fewer sites than they would otherwise as a result of the preview feature. Since a preview does not count as a page view, this change has the potential to impact traffic and alter a site’s PageRank.

So what does this mean for web designers? On the most fundamental level, this means that your site needs to be vivid and compelling – even when viewed in a shrunk down thumbnail. In the past, designers built sites that attempted to keep the attention of the target audience once they clicked on it. Now, web designers need to convey a purpose and an appeal to that audience before they even click. Large headings, images, and a clean but vivid layout are just a few things to aim for when building your site with the preview in mind.

After all – as we all know – when Google makes a change, a shrewd designer or SEO manager will be quick to adapt.

So what do you think? Increase SERP’s clicks through improved web design OR don’t you think that Google Preview plays much of a role at this point? Comments below…

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Title Tags are One of the Low Hanging Fruits of SEO – Go Pick Them!

April 11, 2011 By Sam Beamond 2 Comments

Of the approximately 200 variables that make up the elusive Google Algorithm, research shows that the <title> tag is probably within the top 10 of the most important on the list.

To make this a little clearer before I continue this post, the <title> tag is the section of text given to the words/phrase that appears in the very top of the browser window. In Internet Explorer, this is generally a blue bar, in Google Chrome you’ll be looking at the tab, same goes for the latest version of FireFox.

On this page look up and you’ll see the following for the <title> tag on this page:

Title Tags are One of the Low Hanging Fruits of SEO Go Pick Them!  |  Internet Marketing Source Blog

Another method for determining the <title> tag of a page is to look at the code view. Title tags are placed in the “head” section of the source code and formatted like this: <title>title text for web page here</title>

Since a large percentage of web users rarely pay attention to the “blue bar/title tag”, this leaves the tag wide open for SEO domination. In other words, we can use whatever keywords/phrases that makes sense for SEO, even if it doesn’t make sense for users (although naturally it will make some sense, but you get my point).

Furthermore, <title> tags are generally extremely easy to implement. On straight html-based pages, the tag can be changed in a matter of minutes. With more dynamic-type websites, the CMS usually includes the option to define the <title> tag, such as with the Internet Marketing Source site.

With this information, it is surprising to know that very few web sites utilize the <title> tag for SEO purposes. In many cases the tag simply says “Welcome to the official site for XYZ Company”. While that is a nice way to introduce the site, and like I mentioned earlier, not only do few web users pay attention to the tag, but a phrase such as this does not tell search engines anything about your site’s content.

That said, one should carefully write their <title> tags to be specific to the page on which it resides, use intentional keywords and phrases that surround your company and industry. There is no harm in placing your company name in the <title> tag for reference, but place this AFTER your keywords/phrases. Why? Search engines tend to focus on the first 70 characters within the <title> tag for ranking purposes. If you put your company name first, unless your company includes relative keywords, you are taking up valuable real estate.

One final point to mention is that your <title> tag has a value off your site also. When search engines display a list of results for a given search, the <title> tag is the text that is displayed as the link for each listing. For example, in Google, this is the large blue underlined text at the top of each search result. For this reason, I tend to write my <title> tags in “phrase” format, that would somewhat help incentify a click. After all, a user is most likely going to click a readable sentence vs. a string of keywords.

Hope this helps put the <title> tag in perspective for you… now don’t hang around, get picking! Then tell me about your <title> tag success story in the comments below.

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A Guide to Google Analytics

March 1, 2011 By Sam Beamond 2 Comments


Google Analytics is a great (and free) tool for measuring website metrics. You won’t find a better tool out there that won’t charge you a fee for their services.

I’ve written this post as a resource for clients and non clients alike, to provide the basics of navigating Google Analytics and getting the most out of the software.

This post assumes that you have the necessary analytics code installed on your site and is correctly capturing data. If you do not have the code installed, here’s the Google Analytics installation instructions. If you are unsure, here’s how to do a quick check.

  1. Navigate to your website
  2. Click “view” from the menu and “view source”
  3. With the view source window open, press Ctrl F (windows) to open the find window
  4. Type “google-analytics.com”. If you find that in your code, then its likely you have Google Analytics installed. Although this won’t check if its installed correctly

With that said, lets get on with the Guide to Google Analytics…

Accessing Your Website Analytics

Visit Google.com and sign in via the link in the top right hand corner. Enter your login information. Once logged in you will need to click the “Analytics” button to access your website account “Dashboard” and view your stats.

The Google Dashboard is essentially a summary of your web metrics. Look at it as your web metrics homepage. The following sections will explain the main features of the tabs located in the left hand column of your Dashboard page. Topics covered are: Visitors; Traffic Sources; Content and Goals.

Visitors Overview

The first tab covers statistics that relevant to your visitors. It answers questions like, how many people visited my website? etc. Take a look at the date range to the top right of the screen. This can be changed to show stats for a different date range by clicking the gray arrow to the right of the last date. The default is set for the past 30 days. Note: This date range setting is applicable to all metrics from the dashboard.

The Visitor graph display provides a visual look at your traffic trends.

The following information displays numeric figures relating to your website visitors during the time period specified above. Here’s what they mean:

Visits: Total number of all visits to the site

Absolute Visitors: Total number of “unique visitors” to the site, does not include visitors who viewed the site more than once

Pageviews: Total number of pages viewed by all visitors

Average Pageviews: Average number of pages viewed per visitor

Time on Site: Average amount of time spent on the site by all visitors

Bounce Rate: Percentage of web visitors who only viewed one page

New Visits: Percentage of visitors who were visiting the site for the first time

Each of the breakdown figures above are clickable for more detail.

The next section of the Visitors area is “Visitor Segmentation”. This is basically a browsable area of more information based on user location, operating systems, languages etc. Click the links in this section for details.

The bottom of the page features the “Technical Profiles” of the hardware used to access your site, such as browsers used and connection speeds. This particularly important when designing your website for cross browser compatibility. Again, the information is clickable for details.

Traffic Sources

In this section you can learn about where your visitors came from and how they found you.

The first part features numeric metrics and a pie chart to visually show you the sources of your traffic.

Direct Traffic: Visitors to your site who got there directly by entering your url in the browser address bar. These visitors may have got your url from printed literature of clicked a link in an email

Referring Sites: Visitors who clicked a link on another website that sent them to your website

Search Engines: Visitors who found your site after performing a search on a search engine website like Google.

The “Top Traffic Sources” section provides a breakdown of the search engines and other sites that linked visitors to your site and includes the keywords that they used to find you.

The Traffic Sources section is a great tool to use when determining the best methods to optimize your website for search engines (SEO).

Content

Here you learn about which of your web pages were looked at the most and which pages your visitors clicked to within your site after “landing” there.

Pageviews: Total number of pages viewed on your site by all visitors

Unique Views: Total number of pages viewed by unique visitors, i.e., this would not include visitors who have been to your site before and clicked the same pages

Bounce Rate: Percentage of web visitors who only viewed one page

The following sections are clickable and provide details on navigation, optimization and click patterns as follows:

Navigation Summary: How visitors found your content

Entrance Paths: How visitors navigated through your site to get to your content

Entrance Sources: Top sources of traffic for each page

Entrance Keywords: Top keywords used to find each page

Site Overlay: A transparent overlay view of your website that visually shows you which buttons or links were clicked most.

At the bottom of the “Content” page you will find a breakdown of the number of visitors to each page of your site. The most popular being first and working down to the least popular. The top five pages are displayed here but you can click for the complete list.

Use this section to determine where to place or direct visitors to the content that you want them to see. You can also use this area to help determine why these pages are popular and replicate the format or structure for the pages that are most important.

Goals

The last section covered in this reference guide is for “Goals”. The area allows you to set up and record “goals”. Goals are records of conversions from your website. In most cases a goal could be to get your visitor to fill out a contact form, or buy a product. These goals (or conversions) can be recorded automatically by Google Analytics. You can then monitor these goals and tweak, update and restructure your website to “funnel” more conversions.

To set up a goal, follow the instructions on the “Goal Overview” page.

Conclusion

This concludes my “Google Analytics Quick Reference Guide” although, I realize that I have only scratched the surface in this guide on all you can do with Google Analytics.

Do you already use Google Analytics? What do you or don’t you like about it? Tell me about it in the comments below.

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How to Upload a File by FTP to a Web Server

February 26, 2011 By Sam Beamond Leave a Comment

Whether you like it or not, it is likely that there will come a time in your internet marketing career where you will need to use the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to transfer files from your computer to a web server. Unless you are fortunate enough to have a web developer on stand by for those occasions. FTPing a file may sound scary to some, but there is really nothing to it. In simple terms, transferring a file by FTP is like copying a file from one folder to another within “My Computer”, except the originating folder is on your computer and the folder you are copying to is on your web server. I have shown several illiterate clients over the years how to FTP in a matter of minutes. What’s more, I am writing this post to give you a snapshot of how to get a file from your computer to a web server.

Let’s get started…

Transferring a File by FTP

First off you will need an FTP client (software). There are many freebies out on the web. I prefer to use CoreFTP, this is what I will use for this post. FileZilla is another popular one. Whichever you choose, the process will be roughly the same.

Visit: http://www.coreftp.com/ download and install Core FTP

Open the software and you will be given a “Site Manager” window, here we need to configure a new site.

Click “New Site” in the bottom left corner of the window. Now fill in the blanks as follows:

Site Name – Pick a name to refer to your site (this doesn’t have to be your url)

Host/IP/URL – Here you will need to enter your domain name (without the http://www) or the site IP address, if you have it. The IP address will look something like 70.32.116.20

Username – This is your FTP username

Password – This is your FTP password

All other settings can be left alone. Now click “Connect”. After connecting, you’ll be given a screen split into four areas. The top row displays the processing information and a log of all actions performed while connected to the server. The middle left column displays the files on your hard drive and the right hand column displays the files on the server. Finally the bottom row displays a log of current actions performed, i.e. CoreFTP lets you know where it is at when you start uploading files.

To upload a file to the server, you simply navigate to the correct folder/file on your hard drive (in the left column). When you have found the file click and drag it over to the relevant directory/folder in the right column (the web server). You might want to drill down to the correct folder on  the server-side first, since you cannot change the folder as you are dragging. Most files will transfer quickly, the larger the file, the longer it will take.

The process can be reversed just as easily. To copy a file from the web server back to your hard drive, click the file in the right window and drag it to the left window.

Note, this process of dragging will COPY the file from one location to another, it will not “move” it as it would if dragging files to different folders within your hard drive.

Have a favorite FTP client that you like to use? Tell me which it is and why you like it in the comments below.

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Internet Marketing Tips for Authors: How to Market Your Book Online (AUDIO)

January 30, 2011 By Sam Beamond 2 Comments

Recently, I had the pleasure of being included in a web radio show. I was asked to present to an audience of authors on how to market their books using the internet. The subject is broad and there is much to cover in the 45 minute slot that I had, so I employed the tactic of touching on the following key aspects:

  • SEO – How to choose and use your keywords
  • Blogging – What is the advantage of blogging?
  • Social Media – Using FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn and how are they different
  • Selling your book – Lulu, Amazon and ebay
  • Strategy – Tying it all together

The following media clip is a direct recording from the show. Hit Play, then scan across to about the ninth minute, where the Internet Marketing content begins.

Have you written a book, and have further questions? Post them in the comments below. Thanks!

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