OneSearch

After reading this great article about the importance of your website and how it looks, I thought I would share what I read with you.
It is so extremely important for you to have a professional looking website—especially if you are hoping to bring in many visitors and turn them into paying customers.

Here are some tips from the article that you should definitely keep in mind:

1. Make Sure Your Website is Visitor Friendly

You need to make sure that your users/customers are able to find what they are looking for quickly and easily. Having a great navigational system will help do this. Most websites show their navigation bar at the top of the page or on the left-hand side. It’s a good idea to stick with this placement since most people are used to this type of navigation.

2. Make Sure You Focus On Your Customer Needs

Try letting your potential customers know how your product or service is going to benefit them, instead of trying to sell your business to them. Make an effort to emphasize the benefits of what you are selling. Focus on writing this on every page of your site. Show your potential customers that you can help them with your goods or services–don’t try to sell visitors your products or service.

3. Make Sure You Have No Spelling Errors!

Making sure your website has no grammatical or spelling errors is extremely important. This shows professionalism and the credibility of your website.
Also make sure that all your links are working properly and displaying correctly.

4. Show Credibility

It’s important to show that your website is trustworthy, reliable, and credible. You can do that by including testimonials from your current customers to show your potential clients. This will show potential clients that you provide a great product or service and how happy your former customers are with your service. Make sure the testimonials are real and if you can, provide contact details of the person who gave you the testimonial. If you don’t have any right now, you should really try and get them! Just email your customers and ask for their feedback on your business and service. Most happy customers will gladly provide this.

5. Includes Contact Details

Make it very easy for your customers to contact you. Place contact information in as many places as you can. Create a special “Contact Us” page, and include your details in an”About Us” page and also at the bottom of each page. You should include the following information: business name, physical address, mailing address, telephone, fax, email, emergency number, website address and most importantly, don’t forget to include your business hours.

6. Offers a Money Back Guarantee

Remember, you are trying to take the risk out of doing business with you. You want potential customers to feel safe and comfortable doing business with you. The longer the guarantee, the more effective it will be. It could be 30 days, 60 days, 1 year or lifetime.

7. Provides Information People are Looking For

Content is still the most important thing. If you’re not providing something, someone else will! If you don’t provide it, someone else will. Try to include as much information as possible such as detailed descriptions and prices of your products and services, free resources, articles, reports, ebooks or anything relating to your industry, service and products. This will help to ensure that customers will keep coming back to your website, even if it is just to get information. The more people visit, the more they will remember you as an expert and the next time they are ready to order your products/services, you will be their first choice.

Consider giving your website a makeover if it contains any of the following:

1. Flash intros, revolving globes, bevelled line separators, animated mail boxes,
2. Pop up or pop under boxes.
3. Autoplay music.
4. Wording such as “You are the 27th visitor”.
5. Date and time stamps, unless your website is updated daily or weekly.
6. Busy backgrounds.

You have to ask yourself if your website portrays the professional image that you want your customers to see? Did you provide all the information that you think your customers may want or need to know?

Great things to think about!!

I just read a helpful and interesting article about this—is Facebook right for your business and how do you know?
Well, we all know that one thing is for sure—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and really all forms of social media is here to stay, so the best thing to do is accept it and learn how to use social media to your benefit. So how to you know if a social media site like Facebook is right for you and your business? How do you know if it will help benefit your company?

According to this article I read on SitePro News, it all comes down to three things essentially.

First, do you think there are enough people on Facebook that have an interest in your area of business for it to be worth your while? You should try to think about not only clients but also other business connections. Is your profile set up the right way? Are people visiting your site when they see your profile? How long does it take to get a new client this way—what is the value of it? Things to think about…

You can experiment with Facebook. Check to see if there are enough people who need your services. Search for group and check local networks on the Marketplace page.
Check to see if there are people in your area that would “be your friend” who would need and use your services.
Try to not get too aggressive with your promoting—just let them know who you are, what you do, etc and after having a few conversations with them, send them information about your services-maybe a discounted coupon in case they would ever need those services. If you turn your initial conversation into a sales pitch, some people may be turned off.

Next, does your company have an RSS-capable site that is updated frequently?
If so, having a Facebook profile just gives you another place to share your RSS link.
You can import your blog posts and there are also applications like NetworkedBlogs that will help your blog posts get exposure from interested readers.

And finally, do you already have friends, clients, business associates, etc. who are already using Facebook? Try connecting with these people! That is the great thing about Facebook-how you can build and cement relationships with people that you didn’t think you had much in common with. Facebook helps as it functions as an “ice-breaker,” acting as the initial contact between you and someone you want to interact with.

So it’s really a matter of whether you are willing to get something out Facebook and whether the available traffic is targeted to your business. This may not work for everyone since everyone doesn’t want to use Facebook in this way or do the work necessary to have it work for them in this way.

But with a little research, you can determine whether or not Facebook could work for you and your business and what kind of role it could play.

Good Stuff!

I found a great article about this topic this week—about how the effect of social media on SEO is changing so much. It used to be that figuring out how to develop link bait that had the best chance of making it on the front page of social news sites was the thing to do. While this still works and is a good tactic, there is so much more that social media can do nowadays. With sites like Facebook and Twitter, it is possible to build high quality links by using networking and information sharing techniques.
Twitter specifically is being used as a public relations outreach outlet—and it’s effective.

This kind of PR is becoming a new technique for promotion and link building.
It is also a widely believed that social media will be major source of ranking in the future for search engines.

If social media signals would begin to be introduced as a ranking factor, this could allow the search engines “leverage the wisdom of the crowds”.
If users who previously couldn’t vote for content via links from web pages now are able to vote with their tags, bookmarks, clicks, and ratings—this sends a strong signal to the search engines. It also does not simply rely on one web site owner linking to another.

Some don’t believe that social media signals will completely replace links as a ranking signal-but rather complement them. So a link from a highly trusted site will still be considered highly valuable, and at the same time, a number of mentions across many social media sites would also be a strong signal.

For SEO, this means that the skills required to succeed in an SEO project is increasing. There will be a lot more data for the search engines to use, so this is good news for them, and all the while increasing the challenge for SEOs at the same time.

The companies that understand social media and how to use its services as part of a broader PR strategy will most likely get an early advantage over their competition. Knowing this and acting on this can definitely bring some immediate benefits in terms of market exposure now, and most likely will bring a significant advantage of improved search engine rankings in the future.

Good things to keep in mind!

I just came across a great and very informational article about different ways to improve your site conversions. This gives you nine different things you can do to try and make more profit from the same amount of website traffic. Making more money from the same number of visitors? Who wouldn’t want to know how to do that, right?

You should think about these steps before you start spending more money to generate additional traffic—first try doing what you can to improve the traffic that you are already getting.

1. You need to have a good way of measuring what you are doing, what is working, etc . You need to know how you are performing before you are able to fix or improve something. Google Analytics is a free tool offered by Google that offers detailed statistics about visitors to a website. You can sign up for a free Google Analytics account or another no-cost or low cost tool to develop your metrics and analytics.

2. Try to create landing pages that are both campaign specific and keyword specific. If you separate related keywords into smaller ad groups, and then create a landing page for each of these ad groups, your conversions will almost definitely be higher. If your keywords and landing pages are thematically related, this will most certainly help your conversion rate.

3. Try testing different ad copy and headlines in your landing pages. This could be one of the quickest, most effective ways of showing improvements. Having compelling ad copy can increase conversions and should not be overlooked.

4. Testing your pricing is another important way to see a huge difference in conversions.
Try and test your prices in both directions—raise and lower your prices by a certain percentage and see if that makes a difference. If your goal is trying to maximize customer value, then the highest converting price may not be the best. So if you decide to lower your prices by 20% and you see your sales double or triple, your increase compensates for the price reduction. If you raise your price by 40% and only see conversions lower by 10% then you will have more than compensated for the drop. So it’s a good idea to test in both directions.

5. Measure your website load time—make sure the speed at which your website is loading is appropriate. This is often overlooked, but it is extremely critical when trying to reduce bounce rate. There are many online services that will measure you load time for you—and then from there you can reduce your load time (if needed) by removing items that are redundant, compressing images, etc.

6. Keep your sales process as clear and as straightforward as possible. The less confusing it is for the user, and the easier it is to navigate to the sale, the better. You can check your metrics and analytics and find out how visitors are navigating your site and if/when they are leaving your site. From there, delete any unnecessary steps. Try enhancing your sales copy and the call to action. Insert some testimonials to capture business. If you clearly identify the path to the sale, the less resistance visitors will display and the better chance you have for more conversions.

7. Third-party testimonials boost conversions—it has been clearly proven. If you add testimonials (they can be highlighted quotes, letter, or short blurbs) to your different landing page variations, sales pages and even shopping cart pages, you will no doubt notice an improvement in your conversion rate.

8. If you understand your customer’s experience with your website and the mind of the market, you can get a better idea of what you need to improve on in order to increase conversions. Try placing an order on your own site and go through the steps of an actual customer. Identify anything confusing or missing that would hinder a conversion. When you identify why you are not converting, then you can make any improvements that are necessary to improve your conversions.

9. Keep tracking of everything! Keep track of what changes you are making, when you are making them, how you are making them, and why you are making them. From there, you can chart your progress, review it periodically and continue to finesse so that you are getting the optimal amount of conversions.

Great list of things to keep in mind when trying to increase your number of conversions.
Try these things first—before you go and spend more money trying to generate more traffic.