What Your Website’s ‘Bounce Rate’ Means for Your Business
Posted in: Search Engine Optimization, Web Copywriting, Web Design by Althea Tan on September 7, 2010
If you’ve already embarked on simple link building for your website, you probably get daily visitors who either followed your link or found your business through a social media network. If you closely monitor your traffic through analytics, and if you use Google Analytics in particular, you see a column that shows the “bounce rate” of your traffic. Oftentimes business owners tend to overlook this analytics feature, but it actually says a lot about the effectiveness of your website.
What is “bounce rate” and why do your visitors “bounce”?
Bounce rate measures the number of visitors who immediately leave as soon as they land on your website. This usually happens when your website does not have what they’re looking for.
Visitors usually “bounce” from three key areas of your website: home page, navigation pages, and content pages. Content and navigation pages normally have high bounce rates than your home page or conversion pages. On the other hand, if your homepages and conversion pages have recorded high bounce rates, there might be something wrong with them in general, either you need to tweak your website copy, redesign your website, put a compelling offer, make your calls to action appear more prominent, or even install blog or forums to make your website more interactive. Critical pages such as the home page and the conversion page should immediately engage your visitors, cater to their interests, and encourage them to visit other pages on your site. Your critical pages serve as portals to your website so when your visitors leave the gate immediately, you need to investigate why. Read more…
Facebook Marketing 101 for Small Business
Posted in: Facebook, Internet Marketing, Social Media by Althea Tan on August 31, 2010
Facebook marketing may be a relatively new concept for small business owners like you; however, if you’ve tried to look for marketing leads or business advice online, a website or a social media presence such as a Facebook account will benefit you.
Facebook Marketing Starts With Your Profile
Similar to a business card, your social media profile introduces you and your business to everyone online. You build connections through your Facebook profile and you grow your network even if you haven’t met your connections in real life. The viral nature of Facebook makes it easier for your network to “talk” about your brand. Facebook provides many opportunities for its members to “share”, “link”, or “tag” a post or a photo; and if you have a well-planned Facebook marketing in place, you’ll surely benefit from its massive traffic.
A good Facebook marketing strategy uses your business profile to build your brand and develop a strong reputation among your peers who are business owners themselves. Show them what you can offer in return for a mutually beneficial business relationship. Read more…
Elements of a Search Engine Friendly Website
Posted in: Web Design by Althea Tan on August 20, 2010
If you think you have a search engine-friendly website because of the great graphics and catchy content, think again. Search engine friendliness goes beyond the aesthetic elements of your website. In fact, as a business owner, focus your SEO efforts on three major areas: design, content, and coding. For each area, take note of key elements that help search engine bots crawl all pages in your website easier and faster.
Design Elements of a Search Engine Friendly Website
If you recently ventured into online marketing, you may have encountered SEO consultants or companies that believe optimizing web content and site code is enough to develop a search engine friendly website; however, a search engine friendly website consists of not only content and code, but also design. Web design optimization mostly involves “cleaning up” your code by using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to separate the aesthetic from the functional aspects of your website. With CSS, the functional integrity of your website remains intact despite numerous design changes.
Because a CSS-dependent design uses less lines of code, it hastens page loading, which is an important element of a search engine friendly website. Aside from faster page loads, CSS also minimizes coding errors, which facilitates better crawling of search engine bots when they visit your web pages.
A search engine friendly website lightly uses Flash objects and high-resolution images, which frequently cause crawling errors and indexing problems with search engines; however, if your website benefits from a Flash-dependent design, then you should use Adobe’s Flash file format SWF that Google and Yahoo have begun indexing in 2008. Read more…
How to Optimize Your Image For Search in 5 Easy Steps
Posted in: Search Engine Optimization by Althea Tan on August 6, 2010
Have you ever searched for a term on Google and saw images related to that term come up in search engine results page (SERP)? For example, if I search “San Francisco” on Google, I see this:
Image search continues to grow every year as more and more people continue to utilize image sharing sites, like Flickr, to store and showcase their images. Google Images has significantly improved and makes it easier for the users to filter their search results by size, type, and even by color. This only means on thing: image search will be a huge thing, if it isn’t already.
Having said this, your business will certainly benefit from image search. Images naturally capture the attention of search engine users and they will most likely click on an image that is relevant to their query or if it piques their interest. As a business owner, you want your image to be visible when your target customers search for your keywords. If you are a spa owner in San Francisco, for example, and the photo of your spa center shows up when someone searches for “San Francisco spa”, that single image can lead your target customers to find your website.
So how do you exactly optimize your images? As you know, those images that came up in the SERPs didn’t appear there by chance, nor do search engines see what the images actually look like. There are several things that search engines look at when they spider an image and make it relevant to a certain keyword: Read more…
5 Easy Ways to Make Your Videos Show Up on Search Engine Results
Posted in: Video Marketing by Althea Tan on August 3, 2010
Video is becoming more and more popular every year and if you haven’t utilized video marketing yet to market your business, it’s time to do it. It doesn’t have to be expensive: you can use your laptop’s built-in web cam or your digital camera and start talking about your business, your products, or your services. Informative and funny videos usually draw the most number of traffic so you may want to focus on tips and how-tos. Once done, post your video on video sharing sites like YouTube. You can then embed you video on your website, bookmark, “tweet”, or share it on your Facebook.
For you target customers to find your videos, you need to optimize it using your target keywords. Read more…
Is Your Business on Foursquare Yet?
Posted in: Social Media by Gale Thomas on July 8, 2010
Good news for small business owners! The popular location-based social networking website, Fourquare, plans to expand its reach of deals and offers in rural areas, as announced on their blog. That means deal-seekers don’t have to travel far and wide to major cities just to enjoy what participating establishments has to offer.
Small-town business owners can certainly take advantage of this service to grow their customer base and increase their social media exposure. For more information on how Foursquare can help you, visit Foursquare.
Why Use Social Media to Market Your Business
Posted in: Blog, Social Media by Althea Tan on July 1, 2010
You might wonder why you should go to the trouble of visiting different social media websites, filling out almost-repetitive registration forms and profile information and creating user home pages. You probably already have your own website, right? You have an email address. Your business cards include your email address and website URL. You have a physical network of people to whom you can get the word out. Why bother with social media at all?
With the Internet so expansive, your website is still a very small needle in a humongous haystack of online content. Sure, you might have heard about search engine optimization (SEO) and have included a few important keywords on your site. But unless you know how to employ hardcore SEO techniques, you probably haven’t moved up on the list of the popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing, and your business cards only go as far as you’re able to hand them out. Read more…
How People Find Your Local Business Online
Posted in: Blog, Local Search by Althea Tan on June 29, 2010
Times have changes on how people search for businesses and other local information. Phonebooks and Yellow Pages are now a thing of the past. Most people turn to the Internet to search for a local business in their area. If you wonder how people find your business online, watch this video.
5 Link baiting methods that attract one-way links
Posted in: Link Building by Althea Tan on June 15, 2010
Internet users have gotten more sophisticated and online business owners have gone more wary of unsolicited emails asking for a link exchange. Getting good links from other sites used to be so simple: you either buy them or request for link exchange from other websites with decent PR. Over the years, buying links and link exchanges have lost their value. Now, “link baiting” holds the key to getting valuable one-way links to your website.
Photo credit: HurleyGurley
Link baiting uses quality content to attract other webmasters and bloggers to link back to your site as a resource. You need to find that magic formula to get people to think of your content as useful, interesting, or worth linking to. Read more…
How Your Business Can Benefit From Blogging
Posted in: Blog, Blogging by Althea Tan on May 28, 2010
Blogging has been steadily rising in importance since its inception a decade ago. Back then, blogs were no more than static pages constantly updated by the blogger by editing the HTML code. WordPress and Blogger were not available to make the blogger’s work easier.
Now, blogging has become a common activity — thanks to new technology that made it easier for bloggers to create mini sites of their own, complete with pages for a business blog, an ‘about’ section, a contact form, and even a mini directory of links to other web pages.
Is there a market for your business blog?
In a 2008 study by eMarketer, the number of U.S. bloggers will increase more or less 2 million every year. As this number increases, so will the number of blog readers. By 2013, the number of blog readers is set to increase by 10%.
Having a business blog in your corporate marketing strategy can be very beneficial for both the company and its customers. The blog serves as an online public relations medium for corporate news, press releases, and even personal messages from the company’s executives.
More than that, a business blog maintains a well-balanced relationship between the company and its customers: it serves as the avenue for the company to answer questions, assist new clients, and address complaints from customers. Constant communication between company and its consumers brings out issues early on. This gives the company time to fix the problem and avert a possible PR disaster. Read more…