So, the question is; as a local business how does a program like SearchMash.com affect my business? Directly, the answer is minimal, however, now is a good time to review whether you have properly tagged your images on your website to identify your business name, brand and products and services. A9.com was one of the first to incorporate this combined web and image search on one search result page and now with Google playing with this concept it is important to revisit the tagging of images from a SEO / Branding perspective.

What exactly do I mean when I say tagging your images? Basically, it boils down to doing two things:

1) Properly name your images on the server - for example) say your company name is ABC Plumbing and you obviously display your logo on your web page. Don’t name the image logo.gif instead name it abc_plumbing_logo.gif.

2) Include a descriptive “alt” tag so that when a user scrolls over your image - they see a title for it. In the above case, that would be ABC Plumbing - forget adding logo to the alt tag as the user already knows of that.

These can make it easier for a search engine to identify the images on your web site and directly tie them back to a search result page. For example if I did a search for ABC Plumbing on one of these pages and my site URL was displayed on the left and my logo on the right - even if a competitor was trying to capture my search engine traffic, I have double branded myself on a particular page.

Take the first image below and move your mouse over it, you will notice the text “This is the home page of SearchMash.com” this is an example of the alt tag. If like many small businesses you have hired a web designer to build your website, I encourage you to inquire with them about this particular issue to ensure that you are covered.

Search Mash Home Page SearchMash.com

Search Mash Calgary Results Page Calgary
Search Results

Search Mash More Calgary Search Results Calgary
Search Results

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Designing an E-commerce Web site is not as simple as having a “pretty” site that is a pleasure to visit. While it is important to have an attractive site, as much thought must be given to functionality as to appearance.

Many Web designers seem to focus more on appearance than functionality, and while an attractive site is helpful, visitors that become frustrated by the inability of a site to function well, will leave almost immediately, never to return!

Just as important in designing an e-commerce-style Web site, is a somewhat basic knowledge of Web site design, with some simple design skills included. While a thorough knowledge of design and functionality is not important, designing an e-commerce site does have some requirements, or else you’ll always find yourself going back relentlessly and changing the features and functionality in a vain effort to stay abreast of your site visitor’s needs.

E-commerce sites need to focus on some main areas of functionality in order to ensure maximum sales:

1. Load time, page size, and navigability. Slowly loading pages, overly large or small pages, and difficult navigation will only frustrate visitors. Visitors should never have to “wait” for a page to load, should never have to scroll back and forth in order to read a page, nor should they have to “search” relentlessly for the information they want in order to purchase. Clean, simple lines, with fast loading, well laid out pages, make the most sales.

Here’s a great service to check your Web site load time:

http://www.tracert.com/

This one actually pings your Web site from different locations worldwide and returns the average load time for your site, instead of simply returning a theoretical value based on the size of your Web page.

2. Less use of graphics. While graphics are pleasant and intriguing, they don’t necessarily achieve more sales. The opposite may be true if too many graphics are used. A page that is graphics heavy loads more slowly and the graphics themselves may take the visitors’ minds off the main purpose of the site, i. e. “sales”. If graphics are used at all, they should be optimized for Web placement, and reduced to the smallest size possible for viewing. Most graphics can easily be reduced by approximately twenty percent without affecting the quality of the graphics.

Here’s a neat tool for optimizing your Web site graphics if you are not very familiar with graphics software:

http://www.netmechanic.com/GIFBot/optimize-graphic.htm

3. The use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). CSS effectively eliminates the need of entering repetitive tags like FONT, reducing your page size significantly. Such tags can consume up to 5-7% of your page size. Imagine how much bandwidth you’ll save if your Web site has more than 100 pages!

4. Breaking the site up into smaller tables as opposed to enclosing the entire body of a site in one large table. This technique enables the page to load in progression rather than make your visitor stare at a blank screen until the page is fully loaded. This is an often overlooked aspect.

5. Use of sitemaps. Sitemaps not only increase rankings and placement within the Search Engines, they effectively give visitors a “guide” by which to view the site, and eliminate confusion on larger sites, such as e-commerce sites. A site map is what its name implies, a road map for your visitors to follow while they are on your site. It’s also a road map for the Search Engines, so a site map serves two very important purposes on an e-commerce site.

6. Content that is keyword rich and well-written will aid in placement within the Search Engines, and keep visitors on a site long enough to purchase. Horribly written sites drive visitors away, while the lack of keywords negatively affects placement and rankings. The writing on any site is the FIRST IMPRESSION potential customers have of you and your products or services, so paying strict attention to the content usually engenders additional sales.

7. Keyword rich title tags will increase traffic overall, and more traffic, of course, means more sales. Title tags help with placement and rankings. Appropriate keywords should also be used for linking internal pages, as this also helps with rankings. Since e-commerce sites are for the most part, larger than personal pages, or other types of sites, the internal linking does lead to more effective initial indexing by the Search Engines also. Care should also be given to the “alt” tags that surround all pictures of products, as non-optimized “alt” tags can lead to poor rankings and placement.

8. E-commerce databases and purchasing procedures that are user friendly. Nothing is more frustrating to future buyers than databases or purchase procedures, that are difficult to use, or that keep going down throughout the process of purchase. A database and purchase procedure, should be easy to use, yet reliable enough to prevent lost sales, or lost monies from sales.

9. A security feature that ensures visitors that personal information is “safe and secure” within the confines of the Web site and that reassures them that their personal information will not be shared nor sold. This is a major concern of online visitors, as the Web is such an “anonymous” type of medium, so any “assurances” as to safety and security will benefit sales.

10. A thank-you page that is presented immediately upon ordering. This ensures “return purchases” as being courteous and polite is always in style and does leave an overall good impression on visitors!

All in all, an e-commerce Web site is significantly different than a personal Home page, or pages of a non-profit organization. The focus of the design and navigation, as well as all other aspects need to focus on the primary purpose of the site, and that of course, is the SALES!

About The Author

————
Vishal P. Rao is the owner of http://www.work-at-home-forum.com/
A fast growing online community of people who work from home.
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One problem with online advertising is that there is still some confusion, and no thanks to traditional media sources, regarding the proper metrics to use when explaining the value of an online property. This article is not about discounting the term “hits”, rather putting it into perspective in terms of what it actually means to your online business and how to use the information.

Before jumping to that, let me explain what the difference is between the terms.

Hits
According to Wikipedia, in web analytics, a hit is any request for a file from a web server. By request this means a hit calculates the page of content delivered, all the images delivered to complete that page and any additional files that need to be loaded to make the web page you are looking at, look the way it does.

For example, my home page (www.darbysieben.com) upon visiting this 1 page, you actually generated 12 hits. 1 page view hit (index.php), 9 images hits (located in the middle of the site), 1 background image hit (notice the leafs) and 1 style sheet hit (makes the text on my site look the way it does).

You also generated a couple of hits for The Weather Network (notice the weather information on my site) as well as 3 hits to Google (notice the ads).

So, depending the type of site, 1000 hits might actually not really mean much. A graphic intensive web site is going to generate a lot of hits.

A better metric is Page Views.

Page Views
According to Wikipedia, a Page view is generally defined as a request to load a single page of an Internet site. On the World Wide Web a page request would result from a web surfer clicking on a link on another HTML page pointing to the page in question.

Going back to my example from above. When you visit my home page you generated 1 page view. Because you wanted to read the rest of this article, you generated another page view for a total of 2 page views.

Page #1 - www.darbysieben.com (index.php) my home page
Generated a total of 12 hits

Page #2 - this page
Generated a total of 2 more hits (the page load as well as the “, which is actually an image)

Therefore your stats for visiting my site would be:

2 Page Views
14 Hits

Unique Visitor

As you probably have guessed a unique visitor is access from a single IP to a web server whom generates page views and hits during a particular visit. So continuing the example, your stats for visiting my site would be:

1 unique visitor
2 page views
14 hits

Although not a 100% fool-proof method of tracking, the unique visitors metric has limitations. However, that conversation can become quite long and technical, so let’s just say this … depending on your web server, analytic software for interpreting your server log files, you can get a fairly accurate picture of the number of unique visitors. Keep in mind that limitations can come from multiple computers sharing the same IP address, server tracking issues, or a variety of other complications.

So back to which metric you should use?

For pure calculations of where your site is growing or not, you can actually use all methods, provided you have not made any changes to your site over the timeframe in question. Hypothetically speaking, let’s assume a web site in November has the following stats:

100 unique visitors
200 page views
1000 hits

And then in December, there stats showed the following:

200 unique visitors
300 page views
1200 hits

Provided no new content added/removed from the site, regardless of which metric you used, all would indicate that a site is growing.

However, on its own, “hits” tells me nothing. If I loaded 100 images on a page and told you I had 1000 hits, what that really means is the page was loaded 10 times. If I load up the page with 200 images and then tell you I had 1000 hits, it means I had 5 page loads.

Hits is only a good measurement tool when comparing 2 separate time frames of a site, with no content changes as to whether it is growing in popularity. For sites with a lot of images, hits can be used to estimate bandwidth charges.

The better metric to use is page views. I prefer this one, because it gives me a lot of information. For example, if your site has a total of 10 pages that can be accessed and your stats for a given time frame showed 1000 page views, what this tells me is this:

At the worst, you had 1000 visitors to site who looked at 1 page each.
At the best, you had 100 visitors to your site who looked at all 10 pages.

Because of caching, once you visit a web page and then come back to you during the same visit, you are not loading that page from the server again, you are loading it from your local machine. As always there are exceptions, however, 9 times out of 10 this calculation will work.

One its own, page views can provide a lot of information, provided there are no hidden or non-public accessed page. A site that had a public front-end a back-end used by employees under the same URL can really skew the data, so the assumption is that all pages are public.

This measurement tool can be used to tell us a number of things:

1) Is the site growing in popularity?
2) What individual pages of content are viewed? (once you collect page views, you also collect the specific pages accessed)
3) How sticky is our site? By sticky I mean are people visiting our home page and leaving, or are they sticking around to view more pages.
4) What paths did they use? By path, I mean what percentage went from the home page to the products page, etc.

This data can be used to make specific decisions about the performance of your site as well as how to continue to improve your site.

Finally, unique visitors gives us more insight into page views. Using the above example, if our stats told us we have 200 unique visitors, then our median average of page views would be 5, because we generated 1000 page views. This means that for every visitor who left from our home page, another visitor looked at all our pages. The next question I would ask is why did the person leave after visiting our home page, was it because our site design, its content, they thought we are somebody else, etc?

On its own, unique visitors tells us whether our site is growing in popularity.

In conclusion, the most important metric is Page Views. This actually gives us a lot more information as a stand-alone statistic. Second I would add in unique visitors, because this helps me use page views to better unerstand visitor patterns. Hits I only use on sites concerned with bandwidth usage or simply as a gauge to whether a site is growing.

So the next time somebody tried to impress you with the number of “hits” to their website, say great, but how many page views did your site generate?

The reality of web site statistics is that almost everything is tracked. The information collected from visitors is truly amazing. However, more importantly than the statistics is how we use them to make business decisions and ultimately more money.

The last thing anybody business person wants to do is waste time piling through a load of statistics and get no action items as a result. Not all the stats collected will be important; the key is determining what you want from your web site, match which stats measure your objectives, then finally to determine how the information will be used.

Here is a summary of the 4-steps:

1) Determine your objectives
2) Determine which stats directly affect your objective
3) Agree on how the information will be used to make business decisions
4) Make your decisions, track results, review results, make more decisions

If you are a owner or manager reading this, you probably use a similar formula when evaluating staff. Your web site is no different. The only difference between your web site and real-life staff is the website cannot lie about its performance numbers.

So here is one example of how I use key indicators with clients:

Conversion Tracking
Stats needed - # of visitors during a given timeframe, # of page views of specific call to action pages

A client who has an online form that allows users to complete to request a price list. Once a user completes the form, they are directly to a page that allows them to download a price sheet.

Here is an example of how we might use the information. The numbers below all represent the timeframe on the same site.

# of visitors = 100
# of visitors completing the form request = 3
Conversion Rate = 3%

# of page views for form request page = 20
# of page views for price list page = 3
Conversion Rate = 15%

Why 2 sets of numbers? If you simply look at the number of visitors, this would be the same as counting the number of people walking into a store and then matching the number of inquires (in this case the form completions). This gives you an aggregate view of conversion rate. However, this alone does not paint a completely accurate picture. This is why we also need to look at the number of page views.

The second set of numbers are the page views of the price list page. In most cases we should see a 1 to 1 visitor/page view ratio as this is a results landing page. However, if we go back to the page where the form is actually located on, we can track the number of times people looked at the form relative to the number of times they completed it. In a real-life example, this would be watching all the people who walked through the store and who actually talking to a person regarding prices.

So, how do we use this information?

Once we have some starting data, it create a baseline for the performance of a clients web site. As we continue to change either the web site, or the marketing efforts of the web site, we can actually measure end results.

For example, if we did nothing but slightly improve the form request page, to make it more user friendly for example, we might be able to increase the number of leads from 3 to 6? This would increase our conversion rate to 30% on the page views and 6% on the entire site traffic. By working on site structure, we have increased conversion rate on existing traffic instead of spending more money on new traffic. This is one area that most businesses completely overlook - their web site was designed by a graphics person not a conversion specialist.

Another example would be actually spending more money to drive more visitors. If we deem we cannot increase conversion rate anymore, then we switch to marketing. The client purchases an advertising campaign that contains a call to action to their web site. We track the number of increased visitors, compared to our baseline and compare that to the resulting price list requests. If we drove another 100 visitors from an ad campaign that resulted in no increase in price list requests, maybe we are advertising in the wrong location. Conversely maybe our requests went through the roof, thus proving this form of advertising to be very effective.

When working with clients I would take this one step further and track the resulting 3 price list requests to the actual sales calls and the results from that. For example,

# of price list requests = 3
# of sales person follow-ups = 3
# of sales generated = 1
Dollar value of sales generated = $1000

All this information was collected on 2 pieces of web site stats. If there is one thing to remember; stats alone are useless, stats combined with business strategy = growth.

Start using your web stats to help grow your business. To recap, the 4 steps are as follows:

1) Determine your objectives
2) Determine which stats directly affect your objective
3) Agree on how the information will be used to make business decisions
4) Make your decisions, track results, review results, make more decisions

So, what does a line from the Friendly Giant have to do with marketing your business in Calgary?

Simple, look up, look way up. If you are reading this post, you have a browser window open. Look up to the blue bar at the top of your browser window. It probably says something like - “Business in Calgary - Marketing and Internet Strategies >> Look Up - Look Way Up”. In website design and search engine optimization we call this the title of the web page or in technical terms the title tag.

Now, open another browser window and check your web site. What does it say? Some sites same “index” others say “index.gif”, some say nothing at all. If you site has a title, that’s great, now click another page on your site, did the title change?

In my experience, this one simple tag can have a great impact on search engines like Google. A good title tag should include your company name as well as the primary product or service of your company, at least on the home page. All other pages in your site should contain their own unique title tags, based on the content for the page. Don’t cram everything into your title tag as this can be considered search engine spam, but do ensure that your key points are made.

So why is this tag so important?

The short answer is this is the headline for the page. Just like telling your users what they are looking at, use the title tag to tell the search engines what you are looking like. Consider this, if you see the following list of titles on a search page of companies selling office furniture, which would are users more likely to click on.

Title #1 - Calgary Office Furniture to Purchase or Lease
Title #2 - Office Furniture and Office Chairs at Discounted Prices
Title #3 - index
Title #4 - Office Furniture Sales and Installation

We have also found that in many cases, by doing nothing that adding a powerful title tag, we can achieve first place ranking on keywords within Google. Don’t believe me, click on calgary office furniture in Google, you will notice that the first site on the list is ks2.ca, one of my properties.

Good web designers tell me they know this already and it is standard practice. Although it should be standard practice, the real question is why do so many Calgary based companies have websites whose title tag is “index”?

This is important to consider when developing a new web site or revamping your current online presence. Is your target audience male or is it female?

However, it is not just as easy to say my target audience is male or female. For example, many household decisions, cars, furniture, appliances, etc. will have both parties involved in the process. However, the key question is during the buying process, which gender is more likely to view your website.

Over the past 3-years working with auto dealers, one thing that appears to be common is that it is usually the men that drive the process to buy, but it is the women who will ultimately decide whether the purchase happens or not. The question for local businesses is which of the genders is using my site and at what stage in their buying process.

Could this affect the outcome of somebody choosing to do business with you, maybe, maybe not. Usually I say this, a good web site design will not get you any more sales, but a poorly designed web site will surely lose you some.

From the University findings, Gloria Moss, Research fellow at the University of Glamorgan Business School teamed up with statistician Rod Gunn to conduct the research to discover if businesses and organisations are making the most of their web presence to help them reach their particular target audiences.

“We started off by looking at the personal websites created by 60 university students, 30 male and 30 female, to discover whether there were any major design differences. We looked at factors such as language, visuals, and navigation - the differences were immediately apparent,” explained Gloria Moss. “We compared the sites on 23 factors and differences emerged on just over half of these. This is a massive number”.

I think the real purpose of this posting is that business owners should at the very least be aware of some of the various decisions that go into successful website design. So if you are planning to build a new web site or redesign an existing site, be aware of your target market, be aware of the users and finally make sure that your designer (whether male or female) is aware of your requirements.

I want to thank Darren Barefoot and his blog for putting me onto this research.

Have a product or service
Build a web site
Register merchant accounts
Set-up a shopping cart
Promotion
Making sales and delivery of product/service

Usually one of the biggest obstacles in terms of costs or time is the set-up of merchant accounts and the selection of a shopping cart system. I have seen initial set-ups range anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars.

What I wanted to discuss today is a service that I believe would be a good tester for anybody who wants to start selling online without a lot of cost or set-up. The company is called 2Checkout.com and they provide merchant services in US dollars only for a set-up fee of $49. It takes about 10-minutes to start selling online.

Although their transaction fees are higher than normal and you are limited to selling in US dollars, for $49 this could be a great way to test your idea of selling a product or service online. Once you find that your idea has some legs, and then I would recommend upgrading to a dedicated merchant account as the costs long-term will be much lower.

I believe that at the initial stages, you probably cannot go wrong with this solution. Test your ideas and have fun selling online.

Blockbuster Canada

I recently signed up for the Blockbuster Canada e-Newsletter at Blockbuster.ca to explore how rental companies are using this tool. To my surprise, their e-Newsletter is clean, has relevant information and every time I receive it, they give me something to act upon.

They have printable coupons within their e-Newsletter. Coupons such as Free Popcorn, rent 2 movies, 2 pops and 2 popcorn packs for $12.99, etc. Here is what makes the e-Newsletter special though, the coupons are personalized with my name, account information and when I print them off and take them to the physical location for redemption, they scan right into the point-of-sale system.

CalgaryPlus.ca

Here is an example of a e-Newsletter that is not technically sophisticated, however, is very interactive. Every 2-weeks, CalgaryPlus.ca sends an e-Newsletter to tens of thousands of Calgarians updating them on events that are upcoming in the next 2-weeks.

The power of this e-Newsletter is that active people, who enjoy getting out a lot, tend to be extremely busy. This e-Newsletter gives its readers a mini 2-week calendar of events delivered directly to their mailbox, which for busy people saves a lot of time and energy as it comes directly to them.

Summary on Interactive e-Newsletters

First, interactive does not mean the technology behind the e-Newsletter, rather it means how your users will use it. Whether you need a system as sophisticated as Blockbuster or as simple as CalgaryPlus.ca, the key question is “will my users interact with it?”.

Well done e-Newsletters can generate brand awareness, customer retention, sales, referrals, etc. provided they are interactive and bring value to their readers. Bringing value to your current customers and potential prospects through an interactive e-Newsletter could have favorable results for your business.

My recommendation, register both if they are available.

Before I explain my reason behind this, in case you don’t already know the .ca domain extension is reserved for Canadian entities. The .com domain extension, clearly the most recognized is available to anybody from any geographical location and refers to commercial web sites.

Neither domain extension is better than the other if your business is done in Canada, however, if you start to go North American or international, then I would recommend .com as the primary URL. In Canada we are used to either extension, just like we are use to “colour” or “colour” and “cheque” or “check”.

Why register both?

One reason - tracking. If you have both domain names, you will pick your primary domain for business cards, brochures, letterhead, envelopes etc. I recommend using the 2nd domain as the URL to place into traditional advertising, print, TV, radio, magazines, etc. to track results and paths on your web site.

Because you are using this 2nd domain in traditional advertising you know that the people typing in that URL were generated from your advertising efforts. If you have a process in place to track visitor paths on your web site you can start to determine what traditional advertising methods are generating the most favourable results.

However, adding interactivity can also be a detriment to your web site if not managed properly. The key questions to ask yourself before considering adding these components are:

1) Who is going to be the champion in your organization who will update this information on a regular basis? Nothing is worse than visiting a site with an Event Calendar and the last entry was June 1999.

2) What value does this added functionality bring to your organizations, your existing customers or prospects. If you cannot clearly define at the beginning the reasons why you are adding functions to your web site, maybe you should not be.

3) How easy is it to switch your hosting, upgrade the component piece or extract the data. In terms of switching hosting providers, I recommend to clients to stay away from software or scripts that are not compatible with .php, ASP or ASP.net. The reason is simple, if you go with a proprietary solution running on a server and want to switch later, you could end up paying hugh dollars down the road.

With respect to upgrading the software, just make sure you find what the process is for updating and the typical costs. The last component is the extraction of data. I usually recommend that any components you install should be database driven. This will allow you easy access to extract the data into an Excel file for usage later.