Archive for April, 2009

Why visitors “Bounce” from your website involves understanding the term first. Bounce rate percentage represents initial visitors that “bounce off” to another website rather than continue to other pages within the website. Bounce rate means the number of people who land on a website and didn’t give it one single click.

Bounce rate helps understand how and where to change your website to improve stickiness. By lowering your bounce rate and increasing stickiness of your small business website, you can turn visitors into return customers. The higher the “bounce rate” is determines that visitors come to your website, see nothing of value and move on, probably to your competition’s websites.

Keep your bounce rate low by strategizing what needs to be improved with your website to increase stickiness, and most likely find that more of your potential customers may contact you for your products and services on your small business website.

Stop Bouncing Tips For Website Success

What is Bounce Rate and Why it Matters

A sitemap is a webpage list overview to aid in website navigation for visitors and search engine bots, usually for larger websites. It can be a webpage that lists the pages on a website, organized by importance or navigation order, rather than an alphabetical order list index which is known as a “site index”.

Sitemaps improve SEO ensuring every webpage can be located, and provide content overview in a glance which helps visitors navigate around your website. They are particularly useful for stickiness because instead of a visitor arriving and “bouncing” from your website, a sitemap may help engage your visitor and interest them into other pages of your site.

Sitemaps for your website offer easier navigation, more stickiness, increased SEO, and a clear layout of what your website contains. Once a website reaches 50 to 100 pages, it is recommended to add a sitemap in order to give it effective navigation.

Have a look at my Webdesign Resources Sitemap for this website.

Related Resource:
“Add a Google Searchbox to Your Website

I recently did a project analyzing and comparing some of the top 10 websites indexed by Google with certain key phrases. The purpose of this study was to figure what key factors affected a high page ranking in Google, and how to tweak my own website to gain a competitive edge over the competition.

In taking each website, running it through Website Grader, validating the code, and reviewing the results, a few factors were consistent. The top sites had hundreds, thousands, even hundreds of thousands of pages and inbound links, and maintained top positions in Google despite of missing or too many keywords and descriptions. Also noted were sites with an older domain age and longer time until expiration were given higher priority in Google indexing. These factors seemed to affect a website in a positive manner, despite imperfections in code.

Regardless, my theory is that optimizing the source code for as few errors as possible and correct numbers of characters and keywords contained is important to obtain a winning website. Combining this with a pleasant layout, color scheme, and effective business strategy can turn more of your visitors into repeat customers.

Recently I helped in the launch of a custom CMS (Content Management System) website redesign for CDAAlliance by collaborating on this rather large project with my father, Jim Degerstrom. This website contained almost 100 pages, and their direction of business had also recently changed. As a result, a major overhaul of the site was required to reflect their new business model and their new future direction.

CDAAlliance’s redesign collaboration between myself and my father had text content that had to be edited and updated. From Joomla we converted it to a less complicated custom CMS package by doing text rewrites and seo revisions to this site prior to launch, and then 301 redirects from the old page names to new ones.

Now that the site has been converted to a custom CMS system, it’s usability is enhanced, page load time is faster, and the website owner can easily take it over to add and edit content.

Update Aug 2009: This redesign in a green color scheme has been transferred back to JimDegerstrom.com and changed again. He will manage a family of 3 websites created by him and redesigned for the client with a new matching look similar for each one.

Have a look at other posts regarding website launches.

Getting to Google page one in two months for over 30 key phrases was a surprise to me. Although I’d never promise a client the same results, I could touch on some points that are rather important to achieve a similar outcome.

Having an aged domain aided in reaching Google page one because it established seniority, even though nothing was posted for a while. Using appropriate methods for search engine optimization helped this website too. By using appropriate keyword density, adding content often and writing to solve a problem, my website has reached excellent rankings with Google.

Some things I didn’t do helped page rankings as well. By not using deceptive methods to attract traffic such as stuffing keywords or buying inbound links, Google doesn’t punish my website for deceptive practices. In doing research of the top 10 sites for given keywords, I’ve noticed a couple things in common, including a high number of site pages and inbound links, but Google rewards those who don’t try to deceive.

By using appropriate methods of search engine optimization to reach page one rankings in Google in only one month of effort, I’ve received more traffic, which translates into more potential customers and clients.

Add a Blog to Your Website

“Web Design” and “Website Design” key phrases come up as 2 different indexes in a Google Search. Deciding on which website key phrase to use depends on what traffic you want it geared for, and can affect how much traffic your website receives. The same is true for any business niche. By using a more popular key phrase, your small business website can get more traffic and most likely receive more potential customers.

Since more people search on Google for “Web Design” rather than “Website Design”, it would make more sense to use the shorter version (if your small business website was geared around this type of business). The reason for this is because those searching for this type of business are more likely to use the shorter key phrase, rather than the longer one. This factor can help decide what key words and phrases to incorporate on your small business website design. Strategize key words and key phrases for your website, search them, and see what keywords are used by your competition.

For small business website owners to understand which keywords and key phrases to use, it makes sense to choose some of the most common searches done in Google within one’s niche. By using more popular keywords and key phrases, a small business website owner can drive more traffic to their website.

The importance of market branding revolves around understanding, choosing, and marketing your business logo and motto, or your “market brand”. Market Branding is a name, term, symbol, sign and/or design to differentiate and identify goods and services of a seller or group of sellers.

Market branding is about getting your potential clients to think you are the only one with a solution to their problem. Your logo’s colors should convey the nature of your business. Using a matching design and color scheme on your website, business card and printed materials can make your company’s market branding more effective and increase it’s market value. Your business logo design should give a positive first impression to attract new customers with a unique look that is simple and makes a statement. Your market branding should deliver your message clearly, confirm credibility, motivate the buyer, and establish user loyalty. Your market brand is your source of promise to the consumer, and the foundation of marketing communication that business should not be without.

The importance of market branding involves multiple considerations. By choosing appropriate designs, colors and logos, a small busniess owner can effectively portray the business they are in. Consider what the customer is going to see, because when you have a positive first impression, you may find that potential customers may become clients.

Understanding the difference between HTML and CSS may be complicated to most people, but a standard for website programmers. The following will outline differences for small business website owners, to be comfortable with the terms when discussing HTML and CSS.

HTML handles the structure, or construction and output of webpages, and CSS decorates, aligns and positions the elements in HTML, taking the normal HTML output adding display rules. The three sections of HTML source code include inline, internal and external markup.

HTML inline markup defines the webpage layout and structures the output for tables, divisions, forms, links, buttons, text and images, such as video and flash documents.

Internal markup, unseen by visitors, declares character set and document declarations and keywords. It links languages such as CSS or Javascript used for decorating, aligning and inserting dynamic items.

External markup isn’t contained in the HTML, but is in a different file affecting the webpage a variety of ways. It’s contents are called up by the internal markup section.

CSS, on the other hand, doesn’t “create” anything. CSS takes HTML output and adds display rules by editing element height and width, background color, border, visibility and alignment. HTML does some of these things, but the methods are usually “deprecated”, or soon to be. Deprecated code refers to features of software which are superseded and can be avoided, because their use causes warnings that recommend alternate practices, indicating the feature’s future removal. Labeled as deprecated instead of removing this code gives programmers time for bringing the code into compliance with new standards, and provides backward compatibility.

By understanding the difference between HTML and CSS, and how they interact, may simplify discussion of small business website design projects. HTML and CSS, when used in conjunction, can aid small business websites in keeping up with today’s standards for website design.

Attaching blog posts to external sources can add value to your blog posts for various reasons. By realizing that blogs add pages to a website, small business website owners can gain ranking with Google even more by linking those posts to multiple other blogging websites.

Once a website is added to external blogging sources on the web, this links posts to other websites, just by adding a single post. Add a new post every two or three days, and now a small business website owner could potentially gain a dozen links in a single week. I use Zimbio and Blogflux myself, and have found that by doing a Google search of my name, now links to these sites are provided in connection with my business name, Coderepair. Just by adding to a couple weblog posting sites has improved my accessibility online with Google.

Attach a blog post to external sources on the internet to add value, page ranking, and accessibility to your small business website page, and eventually, those increased website page visitors may have a greater chance of being converted into customers.

Have a look at these other blog related posts that give tips and advice on writing blog posts, filtering spam, writing to increase traffic, WordPress advantages over Blogger, ways to come up with post ideas and more.

Look at our Custom Blog Design Prices and Low Cost Website Design Prices on this website.

Using social media marketing to improve traffic to a small business website can be both advantageous and profitable. Some approaches include the small business website owner to write about what people care about, start a buzz on Twitter and Facebook, use social bookmarks, and share with like-minded individuals.

If you write about something that interests people, your post may have a better chance being picked up on the internet. Posting on Twitter, an amazing resource for spreading news, links and current events, can incorporate small business website owners into a web of followers. Using social bookmarks such as Digg, Zimbio and Blogflux will incorporate multiple blog resources to bring small business website owners traffic to their site. Sharing content with like-minded individuals may translate to greater traffic to a small business website also. Video, linking, email and podcasts are some other good media devices which can spread your word as well.

Using social media marketing to improve visitor hits is helpful to increase internet traffic to any small business website. A small business website owner should include as many types of media that is relevant to aid in the constant forge ahead to page one of Google.