Heat maps can help you to provide data of where human eyes naturally gravitate towards and which elements on your site are interesting. In the image shown above, you can see different colors denoting the visitor’s eyes behavior. A color closer to red shows regions the user’s eyes are looking at more often. It seems that for Google’s search results web page, only a certain amount of hits are fully taken into account. Heat maps based on mouse hover or clicks do produce quite similar results. Running a heat map on your site is helpful and maybe even surprising. Once you find the hot spots on your site,  you can use them to improve your site design and conversion rates.

If you are a business owner, one of the challenges is to identify which information is valuable to reach your goals. I bet your time is limited and you do need to focus on the key performance indicators. In the end, what matters is that your visitors convert and keep coming back. Heat maps can certainly be helpful in this process, but they are just another indicator of your overall website performance. Have you used any heat maps on your website and did you find them useful?

I have seen Ernest’s presentation and it is excellent. If you are in sales, marketing or website development, I would highly encourage you to attend. During the seminar Ernest will be looking at the connection between a prospective buyer and your landing page after they do a search or click on a pay-per-click ad.

What I like about Ernest’s presentation is his straightforward style, great examples and practical tips. During his presentation he uses his own custom slides that are engaging, interesting, and well designed.

To find out more details and to register please go to:

www.quickinars.com/2011/03/landing-pages-that-convert-to-prospects-customers/

I’m looking forward to meeting you at these session.

You won’t be disappointed.

Jeff Nelson

Troy is a writer who focuses on helping businesses tell their story and impress their clients. You can find out more about Troy and what he offers on his website, www.troywhite.ca.

Today Troy told me about 2 websites that are interesting and worth mentioning. The first is www.simplyamishedmonton.com. This company sells Amish Furniture – part of a franchise. A long time ago my Dad showed me how to build Shaker furniture which is similar. I love the simplicity, the lines and wood grain. Years ago I made a blanket box and a 2 step stool. But enough of me. If you are looking to buy simple, well made furniture, have a look at the site.

The second site is www.saddlebackleather.com. Obviously, this company is selling leather satchels, bags, and luggage. As Troy pointed out to me, what sets this site apart is that it is chock full of stories – a dog named Blue, a list of competitors, a small travel case in the middle of Serengeti Park (I’ve been there), and of course their story. What a fantastic way to tell people about your company – what you do and what you offer. I love it.

As a result, we had an objective (do the video) but this was one of those situations where we had no time, no media room, dysfunctional equipment, and no one to shoot the video.  Being 2 resourceful guys we improvised. We met at Mount Royal University, snagged a classroom, set up our cameras on a tripod, hammered out a script (very loose) and shot the video. Here is what we came up with. Enjoy.

Here is a photo from our website of people in our company.

Casual, fun, interesting. You can click on these links to learn more about our company and our team.

Have a look at Nielsen’s article for more about selecting images for your website or blog.

Today I thought I would highlight some other websites that are interesting and use video in a different way.

The first is KhanAcademy. See www.khanacademy.org. If you are struggling with math concepts like ratios or statistics – go to this site. But to really see his genius you need to look at the videos on his site. If you want to learn about motion, Newton’s Law of Gravitation, venture capital, or even the French Revelolution – go to this site. The founder (and faculty) of Khan Academy is Salman Khan. You can see his talk at the Good Experience Living Conference here: www.khanacademy.org/about#GEL. Bill Gates thinks highly of Salman Khan, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A07Pj71TUA. KhanAcademy has over 1,900 videos on YouTube and thousands of videos on KhanAcademy. Great resourse.  Interesting material. Fantastic presentation. Excellent teacher.

The second site that has fantastic video is CommonCraft. See www.commoncraft.com. The site was started and developed by Lee Lefever. He founded the company with his wife Sachi in 2003. See About. The tag line of the site is “in Plain English”. In fact, Lefever started writing blog posts and then switched to videos of his drawings. See RSS in Plain English. Topics include CFL Light Bulbs, Blogs, Twitter, Social Media, and Social Networking.  For a full list of his videos have a look at www.commoncraft.com/videos. Awesome video. Easy to understand.

The third site is TED, Ideras worth spreading. See www.ted.com. TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. The topics and videos are avant garde. How about this topic: Carolyn Porco flies us to Saturn? Porco takes us on a journey from Earth to Saturn. Or this topic: Jeff Han demos his breakthrough touchscreen – multi touch and pressure sensitive computer screens. Of course this technology is now commonplace but this video was shot in Feb 2006 which makes it phenomenal. Or Sirena Huang playing violin – she’s 11 years old. She is good. Or Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen. Rosling’s website is www.gapminder.org.

The last video site for today is Vimeo. See http://vimeo.com. This site is for the creative types. Have a look at Chromeo’s video, Hot Mess. 5-Second Films has over 500 very short videos in its catelog. See http://vimeo.com/fivesecondfilms/videos.

1. Hosting

Ideally, the IP address of the hosting server should be in the country of the target market.

For example, the hosting server of a website targeting the USA market should be located in the USA. Of course, this is not always possible but it does make a difference. I would like to say that this recommendation is critical; unfortunately it is not always possible.

2. Domain Name

The domain name should include the most important keywords that the company is targeting. This is rarely possible but it is powerful if it can be done. For example, www.antennacommunication.com is much stronger than www.antcom.com because it contains the word “antenna”. But “antcom” is shorter and that is the reason this company chose the shorter version. Of course, there are many other issues that are involved in the selection of the domain name including history, branding, trademarks/copyrights, length of the domain name, competition, and availability (price). This recommendation is not critical since the considerations listed above may take precedence.

3. Re-Directs

It is best to avoid re-directs from the domain name page to another page. For some strange reason website developers like to redirect www.company.com to www.company.com/index.html or www.company.com/home.php. In general, re-directs like this are frown upon because of issues related to the possibility of “clocking”. A worst case scenario is for a website to be banned from a search engine. The best case scenario is that the sub-page is much weaker than the real home page without the re-direct. From a user’s point of view a redirect to an internal page is awkward. It adds un necessary confusion. However, this recommendation is not critical since most search engines have figured out that the target page is the important page.

4. URL Structure and Format

Ideally, we like the URL to follow some logical format based on the URL, the folder for the website section and the file name. For small simple sites you can ignore the folder. Ideally we would add keyword phrases to the last part of the URL. For example, http://www.dell.com/business/laptops. As you can see this page is ranking well on Google.com for the keyword phrase “business laptops”. Ideally, the URLs should be decipherable as opposed to database references that are unintelligible. This recommendation is not absolutely critical. Many sites work well with the search engines without a URL format that is simple.

5. Frames

Avoid building websites in Frames. Everyone should know this by now but it is worth repeating because some developer are still using frames. For example, http://www.calgaryhotelassociation.com/. If you look at this page using www.seo-browser.com you will see that the content in the frame doesn’t show up. The frame just creates problems when search engines index the site. The search engine may index the content of the frame without the frame.

6. Flash

Flash is fine as long as it is a component (or file) on a HTML page. The search engines can’t read the content on sites that are 100% Flash (not yet, maybe in the future). Adding a page with special functionality, as we discussed, is fine. This page may not show up in the search engines very well but that may not matter for that single page. If you want the search engines to index the content of a website then this recommendation is critical.

7. Control of “Meta Tags”

With websites developed using static HTML pages this isn’t a problem. Changes and modifications are simple and quick. From and SEO point of view, the issue of manual overrides can be a serious problem when a site is developed using a Content Management Solution (CMS).

Selecting the right CMS is critical. To “optimize” the pages of a website it is critical that we need control (manual override) of the following sections on the web page:

• Title (absolutely critical)
• Description tag (absolutely critical)
• Keyword tag (search engines place no value on this tag but it is a great spot to place the keywords that we are using for that page)
• H formatting for content headings (changes should be possible with all CMS)
• Page content  (changes should be possible with all CMS)
• Anchor text related to links in the page content (absolutely critical)

8. Home Page

The home page of a website is the most important page to add keyword phrases. It is the most important page to optimize using the most important keyword phrases. See: www.paisley.com All of the keyword phrases listed on this page are working well (first or second page of results) on Google.com. This recommendation is critical.

9. Text Navigation and Site Map

Search engines need a way to find all the links to internal pages. To make this easy for search engines we recommend adding a text menu at the bottom of all pages and adding a site map with a link from the text menu or the home page. There are lots of ways that this can be done but the objective is basically the same: make it easy for search engines to find all the pages of the website. In addition we often use the site map as a good place to add links to the “Focus Pages” or optimized content pages that we create for our clients. See the links at the bottom of this page: www.novatel.com/sitemap.htm. This recommendation is critical.

10. Avoid Duplicate Content

Most search engines will only display one page if it has an option of two page with the same content. Search engines are unpredictable in how they react to two pages with exactly the same content. Google seems to pick a page whatever page it likes best – often the oldest page. Yahoo often picks the page that was updated the furthest back in time (that isn’t logical which is why it is a problem). Our recommendation is to avoid duplicate content at all costs. This includes websites with the same content on 2 URLs like .com and .ca. This recommendation is critical.

11. Robots.txt File

Every website should include a robot.txt file in the root directory of the website.

The robot.txt file tells search engines which pages NOT to index. This file also serves to give permission to search engines to index the rest of the site. Including it is a good idea because all major search engines look for this file. This recommendation is critical.

12. Form and Thank You Page

It is our experience that including a form on a website is much better than adding a link to an email address. With a form you can force the user to give you information like a phone number.

The main problem with adding an email address is that you are exposing that person to email spam. Who wants spam? We recommend adding a form and thank you page (after submission) to the Contact Us page. If we use pay-per-click ads as one of the online marketing strategies then we can add conversion tracking code to the thank you page. This recommendation is critical.

I hope these recommendations are valuable.

]]> http://anduroblog.com/2009/09/criteria-for-high-performance-websites-on-search-engines.html/feed 1 http://anduroblog.com/2009/09/forms-shmorms-why-have-a-form-on-your-site.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=forms-shmorms-why-have-a-form-on-your-site http://anduroblog.com/2009/09/forms-shmorms-why-have-a-form-on-your-site.html#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:13:28 +0000 AnduroGuest http://anduroblog.com/?p=494 There is nothing more frustrating than going to a website, finding out that whatever the company is offering is interesting to you and then clicking on the contact page only to see a long list of phone numbers and email addresses. I like contacting online. It is easy, it is fast.

Now this is obviously personal preference but there are real reasons why there should be a form on the contact us page – a short form that is, followed by a separate page with a thank you message.

There are a number of Analytics programs out there but for simplicity sake (and because I am most familiar with it) I will use Google Analytics as the analytics program of choice. It is free and collects really great, useful data.

Say you have a website, you have added all the Analytics code to the pages of your site and you are just sitting back, collecting data. Now let’s say you don’t have a form on your site. You can collect endless amount of data but at the end of the day, what have you learned? How many visitors are coming to your site? How long they stay? Which page they like the most? Which page they like the least? This is all great data but so what! Have they bought anything? You don’t know. Have they contacted you? You don’t know.

Of course, you can keep track of how many phone calls you received and how many emails Joe got on Tuesday but you have no idea where these leads came from. You know that you received 100 visits from Google Organic. OK, that’s great. But did any of these people contact you?

By simply adding a form to your site and adding a goal in Analytics, you take away a lot of the guess work. You will now be able to see where the people who competed the form came from, how long they spent on your site, which pages they enjoyed etc. etc. etc.

This is especially true if you are doing any paid advertising. Google AdWords, Facebook – all of these can be tracked in Analytics but you will only know whether your efforts are worth it if you can see conversions and how much you are paying for each conversion.

Forms are simple to add and you will get a lot of value out of them!

So I clicked on the icon. A new window opened up with the word and a definition. Very cool.

Try it. Go to this page: A New World: Scheduling E-Books. I’m following articles on ebooks because I think they have potential. I don’t own one, yet. (Hint to my sons, Riley and Daniel, my birthday is in September.) With your cursor, highlight the word “hardcover” in the first sentence. Notice the ? icon that pops up. Click on the ? mark. A new window will pop-up with the definition of “hardcover”. The alt tag suggests that this feature is called “Lookup Word”.

I still use Google to “define” words because I like the various perspectives that Google finds but this feature on NYTimes has value.