Web Design & SEO For Small Businesses

Traffic is a very important aspect of online marketing and success of any website. So how does you make that traffic stick around more time around your website. Online traffic has little patience and getting their attentions and making them engage with your site is key to any success of your website.

Several factors are involved in making your site compelling and make that traffic to stick around more. On an average the average visitor time spend on a site is 8 sec. And you all know with 8 sec you achieve any action from the visitor’s side. So what makes the visitor stay around for a while?

I have put up few point to which will make your visitor to stay longer on your site.

1) Informative Content – One of the compelling reasons for a visitor to spend more time on your site is because of the magnetic quality of the content. Providing content which can’t be found anywhere else.  So they have a reason to stay longer on your site.

2) Update your content – Adding content on a regular basis can keep your website fresh with good new content. Visitors don’t like to read content which is old update your articles, add more new pages will lead your visitors to stay long on the site.

3) Fast loading page - If you web pages loads faster visitors are comfortable with sticking with your site. Sites with heavy graphics and flash intros scare away the visitors and finally they stay less time on the site.

4) Don’t distract your visitors – Some website owners think adding flashy kind of stuffs to a website will attract visitors to stay for a longer period of time. If you think that is the answer Study shows that using popup and other kind of flash stuffs are not comfortable with web visitors, so stay away from that.

5) Information architecture – is the structure, organization, navigation, labeling and indexing of a website. Information architect is the backbone of any website. Information architecture is a vital component of defining the user experience which make the visitors to stay longer.

6) Engage your visitor to contribute – In today world website are interactive where a visitors can put their thoughts about your products and services like adding components on your website where you can make the visitors engage like putting comments, rating, forums where discussion can be help etc.

You have got just 8 second to grab the attention of your visitors so when you build you site is comfortable to the user so that they will stick longer and your website will be a success.

Recently most of the website owners started seeing a big drop in traffic some of them as much as 90% drop in traffic. Some of the owners also saw a drop in ranking as well for their main keyword terms.Do you think it is Google penalized for sites which is over optimized? A thread on webmaster world today there is a huge discussion about that.So what constitutes an over optimized pages? Below are few tips on avoiding over optimization of your web pages as well as keep your ranking on the search engines.

1) Don’t Over optimizing the title with repeating the keywords several times. Just focus on one keyword at the beginning of the title, and try to write the title as a sentence so that it is use for the human visitor.

2) Write your

Meta description title with less keyword density and try to add a variation of the keywords you are trying to target on that page.

3) Don’t make your H1 tags as keywords but make it a sentence and make sense to the user.4) Instead of using keywords strategically inside the content make keyword flow look like natural you can solve that problem using long tail keywords.

5) Don’t use the same keywords phrase to link back to the website use different variation of the keywords and make sure that look like natural in the eyes of the search engines. 

Reducing over optimization can get back your lost traffic but it is always try to do it right the first time so that way you don’t need to go through all these kind of trouble.

This question is been asked several times by SEO but so far there is no clear answer to how much percentage of keyword should we use to optimize a web page content. There are several tools out there to find the keyword density of a web page but what is the real answer to how much keyword do we need to use on a certain amount of words in a page.

When I think about keyword density my thoughts is that we need to have keywords density but don’t overdo or under do it. As we all know content is what really matters at to search engines and the human visitor. But if you have content which doesn’t have any topic then it is of no help both from the search engines point of view as well as in human eyes. That’s where keywords come in. The whole idea of having keywords more than once is because that makes that particular page is relevant to a certain niche.

Saying said that, keywords density is important but it should be written in such a way that it shouldn’t look like it is stuffed. While optimizing a web page content a SEO copywriter needs to keep in mind that the content he is writing should appeal to both search engines and website user.

Here are some points a SEO copywriter need to focus while writing a SEO optimized content for the web.

1) Focus on one keyword theme and write the content just based on that theme instead of just repeated the keywords several times on the heading of the web page till the footer of the content.
2) Do through keywords research before planning to write the content. So that you get more keyword ideas to chip in to the content as well as you would be able to enlarge your content because of you are armed with more keywords that can add more content.
3) Try to use more long tail keywords more often inside your content it not only reduce keyword stuffing as well as your web page can draw more long tail keywords traffic.
4) Add your keywords phrases where it really matters in places like Meta Title and Meta description also on the heading of the web page.
5) No traffic is great if it didn’t really convert at the end of the day. So just writing content for the sake of it is not going to work for your favor. Instead writing interesting and compelling which users are hunger for.

Search Engine Optimization is a long and challenging process, since it takes quite lot of time to achieve results through SEO; you can take advantage of this and make money through affiliate marketing. As an affiliate marketer all you are concerned is to make money so why not try this way optimize your web pages for your promoting offers which big companies and brands are not doing it. Today I did a search for Red Nike Shoes in Google I found not a single popular online shoes websites where not coming up in the top ten results. Below is the screen shot of that result?rednikeshoes1.jpg

Why do you think these top Shoe websites are not interested in ranking under natural search engine ranking, because they are lazy as well as some of their individual product page URLs are not search engine friendly and these big companies don’t want to change that. But why do we need to optimize that affiliate product which big players are not in the top ten. Because these bigger companies want to be visible as well as traffic for that products which is very important. So why exploit these opportunity to your advantage to make money through Search Engine Optimization.

If you have a website, you need that to convert what ever your conversion goal is right, so understanding what the wants and meeting those expectation on your website should be your first decision when you build a website that converts.  No wonder people get frustrated when they find no conversion on their website after wracking their brains and mind to find a unique website address and spend thousands of dollars on web development and trying to get compelling content and finally trying to get top ranking and traffic to their site and what nada no sales. Here I have put forth 10 relevant tips to make an impact on your website to make a sale or lead.

1) Understand your visitors what they are looking for when they stumble upon your website. Meeting their expectation when they reach your website should be the first and the fundamental goal while your develop a website. Make the visitors find the product and service they are looking for. Ensure your website format meets expectations like navigation links, web content and goal process.

2) Clear website usability when a visitor comes to your website they have some idea where the links usually on a website like top navigation, left navigation and footer. If you try to alter those common standard navigation techniques you are making the visitor frustrate and make them to leave as fast as they came. It is like how you drive your car on the road and the rules changes in each city that makes the driver frustrate, because they are not used to those kind of rules where they came from. So having a providing a clear navigation standards and other elements on your website is key to  improve conversion.

3) Useful Content about the products and services you offer, don’t make the user struggle to find the details necessary to make a purchase or lead. Always try to make few clicks for the users to find the necessary information.

4) Avoid distraction to the user cluttering with graphics can distract the user mind and leave without a purchase. All you gain from a user is few seconds to make them to take a decision so make it right without unwanted offers and confusion to the user. If you are selling a products the page should only contains content and graphics related to that product only. The rest of non related offers or graphics and go to the most non prominent part of the web page.

5) Scan key feature of your products and services through bulleted points and highlight it to the user. As I said on the earlier tip that users are very impatient and don’t want to spend too much time on a website because their are several choices online. So within those few sections make the user to make the purchase. The user have the habit of scanning the main features of a product or service quickly and allow them to drill down to that for more details easily and fast.

6) Provide transparency of the users information collected through your website like lead and request a free quote forms. Adding a privacy policy or return policy if you are running a ecommerce site will increase conversion because of the transparency you provide to the users and make the comfortable to give you the information.

7) Don’t make the visitor lost or users location, tell the users where are they on your website by providing appropriate breadcrumbs so that they can navigate back to the pages where they came from. Breadcrumbs is an very important website usability which every website owner should keep in mind when they build their website.

Compelling relevant Sales Heading makes the visitors and the search engine bots to know what the page is all about. Also provide the same consistency in your pay per click campaigns as well so that when the users arrives they can find the right message from what the PPC advertisement was talking about which will improve website, conversion.

9) Cut short your conversion process any delay or more steps in your purchase or lead form increases the possibility of site abandonment. Try to reduce the form fields ask only what is mandatory, try to get your checkout process not more than 2 steps. Also create a simple registration form will help returning visitors make the checkout process fast, thus reduce shopping cart abandonment.

10) Testing and adding useful elements can improve your conversion too, Test your website for browser compatibility, ask couple of friends to do a test drive of your website conversion process and ask for their feedback and incorporate those recommendation if you think is useful into your website. Also adding elements like search box for visitors to find products that they can’t find also increases in conversion rate.

Understanding who your site users are and knowing what they are looking and focusing on and also please your website visitors with a good user experience can maximize both your user retention and also you final conversion rate.