Webmasters and the New Year

Webmasters and the New Year


Its a time of year when people think about goals for the future. As webmasters of revenue-generating websites, we have these goals in common:

- Attract more visitors to our sites
- Convert more visitors to customers
- Keep those customers coming back

What worked last year or the year before might be less successful this year. The playing field changes, and the rules of the game can also change. What should we be looking at for 2006

Attracting more visitors to our sites

First, take a look at how well your site is doing.

- Are you targeting keyword phrases that people are searching for these days
- Have you studied what your competitors are doing recently
- How many inbound links from quality, related sites do you currently have
- Has your SERP or Google PR changed

With some do-it-yourself search optimization tools http://articles.websitesource.com/seo_do_it_yourself_8_16_2005.shtml, you can check your sites position in search engines, view its current Google PR, see what words your competitors sites are optimized for, find out where your site is ranked for search terms, analyze inbound links to competitors sites, and more. Your site may have been the it site for your product or service a couple of years ago, but if you havent at least kept up with your competitors, potential customers might not make it to your site.

Acquiring inbound links is an ongoing job. If you havent worked on this aspect of SEO recently, some newer sites are probably good candidates for a link exchange or one-way links to your site. Start by looking at whos linking to your competitors sites, and look for other sites with related but not competing content.

Also consider the geographical areas youre targeting. To attract more local visitors, get your site listed in local directories and put the name of your city and country in the tag, at least for the Contact page. To attract more international customers, look for listings in international directories, and offer pricing in more than one currency if possible.</p><p>Converting more visitors to customers</p><p>Youve got people coming to your site. Are they buying from you If not, why not</p><p>Try to look at your site with fresh eyes. Better yet, get someone else to. Do the colors and design look dated Does the page look good in newer, larger monitors as well as smaller ones An updated design may be what your site needs to keep it looking like a quality contender in your field.</p><p>Analyze your traffic stats. If you have a lot of visitors who dont click beyond the landing page, either you arent targeting the right visitors or they arent drawn in once they arrive. On the other hand, if your visitors typically view a number of pages and then leave, perhaps the path of information and action isnt clear enough. Or there may be another problem with your site thats turning people off.</p><p>Of course, the above must be compared with the number of returning visitors. Consumers typically visit a site about three times before buying.</p><p>Follow the path from arriving at the site on any page to reading about a product or service, finding more information, and placing an order. Is the path easy to follow Do all the links work If you have another person looking at your site, watch that persons eye movement, observe if any pauses suggest confusion, and listen to the commentary and questions.</p><p>Check that the content is current. If you still advertise a special that expired two months ago, for example, it looks like no one is attending to the business.</p><p>Do you offer as many payment options as possible Perhaps you couldnt afford a merchant account to accept credit card payments when you were starting out, but you can now. If visitors often get to the point of sale and then leave, a lack of payment choices that suit them may be the reason.</p><p>Keeping customers coming back</p><p>Think about your successes over the past year. What products or services were the most popular How did people find out about them What positive feedback did you receive Use all of that information to make your strengths even better.</p><p>If you received any negative feedback, look at it as an opportunity to improve your service or product line.</p><p>An opt-in mailing list or newsletter is a low-cost, effective way to keep your company name in your customers minds. During the order process, provide a check box for customers to choose if they want to receive mailings from you. If they choose yes, you have their permission to send them information about specials, new products, and other news.</p><p>People online are becoming increasingly annoyed by spam and aware of privacy issues. Your website should include a privacy policy, and your mailings should include a link for recipients to unsubscribe if they want to. Dont send out regular mailings more than once a month, and provide information thats useful to the recipients.</p><p>Content 2006-style</p><p>Regular new, quality content attracts more visitors to your site and provides a reason to come back. Once thought of as a fad for personal sites, increasingly more businesses are adding blogs to their websites. Blogs provide a less formal medium to convey information, people can subscribe to them and be notified when they have new content, and they keep search engine spiders coming back whenever you add new content. With thousands of new blogs starting up every day, blogs are the wave of the future.</p><p>In this blog, well be discussing whats new and useful for webmasters and for people who spend a lot of time online. We invite you to stay tuned.</p> <p>About the Author:</p><p>Lois S. is a Technical Executive Writer for   and   with experience in the   industry.</p><p> </p> <h3> Obtaining Good Content </h3> <script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-9082029475933921"; google_alternate_color = "FFFFFF"; google_ad_width = 728; google_ad_height = 15; google_ad_format = "728x15_0ads_al_s"; //2007-07-13: textUnitJuly07_top_art1 google_ad_channel = "4518814794"; google_color_border = "CCCCCC"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "0000FF"; google_color_text = "000000"; google_color_url = "396DA5"; //--> </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </script> <p>Every piece of advice at the moment about improving search engine position especially Google suggests that web sites should be updated regularly with good quality content. The phrase Content is King is seen in most articles on the subject now. So what is good content and how do you go about getting it</p><p>You can purchase it, by hiring a copywriter. However to do this on a regular basis will turn out to be quite expensive. So are there cheaper options At no cost you can visit the article distributors sites and search them for content on your chosen topic. If you are in quite a specialist field you could find that this method does not turn up any useful articles. Whether this works or not and how well it works depends entirely on the topic of your site. You may be fortunate and find a wealth of free reprint articles which are directly related to your site. You may as I have often done in the past struggle to find anything relevant.</p><p>If you do find a directory with a useful library of articles then you can incorporate these into your web site via an RSS feed. This way every time a relevant article is published it will immediately appear and update your own site. This takes all the hassle out of the process.</p><p>It is my own experience that articles are hard to come by which are truly relevant to my own websites. So what is the alternative in this situation</p><p>Nobody, except others in your particular area have the understanding and in depth knowledge of the subject of your site as you have yourself. You are the expert in your chosen field. So use that knowledge to good effect and produce your own content. You should be quite capable of writing informative paragraphs to update pages in your site. Search engines we are told are greedy for content so why not kill two birds with one stone and write informative articles on your topic and publish them with the article distributors as well as on your own web site</p><p>Writing one article a week will update your own site and possibly bring in 5 or 10 inbound links. So not only do you keep your site updated with good content but you are attracting quite a lot of inbound links. Consequently you are keeping the search engines very happy and improving your position all the time with content that you know is good and relevant to your site. The best part of all of this is that it costs nothing except perhaps an hour of your time each week.</p> <p>David Andrew Smith is the owner of   a cleaning services company and he designed and maintains the company site.</p><p> </p> </div> <div style="background:white;margin:20px"><center> <script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-9082029475933921"; google_alternate_color = "FFFFFF"; google_ad_width = 728; google_ad_height = 15; google_ad_format = "728x15_0ads_al"; //2007-07-13: textUnit_july07_bottom google_ad_channel = "3391915841"; google_color_border = "CCCCCC"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "0000FF"; google_color_text = "000000"; google_color_url = "396DA5"; //--> </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </script> </center></div> <div style="padding:17px"> <font color="#396DA5">Related Topics </font> <br /> <a href="http://www.insidetheweb.com/mbs.cgi/mb494096/" >Surefire Google Adwords Formula</a> <br /><a href="http://www.insidetheweb.com/messageboard/mbs.cgi/mb117672/" >Who Else Wants To Maximize Their Google Adwords Success?</a> <br /><a href="http://www.insidetheweb.com/messageboard/mbs.cgi/mb283505/" >Understanding Google AdSense</a> <br /><a href="http://www.insidetheweb.com/mbs.cgi/mb332935/" >Offline Advertising For Online Business</a> <br /><a href="http://www.insidetheweb.com/messageboard/mbs.cgi/mb115939/" >If You Want To REALLY Promote Your Site, Heres How</a> <br /><a href="http://www.insidetheweb.com/mbs.cgi/mb569602/" >Your Guide To Web Site Submission To Increase Traffic</a> <br /><a href="http://www.insidetheweb.com/mbs.cgi/mb894805/" >Advertising by Pixel</a> <br /><a href="http://www.insidetheweb.com/mbs.cgi/mb473767/" >Promoting Your Website Even More</a> <br /><a href="http://www.insidetheweb.com/mbs.cgi/mb1261032/" >Yahoo! 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