7-Point Strategy to Improving User Experience

A great website with all the right components: design, content, structure, navigation, will no doubt be tremendously useful to its visitors. But, user-experience goes beyond a good website. Anyone searching the product you offer won’t just land on your site and make a purchase. Web shoppers are bound to window shop a little before they finalize a product. In effect, user-experience starts at the window-shopping phase.

Step 1: Research
Let’s assume you are looking for a good quality SLR. You would want to explore all your options before you buy a camera that suits your need and budget. While searching on the web, you come across a YouTube review that has been uploaded by a company DigiCam Pros selling SLRs. The review is thorough and gives you all the information you are looking for.

Social media advertising is a great way to get your business noticed in the web market.

Next, you go for a price comparison of SLRs. You look up Google and voila…DigiCam Pros pops up again. Although their cameras aren’t the cheapest in the market, you still visit their site because you are really impressed by their video.

Optimizing your site to rank high in organic searches automatically puts your business at the top of your competitors still grappling for a foothold SEO.

Step 2: Website Visit
DigiCam Pros website is not only informative, but also professionally designed, easy to find your way through and gives you exactly what you need.

A good website does not necessarily have the most creative of designs. Readable content and easy navigation benefit users, which coupled with simplistic and aesthetic design, make your site workable.

But you are still apprehensive about ordering online and having to wait a few days before the camera is delivered to you. So, you decide to give DigiCam Pros a drop and instead, buy the camera from your local cam store.

Step 3: Mobile Website
Unfortunately, none of your local camera shops have the camera you want. You remember DigiCam Pros, and that with a little extra money you can order the camera delivered within the time you want. Just to be doubly sure this can be done, you check DigiCam Pros on your iPhone.

DigiCam pros is not only available but the mobile version of the website makes it incredibly easy for you to order your camera. Within minutes, you have paid DigiCam Pros and your camera is on the way.

Note that mobile devices have limited display ability. You must design your site to not only squeeze into your mobile screen, but squeeze in with all the essentials required to market your product. Your website should advocate speedy downloads of content, images, etc, to score on usability.

Step 4: Support Forum

Your camera was delivered on time and it works great. However, you suddenly encounter a problem, and no matter what you try, you cannot seem to get around to solving it. In desperation, you visit DigiCam Pros and discover a Support Forum.

A Support Forum for your product is generally a great way to invite customer interaction. Besides user generated keywords help the SEO of your site.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t have the answer you are looking for. You cannot contact the customer service either because it’s off business hours.

Step 5: Monitor Social Media
To vent your frustration, you update your Facebook status or Tweet expressing your dissatisfaction with the product and the company. Next day, you receive an unexpected response from DigiCam Pros apologizing for the problem and asking you to avail their live chat facility or call customer service.

Social media advertising is not only superbly beneficial for your business networking, but also helps you keep tap of your customers, and product feedbacks thereof.

Step 6: Customer Service
You are absolutely elated by the service you receive. Customer service not only patiently listens to your problem but also offers helpful suggestions and demos to solve it. They also offer to replace your camera; no questions asked.

Setting up of a good customer service system helps your customers easily contact you with their feedbacks, suggestions. Not having a good customer support system not only causes you to lose potential clients, but also foster a disgruntled group of customers.

Step 7: Beginnings of a Relationship
Impressed by the service you receive, you make another Facebook or Twitter post, praising DigiCam Pros. You are also open to emails from them suggesting new upgrades and accessories, and turns out you avail most of their offers.

Word of mouth may not seem much, but it does have remarkable impact on your company’s reputation. As an advertising tactic, it’s capable of producing assured results. A system of sending out targeted emails is also important to keep your customers hooked to your website.

In conclusion, good user experience does not begin with just presenting a good website, nor end at closing a sale. A lot else has to be taken care of before a business can build a bank of loyal customers.

Bloggers Alert! Do You Have Returning Visitors?

As bloggers, we are obsessed with daily visitor count, twitter mentions, and inbound links because as solo-activists, we do not have enough personal connections with people who can tell us what we are doing right, what we should not do, and how we should improve.

In our search for a number measurement to confirm or negate assumptions about our work, we turn to analytics. A daily visitor stat seems to attract us the most. Especially for those just started a blog, a daily visitor count is rewarding and exciting. However, stats have little use if your blog does not benefit visitors.

In other words, if your blog does not give visitors a reason to return, your efforts as a blogger remains unrewarded in the long run. So, first things first – forget about daily visitor count and instead start focusing on enriching your blog with content that visitors run to, time and again.

How to Make Sure Your Blog has returning Visitors?

Your focus should be on how to make the majority of your first-time visitors revisit your blog. To achieve a decent number of returning traffic, you must give your visitors a reason to return; something valuable like a subscription for personal tips, interaction on social network, product offers, etc.

The easiest way to understand what possible advantage to implement in your blog for visitors is to put yourself in their shoes. Example: If you were visiting a travel blog, would you only be happy with paragraphs of information on a particular destination’s scenic beauty or would you rather read first-hand information about how to get there, where to stay, what to eat, what to wear, what to buy, what to visit, etc? Now translate your preferences to your visitors’ and you’ve got a list of things you must include in your travel blog.

Now, all of the aforesaid information need not be included in one post. In fact, breaking it up is a smart way to ensure interested visitors revisit for information. Additionally, you can offer the following to your niche readers: Free eBooks, Premium eBooks, Humor/Personal Stories, and a Social Community through social media sites, not to mention Expert Advice, Personal Tips, and Personal Insight into holiday destinations. If you are a business offering ticket and hotel booking facilities, there are Discount and Service packages you can offer.

However, just offering tons of valuable information is not enough. Your visitors should be able to find the exceptional content you are publishing everyday. Hence, a sidebar section for popular content, and daily updates, is a must. Additionally, if you are offering a free ebook or subscription, it should feature at the top of your blog.

Which brings us to question: How will your visitors know when you have updated new content if you don’t make it easy for them to get the updates?

The answer: Use a few features like RSS Subscriptions, Newsletters and Social Site status updates to let your visitors keep track of your latest blog activity.

Bottom line, unless your readers can answer the ‘what’s in it for me?’ question by themselves, there is little chance they will revisit your blog. So make sure you provide enough temptation to keep them glued to your blog, because honestly, web users are an elusive lot and value-added, regular information is your only chance to ensure revisits. And once you have implemented features solely meant for visitor benefit, try Google Analytics for spotlights on new and returning visitors. The difference will be marked.

How to decrease bounce rate of any site?

Bounce rate measures the number of visitors who come to visit any particular web page but if the content or design is not well then they bounce back to the other site So, there must be sites with quality content because high bounce rate directly points at content. Bounce rate of 40% is almost acceptable but rates in excess of 80% might not be well enough.

If there is an increase in readership from a single user then it highlights the predictability of sale and if the reader is engaged in a site then there is a possibility of better outcome. Quality content can do wonders and this will help to conquer bounce percentage.

Some sites are benefited from a customer experience program so the option of response/feedback should be offered to the customers if the bounce rates are high and notice that the feedback system is proper so just take care of these few things in order to develop customer’s interest and our main goal is to fulfill the needs of the user. A time to time check on bounce rates helps a lot; it actually maintains the standard of the website.

Techniques Followed By SEO Firms

SEO marketing is the most popular form of Internet marketing amongst the new media firms worldwide. As Search Engine Optimization has increased its popularity worldwide so there are many media firms plus the small/medium business shifting work to SEO Companies in India. When it comes to outsourcing services, there are many SEO firms in India and some opt for Black Hat SEO techniques and some for White Hat. Black Hat techniques are banned by the search engines while companies prefer to follow the White Hat techniques to optimize the clients’ website in order to gain higher rankings. So there are good companies in India which optimizes websites following on-page and off-page practices.

Let us check out the techniques followed by SEO firms in India:

Initial Analysis – This is the first technique followed by the SEO companies and this process involves the full analysis of any particular website and the main competitors involved and finally help them in managing their SEO strategies well.

Keyword Research – Keyword is the most important technique in order drive maximum traffic to the website. The best set of keywords will help you to allocate ranks to the website. You have to choose the most suitable keyword required for that particular site.

Optimizing Pages – Web pages must be optimized with regard to the theme of the website. The content should always be fresh and must be updated from time to time and the content should be created with the specific use of keywords

Meta Tag Code Optimization – This is basically the on page optimization part, the meta tags are considered very important for the search engines and our expert SEO teams carefully analyze and optimize the Meta keyword, description and title of the websites as these Meta tags have a very optimistic impact on the ranking of a website.

Manual Directory Submissions – The SEO professionals manually submit their websites to all major search engines and the Google, Yahoo etc different directories. These directory listing ensures the indexing of the sites faster and we should also give the appropriate site description and category. SEO firms in India provide these services at less cost than that charged by International SEO firms.

Building Link Popularity – Link popularity is very important for achieving a good Page Rank and is very tedious plus time consuming Search Engine Optimization job but can easily be outsourced in places like India where we the professionals take full responsibility to deliver the clients requirements.

So, there are many more techniques like article submission, press releases etc followed by SEO experts and they use a suitable approach in SEO to gain high rankings on different search engines.

Best Practices for SEO Web Development

We search engine optimizers are more often given the task for improving the rankings of the website. But implementing SEO Web development from the very beginning will make certain that there are many of necessary elements in place. You should fully integrate SEO web development best practices but it doesn’t mean that you have to surrender nice designs, so an SEO together with web developers can build up a website which might be appreciated by all.
Guidelines for Effective SEO Web Development

An important point that involves a good SEO web development is that it should carefully reflect on the entire information in a site and the overall design that should look good but make sure that it is easily found by search engines.

Search engines prefer those codes that are simpler and defined in accordance with W3C standards. So, try to create a valid code.

Try to avoid duplicate content. You should not use the same content again and again within a website or don’t use the same content on multiple domains.

Avoid splash pages because they block search engine spiders to crawl that page and hence not good for SEO. If a web developer or client recommend you create that particular page just suggest them not to do this as these are not at all useful for any site.

Use alt tags for images. Try to describe the images well because it helps search engines to know more about the content of the website. So use alt tags for the images including logos.

Use of header tags is the most important part of SEO web development. It should be used in every pages of the site and the main thing is that only the important keywords should be used in the “h1” tags.

Title must not be overstuffed with keywords; it must be simple, well-written and specific.

A site should be search engine friendly. There are many who ignore to look the first page of results but this is to be taken care of and an SEO professional helps us in building a site which can achieve the maximum rankings in the search engines.

So just try to follow the above guidelines for an effective SEO Web Development.

Web Design For SEO

There is no point of having a website if no one can find it. If you want your website to perform its best then you should need to ensure that your site have the right web design principles and for that you need to have a hard look at your site from your customers point of view just see that whether your site conveys the essential message of your business and achieves its maximum visibility by reaching as many people. It can be only be possible through Search engine optimization. Ask yourself questions such as:

Who is your targeted customer?

What is the overall purpose of your website and your business as a whole?

What action do you want from a visitor to your site?

What are you selling?

Where you are expecting to receive major traffic?

So you need to be sure about these aspects and make sure that your website should be designed in such a way that it reflects these. Suppose you want to sell package holidays then you should have to design your website with the theme related to holidays, use those colorful images that reflect holidays site. These little things will surely help you to optimize your site and gain importance in search engines.

If people find your site attractive as well as informative, there will be chances of increasing a large number of customers. So your website really needs to be featured in the top 10 search result otherwise you will be losing vital sales and marketing shares to your competitors.

Black Hat, White Hat and Gray Hat SEO

Search Engine Optimizers use several types of SEO techniques to optimize the websites which completely depends on their respective goals and objectives. There are three types of SEO:-

• Black Hat SEO - Black hat SEO is all about getting fast results. The method that the webmasters adopt to optimize their websites does get the website to the top of the search engines quickly but sooner or later the rankings are going to fall down. When the search engines notice that a particular website has used black hat SEO techniques to gain high search engine rankings then they ban the site. Black hat SEO creates poor quality websites by using several technology driven automated programs and gains inbound links from other sites (link spam). When the visitor opens the website, the website owner will try to redirect the visitor to some sales page of products etc. This is one of the goals of black hat SEO.

• White Hat SEO – White hat SEO believes in creating quality content for the website first and then optimizing it to gain high search engine rankings. They depend on their content and marketing skills to rank high in the search engine results. They believe in writing unique and quality content for their sites. They do not rely on automated programs like black hat SEO to drive website traffic. They very well understand that it takes time to acquire high search engine rankings and so they work accordingly.

• Gray Hat SEO – There are several types of gray hat SEO techniques. Some gray hat techniques may be banned by the search engines although they may not be against their rules while others which are very risky to undertake can still be used after careful considerations

Tips to make your site in Google’s top 10

If you want to make your site in Google’s Top 10 and also increase your website’s page rank then you must follow these standard SEO techniques.

• SEO Friendly Design :-
Make your site as per SEO rules and also search engine friendly so that it is becomes easier for search engine robots to crawl your site. It would be even better if you can add a sitemap to your website as it is approved by major search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo.

• Keyword Analysis :-
Always conduct an effective keyword research before finalizing your keywords. Don’t forget to checkout the competitor’s keywords also. Always use long tail keywords as they are less used and therefore more targeted. Take help of keyword research tools available on the net.

• Original Content :-
Always include unique and original content in your websites. You can take ideas from sites offering articles on related topics but don’t copy them blindly. Try to write it in your own language.

• Directory Submission :-
Submit your site to SEO friendly web directories to gain links. Always make sure to read the terms and conditions before submitting your site to directories like DMOZ as it increases your Google’s ranking like anything.

• Article Submission :-
Write informative and unique articles on your website’s topic and submit them to SEO friendly web directories like ezine articles etc to gain links. If your article is useful and informative then people will read it and link back to your site.

• Blog Update :-
Blogging is an effective way to gain link popularity. If you constantly update your site’s blog with refreshing content then visitors will surely come back again and again.

• Remain updated on all kinds of SEO tricks and techniques :-
It is very important to remain updated on all kinds of SEO methods and implement them in your optimization strategy. Also use the recommended SEO software for your work so as to perform better and effectively.

Most Vital SEO Services That Your Business Should Hire

If you have not yet started using SEO services for your business website, then its time that you start finding a SEO company today so that you can turn your website into an effective marketing tool for your business. There are many companies in the market providing SEO services at affordable rates, out of which you need to select the one that suits your requirements perfectly. But your role does not end here completely. After you select the company to offer you SEO services, you have to ensure that the services offered by them are right for your website so that you can extract maximum benefit from it. You have to ensure that your SEO Company provides the following 3 vital SEO services.

1.KEYWORD ANALYSIS :-
This implies thorough research of all the keywords that are applicable to the services or products offered by your business as well as the keywords your competitors are using in their website optimization process. After this research is over, only then the SEO company will be able to decide on the keywords that will be used to search for the products and services offered by your business. Then a compelling copy needs to be made using these keywords so that the search engines can cache your website into the relevant category. Keyword analysis is one of the most important and the first step of the SEO process.

2.UPGRADES FOR YOUR WEBSITE :-
Your SEO Company needs to ensure that your website adheres to the rules of major search engines before optimizing it. This includes an in-depth research of the website. After this if the SEO Company feels that there is need to upgrade your website then it can do so by adding new links or pages in it to improve its ranking.

3.PREPARING SEO REPORTS :-
The main purpose of hiring SEO services is to increase your site’s ranking in the search engine results. But how will you know that your aim has been fulfilled or not? This can be done by asking the SEO Company to prepare reports for your website including all keywords as well as the amount of website traffic received.

But the most important thing that you must remember after you are done with these three services is that you have to check that your SEO Company is not using black hat SEO techniques instead of white hat to bring in website traffic. Black hat SEO techniques will definitely bring quick results but will harm your website’s ranking in the long run. Therefore this process should be strictly avoided.

Importance Of On Page SEO To Optimize Your Website

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a process by which we can increase the visibility of our website on search engine listings.

There are two main factors in search engine optimization:-

On Page Optimization

Off Page Optimization

• On Page SEO:- On Page Optimization is a technique by which your web site gets a high ranking on various search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask etc. This factor is related to the content and structure of the website.

o Few Tips on On Page Optimization:-

• Title Tag: In this section the title of the website is shown. Search engines use title tags to make a link in search results. Usually sixty six characters of the title are visible on search engine result page.

• Meta Description Tag: A Meta Tag Description is a short review of the webpage which gives a brief description about the website. You can use your main keywords in this section. Meta tag description plays vital role in web page ranking.
• Keywords: Here you have to choose most relevant keywords which will help for high ranking to your website.
• H1 Tag: H1 tag should be appropriate to your webpage.
• Header Text: In this portion a short description about the website are written.
• Footer Text: The keywords which are not used in title or mete description are written here.
• Site Map: Brief description of all the internal pages are written here, first you have to write the name of the page (which should hyperlinked with the page url), then write a very short description about the page.
• Footer Link: Here you have to add the main keywords of all internal pages (you can also mix more than one keyword) and hyperlink with the page url.

The Positive Effect of Blog Commenting for SEO and Search Ranking:-

It is common to all that Google and other Search Engines look at the number of inbound links to promote your website’s search ranking. There are many ways to acquire more inbound links to your website, one of them is blog commenting. Now a days blog commenting is more effective than social bookmarking, directory submission etc, to increase your website’s search ranking. By taking the time to comment on blogs, even one or two comment per day can lead to extremely positive results such as reputation building, expert positioning and the building of inbound links.
So if you are going to comment a blog you should devise a good strategy for commenting on blogs in order to get the most page rank value. Here are some tips for blog commenting:-

• Write a relevant comment: - The comment should be relevant with the blog content.
• Find a blog list in your niche: - It is recommended to go with a dofollow blog directory and search dofollowers in your niche by the help of the Google toolbar.
• Find out the blogs which already have a good number of backlinks: - It will help to improve search ranking because an internal blog post can have better rank than the homepage if that internal page gets a lot of links.
• Use Google reader or other RSS reader: - Using a reader will organize posts based on their freshness.