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Guest post by: Dave Gilbert Become an Author

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Things have certainly changed on the internet in the last few years, expecially in the realm of SEO and Marketing, where in previous years we worried over meta tags and oneway linking, in 2011 the catchword is influence....what influences your sites popularity and traffic.

Understanding what influences your websites popularity is critical in understanding what needs improving on your site to increase sales after all any business person will tell you there are never enough sales especially in a world where prices only ever seem to go up and overheads quickly reach critical levels affecting a businesses survival.

In order to detect and map out a websites influencers we need to go a little deeper into it's statistical data than most webmasters venture and we need identify and highlight just what has attracted the buyers and why!.

This means we look at where visitors go on the site rather than how many pages have been viewed or the number of hits the site has received.

The path a visitor takes through the site is just one of the indicators we need to trace, we also need to note how long a visitor paused in each location and where possible what caused them to pause and the length of time they spent in that location.

Not all statistical softwares allow us to do this so we need to use one that does map these critical factors, my personal favourite software for this type of recording is a free software called Tracewatch you can easily google it

So just what is likely to influence a visitor on my website ?.

The following are a few of the common attractions that can influence a person to spend time and hopefully money on your site;

• Usefull information/content
• graphics
• Comparative evidence
• Interaction.

By using a combination of information and graphic representation we can promote an idea or product however how the information is written will affect it's influence on the reader and can seriously impact their responses.

In the case of a site selling whitegoods for instance adding in comparative pricing and warranty information will enable the prospective buyer to make an informed choice whcih ultimately leads to customer satisfaction.

Interaction can be as simple as adding a contact form or a more complex solution may be a live chat system such as employed on this site, adding flash games etc is generally not a good idea unless your site has been designed for such a purpose as these could well distract potential buyers from your product range.

Understanding just what interests your visitors will enable you to build upon the influencing factors surrounding your site and to illustrate this i am going to insert a scenario based upon two Real Estate sites.

Site (A) sells houses in a popular new development at the rate of 3 sales per week.

Site (B) sells houses in the same development at the rate of 1 sale per day or 7 sales per week roughly double the turnover of site (A).

Site (A) has the standard realtors site with nice graphics and a breakdown of the properties features and pricing.

Site (B) also has the same nice graphics and breakdowns etc but there the similarity stops because site (B) has also added in a ton of information on the local area that Site (A) has omitted such as pages on the local schools,shopping areas and transport facilities etc.

In this case the main influencers generating sales for Site (B) is the extra information it provides, by simply adding a few pages it has managed to engage the visitor and pass critical information to them that affects their reason to buy from Site (B) by providing answers already on the buyers mind such as schooling, shopping and transportation Site (B) has allowed the buyer to make an informed choice and saved them the time needed to ask those questions or research the answers themselves resulting in a much better conversion.

If we were to look into the statistical evidence gathered on the 2 sites we would see that visitors spent much more time on site (B) than they did on site (A) and that a majority of the time was spent reading this extra information that influenced them to buy from site (B) over buying from site (A).

So how does this affect finding these sites on the internet using search engines ?, in the case of the Real Estate sites site (B) will rate above site (A) because of the information it contains, this estra information allows for a broader range of search terms closer to what a visitor may enter as a search query.

Influence can take many forms and many of these are not easily identified or can take some time to find and become apparent, however they are there and they are critical to just how well your site or business does, identifying and strengthening these influences should be high on any business owners to do list.

Related Articles

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  Strike a Profile for Profit and Dress to Conquer the World Every Day!
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  The Bookend Process of Engagement
  GOSSIP: GOOd NEWS FOR LEADERS
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