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Stoney G deGeyter Articles
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12 Product Page Conversion Strategies That Shant Be Ignored - Click To Read Article The other day I received an email from a client noting that some of his Yahoo rankings have slipped as of late. They are still ranking strong on Google as well as MSN and heck, many of their Yahoo rankings are still very strong. But there was, in fact, some slippage and the client was concerned. Well, first we know that there is more to web marketing than top rankings. In fact rankings are just a small piece of the bigger web marketing pie. I know that and you know that, but for whatever reason, we all still have to deal with clients that refuse to accept that. But that's a story for another post. Sometimes Motivation Has to be Felt - Click To Read Article Motivation is a funny thing. You can try to encourage people by telling them the benefits of this, that or the other, but sometimes it's just not enough. You've got to make them "feel" it. If you craft your message right, you can do just that using words only. 9 Tips for Creating a Site Map for Visitors and Spiders - Click To Read Article Not every site needs a site map, they can certainly be a good idea. Site maps provide a dual purpose: They provide search engine spiders easy access to all of your site pages and they provide site visitors easy access to all of your site pages. The difference is that search engines and visitors access your site map differently and therefore there are different methods that need to be applied to creating site map(s) that are friendly for both engines and search spiders. Reciprocal Links Are Still Not Dead - Click To Read Article A while back there was quite a bit of scare mongering going around the SEO industry about how reciprocal links were dead. I had a potential client once tell me that so-and-so-big-name-in-the-SEO-industry told them that reciprocal links were dead. I've said this before and I'll say it here again. There is nothing wrong with reciprocal links. And here is the proof. 5 Easy Ways to Make Your About Us Page More About Your Customers - Click To Read Article For many sites, visitors that find their way to your About Us page tend to have a somewhat higher conversion rate than those that don’t. Potential customers that do visit this page are showing a bit more than a casual interest in what your site has to offer and are looking for additional signals of trust. The About Us page can play an important functional role in the process of providing visitors comfort and assurances in your company and your ability to meet their needs. Here you can provide specific information that visitors both expect to find and that will help them feel "safe" with the offerings you provide. The Best Damn On-Page Optimization Process Checklist, Period - Click To Read Article I like to create systems for everything that I do and SEO is no exception. While not every aspect of search engine marketing can be programmed, categorized or easily referenced, the bulk of the work can at least be outlined into a handy check list. 10 Not-So-Quick-But-Still-Important Ways to Increase Conversions - Click To Read Article In a previous article I provided 10 Quick Ways to Increase Conversions. As I stated in that article, there are literally thousands of signals that can be changed to improve one's conversion. That list was to give you 10 easy changes. HereI give 10 more, but they are not quite as easy to implement as those on the first list. They are none-the-less still important! These are in no particular order. All Roads Lead to Congestion: Weighing in on Universal Search, Part II - Click To Read Article With Google's new universal search being rolled out the concept of "top search engine rankings" changes dramatically. On one hand a first page ranking is much more difficult to achieve, and on the other, there are now more ways in which to achieve a first page ranking. Here is a quick rundown of possible results that could appear on the first page of a Google search: 5 Engaging Ways to Engage Your Audience - Click To Read Article How engaged a customer is with your website will determine whether they can be persuaded to buy, comment, download or submit their information for you to follow up on. Customer engagement goes beyond just getting the customer's attention, you must keep their attention. This can be done by providing your visitors near immediate gratification. To do that you have to first know who your audience is, know what they seek and then also know their purpose for being on your site. Knowing all this then lets you work toward meeting the needs of your target audience. But it also means taking things a step further and building a relationship with them. The ability to build a relationship with your visitors can be crucial to driving them through the persuasion process. Relationship building starts the moment the visitor hits the website. 10 Quick Ways to Increase Conversions - Click To Read Article My SEO firm has been spending a good deal of time analyzing conversion and usability aspects for our clients over the past year. While there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of things that can be changed to help improve conversion rates, we've created a short list of things that are both quick and easy to change or add to your site. These are in no particular order. The Best Keywords Ever for Your SEO Campaign - Click To Read Article How do you determine which keywords will be the best for your SEO campaign? 6 Quick and Easy Accessibility Issues That Make Your Visitors Happy - Click To Read Article As more and more users gain access to the web it becomes increasingly important to ensure that your website is accessible to all, not just a few. Just as businesses must comply with the American Disabilities Act to ensure proper access to customers with disabilities, businesses should do all they can to make their websites accessible to all users regardless of the means in which they access the site. And of course not all accessibility issues involve meeting the needs of the disabled. What must be considered is the growing number of users that now access websites through non-traditional means, whether it be mobile phones or with images turned off. These users can still be your target audience and ensuring your site can be used through alternate avenues is essential to capturing that audience. Converting Visitors Through Errors and Form Fields - Click To Read Article Forms are one of your primary points of contacts with your visitors. While many visitors still use email or even the telephone to contact you or to place an order, the vast majority will contact you first via your web forms. Forms that are broken or improperly implemented cause frustration and can greatly reduce your conversion rate for leads and sales. It is up to your design and development team to test your site's web forms as thoroughly as possible in order to eliminate any errors. While no site can ever be 100% error-free, finding and fixing errors sooner, rather than later, is important to maintaining a usable website. When user and usability errors do occur --and they will-- it is important to employ the right safeguards in order to ensure visitor satisfaction and reduce exit rates. Giving Personality to Your Personas - Click To Read Article One of the things we've been trying to wrap our head around is the concept of writing content for both personas and the personality of site visitors. We battled with this for several days, trying to distinguish properly between a persona and a personality. I was finally able to boil each down into a few words that made it easy for us to see the difference. A Day in the Life of a Search Engine Friendly Web Page - Click To Read Article In a previous article I wrote that a search engine friendly website is not the same as a search engine optimized website. I'm using that as a jump off point for this article on the topic of building a search engine friendly website. The purpose is to simply highlight a few of the aspects that comprise a SE friendly (not necessarily optimized) website. Lessons From Blockbuster A UVP Worth Writing Home About - Click To Read Article When Blockbuster first came out with their online movie rental service it was a joke compared to Netflix. I tried it out for several weeks and was sorely disappointed and quickly switched back. What was Blockbuster's problem? Essentially, they had no Unique Value Proposition. Blockbuster could not convince me, and many others, that their service was worth using over their primary rival, Netflix. That has all changed. 13 Ways to Lose ROI on Your SEO Campaign - Click To Read Article Whether you have outsourced your SEO campaign or are performing it in-house, here is a quick list on how to lose ROI and create diminishing returns for your business. Why 13? Well, because that's your lucky number! Search Engine Friendly is NOT Search Engine Optimized - Click To Read Article When we are quoting development work for prospective clients we are often asked to develop a website that is search engine optimized. This usually brings me into a long-winded explanation on how developing a website to be search engine friendly is not the same thing as optimizing that website for search performance. Kind of like how building a car is not the same as making it ready to compete in the Indy 500. Those are two different tasks altogether. Winning is for Wimps and Losers - Click To Read Article People often find themselves looking for the winning scenario for themselves or their businesses. Finding the winning scenario is important for any long-term success. But even better than the winning scenario is the win-win scenario. 7 Ways to Make Your Home Page a Home Run for Usability - Click To Read Article Your home page is the single most crucial page of your site. This is the page that will be the primary entry point for a majority of your visitors. It is also the page that sets the stage for the rest of the site giving visitors a birds-eye view of who you are, what you're about, what you can do for them, what you offer, and how they get the information needed. The importance of making sure your home page is user-friendly cannot be understated. This page, more than any other, has to pull together so many elements without being overbearing or overloading the visitor with information overkill. Despite the over-reaching purpose of the home page, simplicity is the key. Provide the necessary information and usability elements and you'll lower your bounce rate and improve site conversions along the way. Mmmm! Tasty Search Goulash: Weighing in on Google's Universal Search - Click To Read Article I've had some time to consider Google's new universal search that they are implementing in their search results. What I see makes me think of this in terms of search goulash. Mmmm! a (not-so) tasty combination of everything I didn't want in my search with some stuff I did thrown in. 11 Ways Fill Your Shopper's Cart - Click To Read Article Since the “purchase” is the ultimate conversion, it is imperative that you remove as many obstacles from the customer's research-to-buy cycle as possible. Providing your visitors the key ingredients in their shopping experience creates a smooth and worry-free transaction process. The easier it is to shop and buy the more customers will overcome the natural hesitations that many feel before they commit by hitting the final "complete order" button. 10 Ways to Help Your Visitors Trust You - Click To Read Article Trust is a key usability issue when it comes to running a successful online business. Most people automatically view web businesses with a bias against them compared to their brick and mortar counterparts. Your ability to convince your visitors that yours is a trustworthy business is one of the key components to getting visitors to convert into customers. Creating a website that conveys trust can be tricky. There are rarely any answers that are always "right" for every visitor. There are, however, several factors that have universal appeal to the weary shopper. 4 Easy Ways to Dissatisfy Your Visitors - Click To Read Article Since creating a website that is "user friendly" is often difficult and time consuming, I thought it would be fun to explore a few ways to create a dissatisfying user experience on your website. Unlike the dozens upon dozens of things that go into creating a website that provides a positive visitor experience, one that creates an atmosphere of trust and is likely to improve conversion rates, creating a dissatisfying experience can be done fairly easily in just a few steps. Are Search Engine Rankings That Important? - Click To Read Article What's more important, conversion or rankings? It's the modern chicken or the egg question as it pertains to marketing online. Assuming even for a second that you had to sacrifice one for the other, which should you choose? 20 Ways to NAVIGATE to Higher Conversions - Click To Read Article A site's navigation structure is extremely important in providing a rich, friendly user experience. Well designed and implemented navigation assists in the process of helping visitors identify sections and pages of the website that interest them and then in moving them in that direction. If you're able to implement a solidly developed navigation system on your site you'll also be providing strong visual cues to the depth of content you have available. This alone can be an immediate first-impression indicator of trust. Establishing Web Credibility - Click To Read Article When doing business online your credibility will play a significant role in how much business you can get and how successful you can be. Just like any brick and mortar store, losing credibility with your online business can be disastrous for business. 25 Ways to DESIGN Your Way to Higher Conversions - Click To Read Article How the site is developed, along with the underlying coding structure, plays a significant role on whether your site meets the usability requirements of your audience. Below are a number of individual elements that must be considered in every website design. While each plays a minor role over the total usability of a website, together they add up to be much more than the sum of their parts. Lessons from Blockbuster: Total Access Takes Another Minor Misstep - Click To Read Article Last week I received an email from Blockbuster notifying me that my ecoupon was ready. The email is great! It's only missing one thing; a link to the actual coupon. 6 Ways to Get Your Visitors To Contact You From Your Contact Us Page - Click To Read Article Along with the About Us page, your Contact Us page is one of the most important and crucial pages on your site to get right. In fact, the Contact Us page could be considered the absolutely most important page. Even if the rest of your site succeeds in the goals, if visitors fail to find the information they need to contact you then you will bring their shopping experience to a screeching halt. Shoppers are often hampered if they don't feel they can get a hold of a real person or are limited in their contact options. With all other areas of the site working, a bad contact us page may cause someone to think twice about purchasing with you altogether. 8 Items Every Shopper Needs In Their Shopping Cart - Click To Read Article Customers who, by all means, appear to be ready to make a purchase, are often found abandoning their shopping carts before they complete their online transaction. In many cases this is part of the normal online shopping experience as the shopping cart is just used as a place to collect items of interest but which the user has no real intent to purchase. But all too often it is a failure of the shopping cart page itself that leads visitors to abandon their items which they do, in fact, wish to have. 12 Privacy and Security Issues Your Customers Care About - Click To Read Article Your website's privacy information and security settings can be significant hurdles when it comes to gaining trust with your visitors. Establishing trust is paramount to enticing visitors to make that final commitment, whether that be making a purchase, choosing to provide their info, or simply making initial contact with you. Your job is to make sure your visitors feel confident that their information is kept safe and will not be used for nefarious means, or anything other than what they fully expect. While providing assurances are nice, those assurances only go so far as what actually happens. Be sure that your small print reinforces what your visitors already expect to find in regards to how their information is used. Social Media Marketing is Branding - Click To Read Article Think of all the ways that companies use branding to build awareness of themselves or to promote their social awareness and customer service values. A few things come to mind such as greeters at the entrance of my favorite store, go-green awareness issues, charity drives that "give back" to the community for every purchase made, TV screens playing music videos or news as you wait in line, and the list goes on. None of these things lead directly to conversions but they do lead to higher company awareness and the good old fashioned fuzzy-feelings we get when we know that that we are valued as a customer. Most times we are probably not even be aware of these things on a conscious level. But the effect shows as we have a tendency to patron these companies more frequently than the other alternatives. The Anatomy of a 12-Month Link Baiting Campaign - Click To Read Article Last February, I had a diabolical plan to become a household name in the SEO community. Here I was, a guy who has been in SEO for almost ten years and remained a relative unknown. Sure, I made a few friends here and there and have been slowly building my reputation, but who would of thought 12 months ago that I would be able to snag an interview with one of the biggest names in the SEO. And that's not me interviewing the big name, mind you... that's the big name interviewing me! Lessons From Blockbuster: Money For Nothin', and the Survey's For Free - Click To Read Article The other day I received an email from Blockbuster asking me to take a survey. See if you can tell me what is missing from this email: Lessons From Blockbuster: Don't Hide All Your Good Sales Material - Click To Read Article Blockbuster is making a mistake by not letting people see the various program options they offer. For many, this information can be an important part of the decision making process. Blockbuster provides these options only AFTER you create an account (and are therefore logged in.) Full RSS or Summary Feed - Click To Read Article I'm not the first one to chime in on this topic, mostly because I've gone both ways and I can make pretty valid arguments from either side. But I've finally settled it in my mind which is "best". Full RSS feeds are better than summary feeds. Why? Searching for Better On-Site Search Usability - Click To Read Article Not every site needs, nor should have, an on-site search feature. But those that do must be sure that the search isn't just an after-thought. It needs to be more than something to add because you think visitors want it. Adding a search function is not necessarily good for on-site usability. Implementing a search function improperly is often a greater source of frustration than not having one altogether. Four Quick Ways to Improve Your HELP and FAQ Pages - Click To Read Article Depending on the nature of your site, Help and FAQ's (Frequently Asked Questions) can span a few or many pages. Building up these sections of your site can greatly enhance your visitor's experience with your website. These pages are often sought out by shoppers who are looking for just a bit more information to help them feel confident about their purchase. Managing Projects Through People - Click To Read Article Management can be a tricky thing. Many companies promote people to management / supervisory positions based on their knowledge of the job and ability to get things done. But management goes so far beyond that, which is why many managers are not as effective as they should be. So what does it take to be an effective manager/supervisor? A supervisors job is to manage both people and projects. Tuning people-management and project-management skills are necessary for any manager to truly be effective. 9 (+1) Tips For Writing User-Friendly Content - Click To Read Article Content weighs heavily both in terms of how users interact with your website as well as how visitors (both human and search spiders) are able to determine what you offer and what each page of your website is about. While solidly optimized content is important for search engine rankings, considering the usability of your content is of paramount importance for attaining good conversion rates. 14 Usability Tips for Login and My Account Pages - Click To Read Article Sites that require users to log in to access certain information and/or purchase products add an additional layer of potential complication to the usability process. To avoid potential visitor confusion and the possibility for errors, it is important that any login process requires little or no thought on the part of the site visitor. Once logged in, you must be sure that visitors are able to find the information they want and expect to find. My Account pages need to provide visitors with access and ability to view and change personal information, as necessary. How to Succeed at Everything that Matters - Click To Read Article Everybody wants to succeed. Success, though, rarely comes easy. Nor does it happen overnight. We often hear about overnight success stories, certain companies or individuals thrown into the limelight, having made millions from something or another. What we fail to realize, or rather the people calling them an "overnight success" fail to realize, is that there is usually a pretty substantial history building up to that success. Long hours, lots of money invested, family, goals or desires sacrificed, etc. Like this article? Share it with your friends
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