There is specific data about your web site that you should be looking at in your log files on a regular basis. Several variables should be examined monthly or even weekly to ensure your site design and page optimisation is on the right track:

Entry Paths

Most sites can be developed and analysed around the concept of visitor pathways. If, for example, your site is a Business to Business (B2B) site and you service small, medium and large businesses, there should be pathways through your site designed for each class of visitor. An extremely simplified example would be:

Clients coming to the site through an optimised home page:

• home page —> small business page —> order page —> order confirmation page
• home page —> medium business page —> order page —> order confirmation page
• home page —> large business page —> order page —> order confirmation page

The site entry pages for these pathways are often optimised home pages or optimized content pages. The final page of this route is often the action that you want clients to take on your site (e.g., sign up for your newsletter, buy your products online or contact you for further information). You can easily determine how effective your pathways are by tracking the entry paths on a regular basis via your site stats.

You should have some idea of the main pathways that clients take through your site, both for monitoring the effectiveness of your page optimisation and conversions, and for the purpose of subsequent site redesign(s). A good starting point to track the pathways through your site is via the graph or chart called “Entry Paths” in your log files / site statistics.

Top Exit Pages

These are pages from which most visitors click away from your site. Why is it useful to track these? Because exit pages can tell you:

• If there is a technical problem with the page that is causing visitors to leave your site. For example, if there are broken links, or the form on the page is not working properly etc.
• If your site design is breaking the strategic pathway, for example, you may have links to external sites that are inducing clients to click away before buying your product or signing up for your newsletter.
• If there is something on these pages that is encouraging visitors to leave your site. For example, an unprofessional design or confusing layout.

In your log files / site statistics, the graph or chart called “Top Exit Pages” is the place to learn why visitors are leaving your site.

Single Access Pages

These are entry pages that are viewed once before the visitor clicks away from your site. Similar to Top Exit Pages, Single Access Pages can tell you a lot about why people are not staying on your site for long.

Have a close look at the search terms used to find your site. Single Access Pages can often indicate that your target search terms are too broad. For example, you may be getting a lot of traffic by targeting “printer cartridges” but if you only stock a particular brand of cartridge, then people seeking other brands are not going to find what they truly seek when they arrive at your site so they will leave immediately. This can be resolved by narrowing down your search terms to be more targeted and focused on your niche products and services, for example, by changing “printer cartridges” to “HP printer cartridges” and so on.

To see what pages of your site are viewed once, look for the graph or chart called “Single Access Pages” in your log files / site statistics.

Most Requested Page(s) and Top Entry Pages.

Tracking these pages is key to measuring the success of your SEO campaign. If your optimization is effective, the Top Entry Pages and Most Requested Pages should be those that you have optimised for target keywords. The Top Entry Pages are particularly relevant as you consider the pathways through your site. Do the most popular entry pages have any relationship to the start pages for your plotted visitor pathways? Or are visitors entering and navigating your site via ways you didn’t intend? You can use this information to continually tweak your page optimization to guide visitors to the right pathways.

To see your most requested pages, look for the graph or chart titled “Most Requested Pages” in your log files / site statistics. Also look for “Top Entry Pages”.

Referring Domains and Referring URLs

Where are your visitors coming from? Are they coming from sites that are linked to yours? Are blog authors or forum members talking about your site? Referring Domains will tell you what sites are linking to yours, while Referring URLs will list the actual pages where the links are located. These can be little gold mines because you can often find valuable sources of traffic via links to your site that you didn’t even know existed.

In terms of an SEO campaign, these links can all add to your site’s overall link popularity, an important factor in the ranking algorithms of many search engines, particularly Google. Monitoring these metrics can tell you if your site requires a link-building campaign or help you measure the effectiveness of various online and offline advertising campaigns.

In your log files / site statistics, Look for the graph or chart titled “Referring Domains” and “Referring URLs”.

Search Engine Referrals

How many of your visitors are coming directly from search engines? What percentage of overall traffic does this represent? This is a good variable to track to help you keep up with how many search engines are listing your site (both free submission and paid submissions), how much traffic they bring and whether to renew your paid submissions. It can also tell you whether you need to increase the number of search engines your site is submitted to in order to build on your link popularity. As a a very rough guide, you should be receiving at least 30 percent of your site traffic via search engine referrals.

To see search engine referrals, look for a chart or graph called “Search Engines” within your site statistics.

Search Keywords

This topic is related to search engine referrals generally, but gives added insight into what terms you were actually found for in the search engines. Do these terms match what your site was optimized for? Are there any surprising terms that you might want to develop site content for? Some log file analysis programs will even break down what specific phrases your site was found for in which particular search engines. The more detailed the data you have, the more closely you can tweak your optimization campaign to your precise market.

To see the search phrases your site was found for, look for “Search Phrases” or “Search Phrases by “Search Engine”.

Landing pages for PCC Campaigns, etc.

If you run a pay-per-click campaign or dedicate specific pages to advertising product specials, you may use special landing pages or tracking ids to monitor your traffic and conversions. Your site logs can help you track these by showing you how many visitors they each had and what they did after they visited those pages.

Metric values that show dramatic change from developing trends

Any site metrics that show a dramatic change from one month to the next could pin-point a problem with your site or with your optimisation campaign. For example, if your search engine referrals have dropped dramatically, it could indicate that you have been penalised in a search engine (or more than one). Noticing changing trends early gives you the chance to investigate problem areas and make adjustments if necessary.

Please note that all log file analysis and site statistics programs are different and use slightly different terms to describe the metrics listed above. If you’re confused, ask your site admin or hosting provider to highlight these for you.

Remember, your log files are gold mines filled with nuggets of information about your optimized web site. If you keep digging on a regular basis, you’ll eventually strike it rich with success.

]]> http://webconsulting.com.au/analytics/understanding-analytics/feed 1 http://webconsulting.com.au/conversion-optimisation/six-ways-to-drive-your-seo-crazy http://webconsulting.com.au/conversion-optimisation/six-ways-to-drive-your-seo-crazy#comments Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:20:51 +0000 http://webconsulting.com.au/?p=537 Okay, so you’ve hired a search engine optimiser (SEO) to help your site’s rankings in the search engine results. If you’re in a sadistic mood, here are a six things you can do to drive your SEO professional over the edge.

1. Go out and register a bunch of “keyword-rich” domain names. Duplicate the content from your main domain to each of these and link them all back to the main domain to “help” the main site’s popularity.  Make sure that you “Forget” to tell your SEO that you’ve done this.

Not only will this not help, but it may prevent even your main domain from being displayed in some search engines. While the search engines don’t actually penalise duplicate content, they will either ignore or eventually filter out the duplicates – and they might just decide that your primary domain pages are the duplicate ones!

If you haven’t yet done anything like this, but you’re thinking it might be a good idea, save your money.  You’re much better off spending your time effort and money on optimising your actual site rather than a half hearted effort on lots of sites.

2. Hire a web designer who knows nothing about SEO to produce a site for you. Bring the SEO in at the end of the process, after the site is already completed. Forbid your SEO from making any changes to the on-page display of your site.

Virtually any existing site, no matter how search-friendly it is, will need some changes. If your site isn’t search-friendly already, the changes may be significant indeed.

If your SEO tells you that you don’t need to make any changes to your site and everything can be handled “behind the scenes,” then you should think about getting yourself a new SEO! They’re either clueless, or they’re planning to use sneaky tactics that can eventually get you in trouble with the search engines (or both!). Solid, long-term results come from hard work, not trickery.

Of course, the best tactic is to bring your SEO and your designer together from the start, so your site will be search-friendly from the get-go.

3. Neglect to tell your SEO about previous attempts at optimisation, particularly if they involved questionable practices. After all, there’s no sense in dredging up ancient history.

If your previous SEO efforts managed to get your site penalised or banned, your present SEO needs to know this. There are things that can be done to try to rectify the situation, but those things won’t be done if your SEO doesn’t know they need doing.

Even if the tactics used haven’t yet caused any actual penalties for you, it’s important to let your new SEO know what went before, and what might still be lurking about in dark corners of the Web. This will help your new SEO get things cleaned up and avoid any unpleasant surprises on down the road.

4. Start calling your SEO approximately two days after they’ve first started work on your site, asking when you’re going to see your rankings go up for your favourite key phrase. Call back at approximately two or three day intervals from then on out until you rank number one for your chosen phrase, or the SEO jumps off a bridge, whichever comes first.

Optimization takes time to reach full effect. For instance, it may take up to a year before a new site will rank well on Google for competitive key phrases. Even for less competitive phrases, you could potentially be looking at a period of several months before your site’s natural rankings settle in. In the meantime, Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC) can get your site on the first page even for highly competitive terms, as long as you’re willing to pay the cost per click.

5. Focus all your energies on a single phrase. No matter how much your SEO tries to convince you to diversify, or tells you this phrase isn’t going to be all that useful to you, insist on single-minded concentration on this one phrase. After all, your competition’s site ranks at number one for this phrase, and you have to beat them to get bragging rights.

Depending on its size, a well-optimised site should focus on dozens to hundreds of key phrases. There is simply no reason to limit yourself to one, or even a small handful of phrases. If your site doesn’t have enough pages to support all the useful key phrases recommended by your SEO, consider adding additional pages of content rather than shortening the list of targeted phrases.

Follow your SEO’s recommendations about which phrases should get priority. A good SEO will start any project by doing a detailed key phrase analysis to determine which words and phrases are most likely to be used by people who are searching for the kind of stuff you offer. There’s no point in ranking highly for phrases that no one ever uses for an actual search.

Don’t let your ego or vanity limit the potential of your site to rank well for multiple, valuable terms.

6. Check your rankings on a daily basis. Call your SEO to report (and, if needed, complain) about every fluctuation.

It’s a fact of life: rankings vary on a daily basis – sometimes an hourly or even minute-by-minute basis. Checking your rankings daily, or even more often, is simply a waste of time.

Sure, number one rankings are cool for bragging rights, but rankings alone don’t put food on the table.

The true measure of the success of an optimization campaign should not be rankings, or even traffic. It should be conversions – that is, how many people end up doing whatever it is you want your site visitors to do. (Buy your product, subscribe to your membership area, sign up for your newsletter, whatever.)

A good SEO will focus on this metric and will try to help you do the same.

Well, there you have it. Six easy ways to drive any good SEO insane. Now, of course, if you’d rather have a profitable web site, you might want to consider not doing any of these things. The choice is yours.

Better to show a banner than show nothing.

Not advertising at all means no sales at all. People have to get to know about you before they’ll buy from you. Compare banner advertising to a newspaper of 50 pages. There are a lot of ads in a newspaper. Quite frankly, you’re not going to see all of the ads even if you look at each and every page. Most websites are designed in an organised fashion where only a few ads are shown at a time. This gives you a better likelihood of having your banner shown.

To make sure that your banner advertising dollars are spent well, your banners must be designed and implemented with the following characteristics:

1. Keep your message short and simple.

You only have a few seconds to capture the attention of the viewer. Hence, you must be able to get your point across in a few words, as a wordy ad won’t get read. Find the right words and images – including animated GIFs ofr flash that allow short messages to rotate – to trigger action. Too much clutter adversely affects the performance of a banner and negatively impacts on a banner’s ability to brand. Concise ads are successful because they deliver a message or name that the viewer can remember.

2. Provide something interesting to viewers.

It is not necessarily true that people do not read ads. People only read what is interesting to them – and sometimes, it can be an ad. Making the case for targeted placements, your banners will only be successful if you seek out people receptive to your message. You banners will simply be part of the clutter to be ignored if you serve up your ads to viewers who considers your message irrelevant to them.

3. Give people a reason to click.

Viewers will only respond to a compelling proposition. Your banners must be attractive or interesting enough to be successful in generating even the slightest flicker of response. People react favourably to banners that provide them a chance to win something. A banner where they can get something for free or a special discount also gets high click rates. Develop your banner’s message around the most persuasive reason why people would want to go to your site, be it the information you provide, special offers and promotions, or products that can make their life much better.

4. Develop follow-through mechanisms.

Leading users who clicked on your banners to your home page is acceptable if your advertising goal is to develop branding for your site. However, if you offered a special promotion or solicit a specific action from the user, you must create follow-through mechanisms for these users. A special page explaining the promotion in detail, for example, provides visual or messaging clues about what to do next. In addition, having a special page for each of your banners can help you determine which creative is more effective in bringing in traffic or sales.

5. Always test your ads.

Before going full-blast in your campaign, you need to test your banners with a subset of your target audience. You should experiment with various banner designs to gauge the appeal of your promotional offers and the type of message that brings a high-interest customer. Most ad networks now allow advertisers to conduct a test run.

6. Consider using rich media.

Rich media banners, which include animation, sound and other special effects, can increase your response rate. These banners could facilitate e-commerce and may even lead to instant revenues. Some rich media banners have a built-in order area, expandable order forms, and even secure server technology to protect credit card transaction.  The drawback, however, is that rich media banners will cost more to produce and place; and they are not available on all web sites. Plus,  the banners can sometimes slow down web page loading times. If you have the resources, try incorporating rich media in a banner and test how it performs with standard banners.

Finally…Some Quick Design /Content Tips

• Banner Ads are 468 x 60 pixels in dimension. This is a standard size.
• Banner ads should be 15k or less in size. Otherwise they take too long to load.
• Display your website address on your banner. This way, if nothing else, the viewer sees your website.
• Always include your company name on the banner.
• Include just one main benefit or interest point on your banner. Something that would immediately draw an interested parties attention.
• Use fonts that are easily readable.
• Use colours and designs that are attractive but not gawdy. If you’re not sure, ask some friends what they think.
• Look at the ad and ask yourself if you would understand what this banner is trying to advertise. Don’t assume that people understand what you’re trying to sell. If after looking at it, you don’t understand what you’re selling, please redo the ad. Ask your friends to critique the ad for you.
• Make the best use of ad space. Let’s face it, 468×60 is not a lot of space. You have to get the best value for the space.
• Make a few ads and then test them out to see which ones perform better. Even though you feel you’ve made the best ad in the world, you might find better results with different ads. It happens all the time.

Do this Now ! Run a search on Google and find your Pay Per Click (PPC) ad. Click on it. Where does it bring you? Your home page? I hope not. If it does you should consider creating a specific landing page for your PPC ads. A landing page is the page you create with the primary goal of converting your PPC traffic into sales or enquiries. This page should encourage your potential customers (that you have already paid for!) to go exactly where you think they want to go.

Here are some tips to create a good landing page:

1) Focus! Focus! Focus!

The landing page should be about your product or service. No links to other sites, no advertisements, no waffle. When people arrive at your landing page, they should already be predisposed to buy (since you wrote such an excellent ad to get them here in the first place) and are trying to either find out more information about your product/service, or click the “Buy now” button.

2) Specialise your landing page

Use a different landing page for each group of keyphrases. If you sell Widgets and Wodgets, don’t use the same landing page for each. Create a new landing page for each product (or each group of products) and send the clients directly to the page they are interested in.

3) Give them information

If they are not yet sold on your product or service, then they are going to be looking for more detailed information when they arrive at your landing page. Give it to them. You have to convince them that you have the perfect product or service to solve their problem. If they run out of information before they make a commitment to buy, then you have lost them. Nobody will spend money until they are convinced that your product or service is the right choice for them. So prove it.

4) Tell the reader what you want them to do

Use calls-to-action. If you want them to buy your product, than tell them often how to do it (“Click here to buy”). If you want them to call you, post the number up with instructions (“Call us now at 1800-999-999″). Repeat it throughout the text, then again in big and bold at the end.

5) Use graphics

Use pictures to sell your product or service. Pictures of the product or pictures of satisfied customers sell. Use them – and use them often.

6) Run tests

Set up two (or more) landing pages to see which ones convert better. You can use Giigles Website Optimiser toolf for tjhis or set up two identical ads and send one to each landing page, then compare conversion rates for each page. Figure out why one converts better and try to improve the other one. Then, run more tests until you are completely satisfied with the results.

Set up your landing pages so that your potential customers arrive for a safe and controlled landing. If all goes well, they will step out of the plane with their credit cards already in hand – and their money almost in your pocket.