Lead with a clear message

To provide a friendly online experience, it is critical for visitors to quickly locate the products, services, or capabilities they are looking for. Review the most prominently displayed text on your homepage and determine if the provided descriptions give readers a clear indication of what your company does.

Provide simple and intuitive navigation

Use clearly-labeled navigation links that are understandable to your site visitors, then apply them in a consistent manner throughout your website. To test, have a user unfamiliar with your business to interact with your website and note where points of confusion occur.

Offer compelling calls to action

Each page of your website should allow your visitors to answer the question “what now?” Once they learn about your products, services, and capabilities, they should be directed to an easy-to-find call to action, such as: “Request a Quote”, “Ask a Question”, “Download a White Paper”, “Find a Dealer”, etc.

Maximize your reach on search engines

Search engines match results to search requests by identifying relevant keywords, especially the ones in page titles and headings. If the words or phrases being searched for are not embedded in your product and service descriptions, your website will not be found. Google keyword tool provides valuable data for you to identify popular keywords your audience is searching for.

Measure and improve results

Web tracking tools measure website success and identify areas for improvement. Google Analytics provides detailed reports on your site traffic sources, keywords, conversion actions, and more. When measuring results, look beyond the quantity of traffic and focus on the quality of visits and conversions.

This article was first published on the BizTimes, April 30, 2012

If you are doing the same thing as what I did in the past, you’ve missed a lot.

Building up connections and creating your profile page on LinkedIn is just a start. The key is to maximize your returns by staying on top of it and marketing yourself and your company. Here are some food for thought I learned from my own adventure with LinkedIn. Hopefully, you would find them valuable too.

Layer Keywords in your Profile

Similar with Google, search on LinkedIn is based on keywords. After setting up your goals, make sure that you utilize highly relevant keywords in your headline and description as much as possible. Don’t worry about being repetitive. The more occurrences of the keywords, the higher chances you will be found by your target audience.

Your headline of your profile page is like a meta-description of a web page, aiming at delivering valuable information in a concise and specific manner. Think about the expertise and talents that make you stand out among your peers; then craft your headline describing what you do, and most importantly, what you CAN offer.

Freshness Matters: Share news and articles

Why Sharing?

Sharing is one of the best ways to keep yourself and your company active and visible on your network’s news feed, which plays a vital role in establishing long-term relationship and achieving thought leadership.

The last thing you want to happen is to let people gradually forget you without seeing you on their news feed for a while.

What to share?

• Any article, blog post and event you find interesting or rewarding for your connections. Mostly, I would only share information work-related, such as B2B online marketing strategies, manufacturing trends, SEO tips, web design real cases, etc.
• Market yourself by publicizing your own stories, articles and achievements to better present your personality, interest, and professional skills.
• Are you proud of your employer and what they do? If the answer is “Yes”, reshare the latest news accomplished by your company and be proud.

Optimize Your Company Page

1. Utilize multi-media elements to better engage your audience

LinkedIn allows users to present their companies’ stories in a more dynamic way. Check out the video below and learn how to add videos, headers and designated sales reps to each service and product offering’s page.

2. Create a New Audience Profile and Determine Your Message Receivers

Users are able to create a number of audience profiles and customize the offerings to be shown accordingly. Specifically, they can define different target audience groups by selecting a list of demographic variables, including company size, job function, industry, seniority and geography.

3. Share Updates on a Regular Basis

Sharing updates on a regular basis is a must if one of your goals is to achieve thought leadership in your industry. Staying active and productive reflects your capability of what you are really good at. Regarding to Top Floor’s LinkedIn page, I mainly share two kinds of information: the latest news about Top Floor and the recent trends/changes in online marketing industry.

4. Request Recommendations for Your Company

In B2B, referral still plays a big part in generating leads. Thus, building up recommendations becomes crucial in increasing an organization’s credibility and accountability. LinkedIn offers a platform for us to accumulate and publicize the recommendations we receive from our clients. I would suggest every sales rep and the account executive to mark this task on your calenders as one elements of your selling process.

Each service has a unique “request recommendation” button. Only the administrators are able to send out a request on behalf of the organization.

The second part of my blog series on LinkedIn will feature how to leverage the power of LinkedIn Groups.

Other Useful Resources:

• LinkedIn Tips: Tutorials on how to start on LinkedIn.
• LinkedIn Company Pages Tips: Manuals and educational presentations focusing on utilizing LinkedIn company pages
• LinkedIn Developers: for your to customize various kinds of LinkedIn Plugins on your websites or blogs

Some of you might wonder what a Client Services Representative does and what role they play in the website design, development, and search engine management process. It might be natural to think of us as middle-men. Just a roadblock in the communicative efforts between a specialist and the client. In fact, CSRs serve an invaluable role in the customer experience.

Photo provided by Getty Images

Jacks (and Jills) of All Trades

A Client Services Representative needs to be familiar with every part of a site. The programmer digs into the code behind a site, the designer focuses on the aesthetics of a site, and the SEM specialist will work on the searchability of a site.

The CSR must have a working knowledge of all of these aspects and make sure they cooperate in tandem to deliver an effective web strategy. In order for a specialist to do their job to the best of their ability, the CSR needs to be aware of what everyone is doing so there are no redundancies and so no one “undoes” another’s work.

To borrow the old metaphor, the CSR works to ensure that the left hand knows what the right is doing.

More than a Smiling Face

Top Floor takes pride in our client interaction. It is in our best interest for clients to be engaged and informed in the projects that we are undertaking, and transparency in our process is an absolute necessity. It is a CSR’s job to provide that transparency. If a client has a question about why we did something one way instead of the other, it is up to us to present a compelling case for our team’s actions. It is important that the customer knows that we have their best interests at heart.

Not only must we provide the client with answers, but we just as often need to relay a client’s desires to the specialists. In a sense, we act as a funnel. A client may have several wishes or may demand that something be done in a certain amount of time. The CSR works to set expectations for both the client and the specialist so that realistic goals are set and achieved.

The Sounding Boards

As a CSR, we are often asked for our feedback on projects. Because we are not immersed in every single project, we can provide a fresh set of eyes and a new perspective. This can be invaluable to someone who is intimately involved in a project because they might not recognize the usability issues that a “typical” user might experience.

Let me give you an example of when a fresh pair of eyes saved a client some potential headaches down the road. Our team was working on an aggressive schedule to complete a micro-site. The programmers worked day and night to complete it. One day, I was asked to use the search functions to locate a page within the site. After looking and looking, I finally realized that it had been staring me in the face the entire time. Problem was, it was located right next to an “Ask An Expert” link. I had assumed that the empty field had been set there to ask an expert a question, when in reality it was the site’s internal search function. I pointed this out to the programmer, and he agreed that if it had confused me then there was a good chance it would confuse other users as well. He was so involved in the project; he saw the two separate links for what they were. But a typical user scanning the site might not have differentiated the two functions. It took the naïveté of a CSR to point out the issue and prevent some potential confusions down the road.

A CSR wears many different hats in a typical day. Although they might not dive into the depths of a project, they must have an “above the clouds” view of everything that is happening. This affords us the ability to relay to a customer- who may or may not be heavily involved in their site- what our team is doing and why. Although some may see us as roadblocks in the communication process, a CSR in fact acts as a cooperative and knowledgeable facilitator.

If you’ve ever seen the movie Office Space, then you know about the scene where they beat up the fax machine because of an issue with it saying “PC Load Letter” over and over again.

Do you ever get the same feeling with slow loading websites? I can tell you that from a user’s perspective, it is very frustrating. Who wants to go to a website that takes years to load?

We’re in the age of the internet, which means that people can and will go to where they can get things faster – a slow loading website isn’t one of them.

Not every person immediately leaves a slow loading website, but more often than not this is the case, especially if every click after the homepage results in a page that takes forever to load. In this post I’ll break down a few benefits of having a faster website, as well as some tips to improve the speed of your site.

What is the Typical Website Speed?

The average website takes about 6 seconds to load. While it’s not the greatest time to have, it isn’t as bad as some. Ideally, you want your website to load under 3 seconds. Below highlights some of the benefits of having a speedier website.

What are the benefits of having a faster website?

It is commonly known that decreasing your website’s load speed can improve your website’s user experience and potentially bring in more revenue.  Saying that a faster website brings in more revenue is a lofty statement to some, but it is almost certain considering that higher ranking websites get favored in the search result pages (ie; more clicks), as well as improves the user experience so that website visitors don’t end up leaving your website and making their purchase somewhere else. So it is even more imperative that e-commerce sites address their website speed than an informational website.

How do search engines see slow loading websites?

Search engines are all about improving the search user’s experience, so naturally, the slower your website is, the worse the user experience it has. This is why search engines favor speedier websites. The speed of your site does have an impact on the way search engines choose to rank your website in the search results, in addition to a variety of other rankings factors.

What can I do to check and enhance the speed of my website?

There are also many free website performance tools and browser page speed extensions available that you can use to help you perform website speed analysis, and find the areas that are causing your website speed to suffer. They offer ways for you to optimize and fix these errors.

Some things website performance tools help you solve:

• Large image files: Tools available help you identify images that can be compressed
• Checks to make sure your website follows W3C standard code
• Areas where you can use HTTP compression to reduce the size of javascript files and other external scripts that may be too large.

Two great tools are Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools is a great tool that allows you to check the average load time of each page and the speed of your site over time. Google Analytics is also a great tool to your website load time statistics. They recently incorporated a new feature that allows you to check the speed of your website and produce website speed reports on this data.

While I haven’t had the chance to really implement and test website speed performance data on any specific website yet, I can say that it is something I’d like to try in the near future and know that it is an important part in improving a website visitor’s experience and search engine rankings.

If you’re looking to take a deeper dive into how Google incorporates site speed into search rankings, this site speed post by Matts Cutts gives a great explanation of website speed in relation to Google’s ranking algorithm, and information on website speed optimization tools. Google also has a great mini site dedicated to website speed related resources and tips.

If you have any questions or thoughts on how to improve the speed of your website, or any tips to share, please leave your thoughts in the comments section below.

Image credit:

Image: http://www.cosmicdiary.org

Twitter announced that they averaged over 1 billion tweets every five days in 2011, but certain topics were recorded as having the highest tweets per second ratio.  (The results were recorded at the peak of frequency).  And if you can guess the number one tweet of 2011, I owe you a Follow Friday shout out.

• #10. 6,049 tweets/second. The death of Steve Jobs
• #9. 6,303 tweets/second. Barcelona FC vs. Manchester United final game
• #8.  6,436 tweets/second. BET Music Awards
• #7.  6,939 tweets/second. Japanese New Year
• #6.  7,064 tweets/second. Steve Jobs steps down as the President of Apple
• #5.  7,166 tweets/second. Paraguay beats Brazil in the Women’s World Cup
• #4.  7,196 tweets/second. USA blows lead to Japan in the Women’s World Cup
• #3.  7,661 tweets/second. The execution of Troy Davis
• #2.  8,868 tweets/second. Beyoncé announced her pregnancy during her MTV Music Awards performance
• #1.  25,088 tweets/second. The broadcast of anime film “Castle in the Sky” on Japanese TV

I personally could have guessed only a few of these events, but it’s pretty interesting to see the international pull that Twitter had on the world in 2011.  Other notable events that just missed the cut were NBA Championship final game, earthquake in Japan, and the death of Osama Bin Laden.

Current Twitter 2012 Record Holder

What are you guesses for 2012?

The Broncos’ savior, Tim Tebow, is the current leader on Twitter for 2012. After his pass in overtime beat the Pittsburgh Steelers, Tebow’s name generated 9,420 tweets per second. Good for second place ever!

My guesses for other events that will pop up on 2012’s recap are the Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony, the U.S. Presidential Election results, the winner of Super Bowl XLVI, the announcement of the long-awaited iPhone 5, and the Mayan prediction of the end of the world (supposedly in December).

Leave a few comments letting us know your predictions.

In order to educate and engage your audience in a more interactive way, instead of depending on a press release it’s time for you to craft your own business stories within online communities. In this post, I’d like to share with you several useful online platforms to publicize different kinds of stories and information.

1. News Websites & Blogs

CNN iReport

CNN iReport is a citizen journalism platform that allows everyone to contribute stories, pictures and videos from their own towns and neighborhoods. I would suggest exploring CNN iReport in depth if you are talented in discovering newsworthy stories in your business or industry. You can participate either by creating a story as a response to the existing topic or initiating a new discussion:

Option 1: Join the existing discussion

• Click “Assignments” on the navigation bar on your top right hand.
• Scroll down and pick the “Assignment Group” that matches your interests.
• Click the “Add your story” button upon your desirable topics and start a conversation with your readers.

Option 2: Initiate a new discussion

• Click the “upload” on the navigation bar and fill out the fields in the form.
• Learn more writing tips on iReport.

BizSugar

BizSugar is a social bookmarking and networking site targeting small and medium-sized business owners and managers. You can submit, share and vote for your favorite business information links in the areas of marketing, finance, franchises, legal, management, news and technology. BizSugar accepts both blog posts and press releases.

• Create an account for your team and click “submit an article” on the top of the homepage.
• Include the unique urls of your blog posts and news articles for publishing. If readers are interested in “reading more”, they will be directed to the source, which also helps to generate more traffic for your website.

SocialMedia Today

Unlike CNN iReport and BizSugar, SocialMedia Today focuses exclusively on social media. Therefore, make sure that your blog falls into this category before you submit your entry.

One cool thing I found about SocialMedia Today is that it allows users to link their RSS feed of blogs with their accounts by clicking “Add a feed” under “Post on this site” on the navigation bar. In other words, whenever a new blog post is created on your own site, it will be automatically promoted on SocialMedia Today.

If you want to avoid sending SocialMedia Today irrelevant posts generated on your blog, you’ll want to manually upload single stories by clicking “Create a Post” under “Post on this site”.

2. Showcase Your Talented Teammates

Business Journals – People on the Move

An outstanding organization is composed of a group of great team members. So don’t hesitate to promote your teammates’ achievements with your peers. Operated by Business Journals, People on the Move provides every business an opportunity to share stories about their company’s talent, including new hires, promotions and professional awards. You are able to upload employee photos and social media profiles together with your press releases.

LinkedIn

In B2B, clients care very much about who they are or will be working with. So please remind your new employees to update their LinkedIn profile pages within or before the hiring month. This will allow them to automatically show up on the company’s profile page as new hires.

3. Events

Fox6 News

Fox6 News is a good place for you to advertise community events. For example, I was recently involved in promoting a blood drive event initiated by a local non-profit organization. Fox6 News is one of the tools I used for leveraging the visibility of the cause. So if you are working for non-profit organizations, restaurants, hotels or galleries, please spread the word about your contribution to the community through Fox6 News.

• Locate the “Events” tab on the navigation bar and then click “Add an Event”
• Take a few minutes to fill out the events description form

Feel free to contact Chris Patterson at Chris.Patterson@fox6now.com or 414-586-2164 if you have any questions.

LinkedIn

• By adding events on LinkedIn, click the tab “more” on the top of your profile and click “Events”.
• Tip: Don’t forget to share the event and make sure it’s delivered to your target groups and individuals.You might ask, “What if people miss your news feed or what if your potential leads are not on your LinkedIn network right now?” Don’t worry. You can share the event any time and send it out as a message to your target audience. For those who haven’t connected with you on LinkedIn, just simply add their email addresses. However, for “post to groups”, you can only add the groups that you are already following.

SocialMedia Today

Events posted on SocialMedia Today should be about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging, Youtube, etc. Don’t forget to double check the relevance of your event before pushing it to live.

B2B Magazine

B2B Magazine offers three different levels to promote your events: bronze (free), silver ($25) and gold ($50). If you want to link the event back to the source with a brief description, bronze sponsorship is probably not the right option for you, since it only allows you to add the name, location and the time of the events.

Tips

• Plan ahead, especially for time sensitive events and news.
• Only pick the tools that would reach your target audience.
• The press release is still crucial for PR. Never underestimate the power of an outstanding press release.

While taking a deep dive into the analytics for the client and comparing the traffic year over year, we noticed a large decrease in traffic.  The decrease was about 38% in overall visits.  For nearly all of our clients, this is the opposite case; so this was a cause for concern.  In order to deduce what the culprit was, we need to look at the usual suspects.

Determining The Root Cause

Since we spend A LOT of time in Google Analytics and other web analytics solutions every day, we have developed a quick checklist to help figure out what might be causing this decrease.  The first item to look at is to determine the exact date that the decrease started on.  To do this, we take a larger view of the data.  As seen in the chart below, it is quite clear when this happened.

Now that we know when the decline took place, we can check our time logs to see if we did any work around that time and up to one month prior.  After we looked through that and found that there was no work done on our end to the site, we need to go back to Google Analytics to further analyze where and what might be causing the issue.

Slicing And Dicing

The next step in the process is slicing the data into segments and seeing if those segments are affected to the same degree as the others.  The first slice to take a look at is how the traffic changed around that date for Search, Referral, and Direct traffic.  In this case, looking at those slices we see that Direct is not affected, but both Referral and Search are.  It is important to note that, in this example, the Direct traffic is quite small in comparison to Search and Referral traffic.

Since both Referral and Search traffic are affected to the same degree, then this tends to mean that it is not caused by a loss in rankings on the search engines.  To confirm this one can check the rankings on for their major keywords.  I did not go that far to deduce the problem since I noticed that not only was traffic down for referrals, but also for search traffic that came from branded terms.

However, the above alone was not enough to answer all my questions.  I decided to compare the date before and after the drop in traffic.  As seen in the chart below, a lot of red numbers, but we knew this before.  However, what we didn’t know before is that the bounce rate has shot up.  There was in increase of 37.66%.  This is rather interesting, since if it was just a pure drop in traffic and using the law of averages, there should not be a significant change in the bounce rate.

Use The Source

Now that we know it is not a decrease in rankings and the numbers are not diving, it is time to check the simplest things first. The first thing to check is to make sure all of the tracking code is on all of the pages. The easiest way to do this is to go to the website and take a look at the source code. I proceeded to look at the pages and noticed that the site was taking an extremely long time to load. In order for you to look at the source, you need the entire page loaded. I poked around a few more pages and noticed that it was the same case on the other pages.

To Confirm A Hunch

There are two basic things that can cause tracking to not work properly.  The first is that it is not installed, the second is that it does not load.  Since the page was taking so long to load, this may be the issue and would account for all of the issues that we are seeing in Google Analytics.  However, I needed to confirm my hunch.  To confirm my hunch, I took a look at trusty Google Webmaster Tools.  They have a handy tool in their labs section which tracks your sites loading time.  Below is the resulting chart.

WOW, I think my hunch is confirmed.  I have never seen such a huge increase in the average time of loading a website.  On an interesting side note, Google does use page speed as a factor in your rankings.  But since our did not change much, it appears to have little effect.

Finding the Gas Pedal

Now that we have our problem figured out it is now time to fix it and get back to normal numbers.  There are several tools out there to find what is causing the the site to take forever to load.  The two tools I use are FireFox plugins, PageSpeed from Google and Yslow from Yahoo. They are both great at finding out what needs to be optimized for all things related to page loading speeds. The report below is from running a Yslow report.

The one highlighted in orange is the piece of code that is causing all of the issues. The second column with the numbers are the response codes generated from the server when the request was made: 200 means it is okay, 404 means the file was not found, -1 means unknown, the server didn’t respond.

This basically means that the website was waiting (up to 40 seconds) for a response to load that code before it moved on to load the rest of the website. Since this particular website has the older version of Google Analytics, it is located at the bottom of the page and is after the offending line of code. That line of code has been removed and Google Analytics will start reporting accurate numbers immediately.

In Summary

While your Google Analytics may be telling you that the sky is falling, you absolutely want to make sure that it is the case before you go building that bunker you always wanted.  In this case, the numbers are not accurately reflecting the true visits on the site.  Since it took so long to load a page, users were not sticking around long enough for the tracking code to even load and register a visit.

How to Find Content Ideas using Google Analytics

Next, go to the right side of the screen and look for Date Range.  To change this date, click in the date field and select the appropriate length of time.  I prefer to use at least one year of data; however, if your site is visited a lot, you may only several months of data.

Now you’re ready to search for content ideas.  Go to the Advanced Filter, which is located at the bottom of the page, and enter a word that is commonly used as part of question, such as “Why”, “What”, “How”, “When” or “Where” (to search for all of these at once, use the pipe symbol. For example, “why|what|how|when|where”). Select the “containing” option and hit the “Go” button.

Looking at just this one query, I’ve quickly developed a number of topics associated with my primary area of interest – Search Engine Marketing, including Why PPC Campaigns Fail, Why to Track PPC Goals and Why Keyword Rank is Important for SEO.

A Note about Seasonal Trends

If you work in an industry that is significantly impacted by seasonal trends, you may want to consider the timing of the date range that you select. For instance, if you’re looking for topics around Thanksgiving, you may want to only look at queries between October 15 and November 30.

Gauging Level of Interest in Ideas for Content

In addition to generating quick ideas, Google Analytics provides information based on actual search queries so you know there is interest in the topics.  As you get more comfortable with the keyword data, you can start to expand the words you use in your filter such as “versus” or “types”, which I have used successfully to find topic ideas like PPC versus SEO and Benefits of different types of online marketing.

Hope this helps your content development efforts.  Now, enjoy the rest of your coffee.

Google Hiding Some Referral Information from Logged-In Users

Recently Google decided to protect the privacy of users by hiding the search term they used to find your site. This would only affect users who were logged into their Google Account when they conducted their search. In Google Analytics, these types of searches now show up as “(not provided)”:

You'll be seeing a lot of "(not provided)" in Analytics

For anyone else (those not logged into Google), you can still see the search phrase they used to find your site.

Google claims it was an effort to strengthen the privacy of their users, however many have speculated that it’s nothing more than another attempt to increase their bottom line. That speculation has a lot to do with the fact that their advertisers – those who use Google Adwords to place ads on Google’s sites – will continue to see logged-in users’ search terms in their reporting. So basically, Google’s not ok with releasing private information when the recipients of that information don’t pay – but perfectly ok with it if the recipients pay them nice monthly sums.

How will this impact my business?

If you’re like us and you rely on website tracking software like Google Analytics to help guide you toward targeting keywords that help your bottom line, then this will certainly have an impact. If you don’t pay attention to the keywords your site’s visitors are using to find you then don’t worry about it.

So just how much of an impact will this have? Well, that of course depends on (1) how many of your site’s visitors are logged into their Google Account when they search on Google and find your site and (2) whether you’re an Adwords user. If you’re an Adwords user you’ll continue to see search terms from logged-in users within your Adwords interface. If you don’t run Pay-Per-Click campaigns you might want to begin monitoring the keyword “(not included)” within your keyword reports to see how much it’s impacting your reporting.

I’ve done cursory checks in our Google Analytics account for some of our clients and have found that in general the amount of keyword searches this impacts has been somewhere around 1% (SEOmoz and Search Engine Land have both reported around 2%). Obviously as the amount of people with Google Accounts continues to grow – and with the growing popularity of Google+ – this may present itself as increasingly problematic. But for now, try to relax. And remember that there are likely millions of companies like yours who are dealing with the same thing.