Monthly Archives: February 2010

3 Quick Guides in Increasing Your Website Conversion

Posted on by
1

Every online marketers and webmasters know that traffic that doesn’t convert is dead. In an e-commerce website boosting the website conversion rate is vital. The actual website conversion rate is the ratio of the number of people who actually convert on the site versus the total number of visitors in the site for the same given period of time. Ideally, the higher your traffic the higher the conversion rate will be, since more people will be coming to the form, download page, purchase page, etc. However, there are instances that the large volume of traffic does not translate into conversion. So, here are 3 quick guides in boosting your website’s conversion rate.

Quick Guide 1: Group your target audience.

Identify who are your target audiences and create a page with layouts and contents that are suitable for the taste of the specified target audience. For example, you have both teen and professional audience, you can segment and create a page that would entice the teens and create another page dedicated for working professionals. Because, obviously, you’re teen visitors have different preferences and taste than the professionals.

This would make them feel special. It could help in getting there interested in how you can help them. By personalizing their page, you can speak to them and build a connection in order to get them to contact you.

Quick Guide 2: Offer fewer choices

Research in online shopping shows that people do not like TOO many choices. If they are given too many choices, they tend not make a choice at all. You might assume that your website layout is idiot-proof, but people who are new to your business might not feel the same.

The solution is to de-clutter your website. Do not provide too many options and too many buttons, which may cause confusion. Try to create the flow as simple as possible.

Quick Guide 2: Provide an tempting call for action

Entice your visitors. Capture their attention upon the first their glance of your website. Anyone who comes across on your website is important, some of them may not buy or fill out the form today but they might come back tomorrow or refer your site to someone they knew. It is very important and necessary to entice your website visitors, and you must do everything to get them to contact or leave their contact details for you.

Organic SEO vs. PPC Advertising: Which is better?

Posted on by
4

In online marketing, there are only two methods that get most attention. Those are the organic search engine optimization and the pay-per-click advertising. Search engine optimizers and online marketers have a long standing debate of which of the two is a better way to maximize the ROI. Ideally, both methods can be implemented to maximize your company’s exposure and drive more traffic to your site, but the financial constraints often get into the way to prevent you in taking advantage of both method. In case of budgetary constraints, it is advisable to focus on one method.

Here are the pros and cons of both methods:

PPC Advertising

The Pros:

  1. Quick setup and quick result – Once you have your ad set up, you can have the ad up and running in as little as 10 minutes. You don’t need programming skills or SEO skills in setting up the ads.
  2. Results are quantifiable and measurable – PPC ads are easy to track, you can tell who is looking and clicking at your ads. This makes it easier to get feedback and tailor your ads to the tastes of customers. Commonly, the advertisers provide tools you can use to monitor your ads.
  3. Less resources needed – In PPC, you don’t need to have a designer, a programmer or a writer to carry out the task. The only resources you need in utilizing PPC is your financial resources.

The Cons:

  1. Expensive – The PPC cost is quite expensive and steadily increasing. You can burn serious money through your advertising budget very quickly if you’re not careful. It is primarily a sort of gamble. A bidder who is ready to pay higher than what you are bidding at, will replace your keyword position. One needs to keep tracking the the bids regularly so that no one is able to replace your position.
  2. Prone to Click Frauds – PPC is a constant target of trigger happy clickers. With click frauds you are paying clicks which are not converted into sales or doesn’t do anything to your site.

Organic SEO

The Pros:

  1. Long-lasting ROI – The PPC advertising may produce result quickly than the organic SEO but it can give you results that last. When the budget runs out for a pay-per-click campaign, the results stops. With organic SEO, your optimized site and other changes made to your site can have an impact on your search results for months and years may be until the next change in a search engine’s algorithm, or possibly even beyond.
  2. Drives more traffic than PPC – According to studies conducted, SEO drives more 75% of all search traffic, while the PPC receives less than 20% of all search traffic
  3. Higher brand exposure and more awareness – When optimizing a website a great deal of the effort is on promoting the brand, product or services on social networks which results to more exposure and awareness to your brand.

    4. The Cons:

  4. Takes time to see the result – It is the greatest downside of organic SEO, the result is not immediate. It may take a while for your website to see any meaningful traffic and the time spent waiting for these strategies to take effect may impact heavily on it s profitability.
  5. Need some level of expertise – Implementing organic SEO campaign required some skills to become successful. SEO is a complicated undertaking and if you are a neophyte in this industry you might unintentionally be putting your website at risk.

As mentioned above, both method have its own pros and cons. Organic SEO may have some distinct advantages over the PPC advertising but there are scenarios that the PPC campaign are more fiscally and strategically appropriate. If you have to choose which method to implement, take time to research and look closely into your unique situation before you decide.

Generating Traffic with Article Writing

Posted on by
2

Traffic is lifeblood of any online business, without traffic your business is DEAD. No matter how sophisticated is your website or how wonderful the products or services you are offering, it is all for nothing unless you have a visitor that would view them. No traffic, no visitor. No visitor, no purchase. No purchase, no income. No income, no business. It is as simple as that. But you have to know that traffic are not created equal. There are what we called the high quality traffic and the low quality traffic. Low quality traffic such as guaranteed traffic, exit traffic, pop-up traffic, or pop-under traffic generally produces very low returns. Low quality traffic can also hurt your bounce rate. Meanwhile, the high quality traffic are the traffic that lingers on your site, they are good boosts to your conversion rate. And the question is, where you could get high quality traffic?

One of tested source of high quality traffic is article-writing and article submission. A well-written article can do wonders in driving traffic to your website. With article writing and submission, you will write articles related to the topic of the product or services you are offering, and then submit these articles to various article directories. The article directories then will publish your articles, and other webmasters and bloggers can publish your articles on their web sites and in their ezines and online newsletters. This could result to a snowball, which is really good for your website.
Do not forget to put a link back to your website when you are submitting or publishing articles. The links you place in your articles will serve as the gateway for the potential client. When an interested customer reads your article, they can click to your site through a link you will place at the end or within your article. By this method, the reader will be directed to your web site, which is the perfect way to promote your product.

If you could write at least 10 articles per week and submit it to several publications and article directories, you will not only increase your traffic but it will also help in your SEO effort to have higher search engine ranking. High search engine rank can also assure you of more traffic to your website. More traffic, more visitors. More visitors, more purchases. More purchase, more profit. It is as simple as that.

5 Factors That Influence Buying Decisions Online

Posted on by
1

In selling your product or services online is not much different than selling it on a brick-and-mortar store. That is because people who purchase product or services online are not really that different from those people who purchase offline. There are many factors that influences the buying decisions online; most of them are actually are uncontrollable. Here are top five factors that influence the buying decision of people who shop online.

  1. Security. One of the most important things to consider in ecommerce web design is the issue of security. Most of the consumers who use online for shopping are educated people. They have read up incidents on cybercrimes and very concern on cyber security matters. It is important to convince your website visitors that their information, both personal and financial, is handled with confidence and care. If you can assure your visitor that your site is safe, then you are one step closer in gaining a customer.
  2. Right attitude. Your attitude in approaching customer would greatly affect on how they react towards the product or services you are offering. In the case of online marketing, you can show positive attitude by answering questions promptly and politely. Do not be rude to customers who ask a lot of question but do not make purchase at all. Just because a person has not made a purchase in the past does not mean that she won’t make a purchase in the future. The saying “Customer is always right” might be a cliché but it is true. You can win a hesitant customer by using a positive approach towards them.
  3. Privacy. In addition to security, online consumers are concerned about privacy. Building trust in your customer takes time, but it could help to gain their trust faster if you assure your customer that you will guard their personal information with absolute care. Having a Privacy Policy page on your website is very essential. Privacy is very important to online shoppers, so if you are planning to gain their trust and confidence you should have comprehensive and clear privacy policy on your website
  4. Quality. The quality of the product or the services you offer is one of the major factors in the success of your online business. SEO and paid advertising can bring visitors to your site but you cannot force them to buy your product, if the product you’re offering doesn’t meet their standards. As they say, “you can the horse to water but you cannot force the horse to drink.” In order to get them to purchase online you have to ensure them that product or services you is of outmost quality and the money they will be spending will worth it.
  5. Appeal to emotion. This is one of the “uncontrollable” and “unexplainable” factors in buying influence. Lot of people buy for emotional reasons and defend their purchases logically. There are customers who buy in the spun of the moment because the product appeals to them in emotional level. If you could connect to customer in emotional level, then you win yourself a customer of a lifetime.

In conclusion, you have to remember that each person buy for a different reasons. Selling online doesn’t only involve technical stuffs but you have also considered the other intangible factors like emotion and trust.

SEO Contest 2010 from Claremont Design

Posted on by
110

Official and Final Result:

1. Zick Roman

2. Ronley

3. Wongsableng

4. Zick Roman

Result as of April 17, 12:00 noon Philippine Time

Wait for our email for information with regards to claiming your prizes. Thank you for the participation and watch out for the next SEO contest, I will announce it next week or the following week so be back!

Claremont Design, a professional web design consulting company, would like to invite all the bloggers and search engine specialists to join our newest search engine optimization (SEO) contest for the year 2010. Test your SEO skills. Learn and earn. Learn some advance SEO concepts and earn some extra cash in the process. Here are the details of the competition, please read the rules carefully:

Rules and Mechanics for the Claremont Design SEO Contest 2010:

  1. Start date is 13th of February 2010 (Saturday 12:00 noon Philippine Time).
  2. End date of the contest is 17th of April 2010 (Saturday 12:00 noon Philippine Time)
  3. On your blog (new or existing blogs will do), simply create an article about web design and rugs, but optimize it so that it becomes the top Google search result for the contest key phrase. (see key phrase below). The article should not contain or should not mention about it as a SEO competition.
  4. Unregistered entries and indented listings or results are not counted on the rankings.
  5. Your blog/s DOMAIN or SUB-DOMAIN used for the entries should not contain any part of the key phrase.
  6. The entries should have a visible link back to the listed sponsors below. Use the anchor text and URL specified below. Be creative in including the link as long it is visible on the first 250 words of the post/article entries. Here are the sponsors:
    • URL: http://claremontdesign.com   Anchor Text: Web Design
    • URL: http://www.thecarpetsrugs.com   Anchor Text: Rugs Portal
    • URL: http://www.isurftheweb.com   Anchor Text: Affordable Outsourcing Web Solutions
  7. There is NO limit on the number of entries/post you may make and submit but only articles posted on or after February 13, 2010 are valid and as long as the post contains the specified sponsored link on rule #6.
  8. To register:
    • Follow ClaremontDesign’s twitter account at

      http://twitter.com/claremontdesign

      (if you don’t have a twitter account, register here.) Future announcement of competitions, SEO or even web designs will be sent via twitter too so it is recommended that you follow us.

    • Post your twitter account and URL entry here with your name.
    • You can also send this information via claremontdesign @ gmail.com
    • Check your entries if it is registered in the valid entries page.
  9. Only registered entrants and valid entries are eligible to compete and win the prize.
  10. No pornography, no discrimination and no illegal behavior are permitted.
  11. The prizes for the said competition are as follows:

    1st – Prize = $300 (Need to Rank #1)

    2nd – Prize = $100 (Need to Rank #2)

    3rd – Prize = $50 (Need to Rank #3)

    4th – Prize = $50 (Need to Rank #4)

  12. Prizes will be sent via PAYPAL.
  13. Required links should be on the entry post all through out the competition and should not be removed. The organizer and the host of the competition have the rights to disqualify any participant if they find the links removed or tagged by the entrants as NOFOLLOW during the competition.

Note: To encourage us to conduct more of this competition, we advice that the entry posts should stay even after the contest. We are planning a regular contest like this every after each competition so please support us on this.

Keyphrase:

The final ranking will be checked using the following search query:

http://209.85.225.103/search?q=webthesurfi+rugs+webdesign&hl=en&num=100

** We have the right to amend these rules if we see fit to do so.

Web Design Tips in Reducing Load Time

Posted on by
Reply

One of the most critical aspects of web design is the consideration of web page load time. Load time is very essential in the success of every website, may it be a personal website, corporate website or an ecommerce site. Generally, people surf the internet to look for information, and they want it fast! If you cannot provide the information they needed within few seconds, most likely, they will hit the back button and move to another website, probably your competitors’ website. Which means a website owner lost another potential customer.

Sophisticated and dazzling website is useless if it takes forever to load. In essence, slow loading web sites turn off visitors which could be your potential customer. So, here are some tips in how to increase the load time of your website.

Trim down the Graphics

Avoid using heavy graphic. Graphic could surely liven your website but too much of it can hurt the performance of your website. Try to use fewer amounts of images while maintaining the look of the website design. If you have large images that are very important for the website, use section like “Gallery” to reduce web page load time.

Minimize the use animated GIF’s and flash. Yes, they are cute but they usually slow down the loading times so use sparingly. Wherever possible use very few animated gifs and flash files.

Optimize graphics. Optimize your graphics by using image editing software like Photoshop, GIMP or whatever editor you like. Appropriately resized and cropped images will greatly reduce the loading times of a page and at the same time maintaining their integrity.
Trim down the Codes

Optimize HTML files. Remove all unnecessary codes which usually happen when using an HTML generator, remove some extra or empty tags get inserted in the code such as breaking spaces, block quotes, unnecessary extra space, blank lines etc. Even if you manually coded your HTML files, check your website for empty and unnecessary HTML tags. Apply appropriate DOCTYPE and close all HTML markup elements. The browser will then have less work to do matching elements. Clean coding of a web page will not only reduce website load time but also increases your text-to-code ratio and search engine spiders do not have to spend time deciphering irrelevant stuff.

Compress JavaScript and CSS files. You can compress your CSS file by using shorthand external CSS. This can help make your website design code compact as well as clean and its proper usage helps reduce website loading time. You can do this by defining most common font styles, images etc. in one single external CSS, then all you have to do is insert the same tags repetitively on different pages by just calling the CSS. The other method is to compress the JavaScript and CSS files through the Minify Engine or by using a WordPress Plugin (if you are using WordPress Plaform) called WP Minify which actually grabs all your .js and .css files, sends them to the Minify Engine, compresses them and replaces the old codes with the new ones. It is safe to use but make sure to backup you file before replacing.

Other Stuffs

Avoid using multimedia files. If it’s not the “life and death” factor of your website avoid using multimedia files especially putting on background music. It’s actually irritating by the long run and it could hurt your website load time badly.

Use fewer redirects, Iframes, PhP and database queries can also help reduce website loading time. If you have a database driven website, it is faster and more secure to place your content on one server and your database on another. And if you can afford it, it is advisable to host on a high-end server with fast connectivity to decrease website loading time.

If you have implemented the suggestions above check your load time by using plugins such as Fasterfox in Firefox or with a free web page analyzer you can found on the internet.

The Power of Images in Web Design

Posted on by
Reply

I guess everyone is familiar with the line, “A picture paints a thousand words.” You can have a website filled with text and numbers, they might be very useful but your visitors can get bored on it within seconds if that’s all they could see. An image or a picture is a very powerful tool. In early civilization, kings and other nobles relied on paintings to show them what their intended looked like before signing a marriage contract, spouse unseen.

Over the years, this kind of system has been perfected with the use of advance technology. Nowadays, online marketers rely on digital image to showcase their product and the online shoppers rely on digital images to show them what an item looks like before committing to a purchase, merchandise unseen.

Several studies have shown that image posses a very powerful influence in the buying attitude. Thus, it establishes how important images are in web design. I have researched two major ways on how images can add value to your web design.

  1. Images appeals to the soul

    2. Images have a kind of unexplainable effect on the psychological side of each person. According to Dr. David Kirsh, Professor of Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California “illustrations are also used to help explain hard concepts … they save memory because they allow the viewer to look at all the facets of the situation at once rather than sequentially as in a paragraph of prose, they save the cognitive effort of visualization, and they allow for more ready understanding of the text, particularly when the correspondence between textual element and visual element is easy to map.”

    Several researches emphasized that there is a need for an image to explain technical items, and it is easier to retain facts if it is accompanied with images.

    On the book “The Psychology of Graphic Images: Seeing, Drawing Communicating” written by Manfredo Massironi, he states, “Because we can readily interpret them, drawings seem unproblematic. Because they show what we see, they appear faithful. Because they make us see what the person who drew them intended to show us, we consider them reliable.”

    To sum this up, image is an excellent way to promote your product. With the proper use of image, your website could look more credible and reliable.

  2. It can help to your SEO campaign

    3. Using images as part of SEO campaign is one of the most overlooked methods in SEO. With effective optimization image can drive considerable amount of traffic into your website. They can be used as bait because images provide site visitors instant visual stimulation.

    When using images, add keywords to the title field and add a keyword then brief description to the image description field. After uploading the image, a new screen appears with these fields above the text/picture box.

    Name your images properly. Make the image names of your files match what is actually represented in the file. Use dashes (-) between the words of images, rather than underscores (_). That way search engines pick it up better and will not class it as one word.

    Make use of the power of Alt attribute of the img tag. Search engine also gives importance to alt tag to determine the page rank of the website. In fact, Google indexes the text given in the ALT tags of images. The ALT attribute can also useful in conveying message to the user because it shows when the user pass over the image with his mouse.

    Images can be very helpful when used properly. It does not only enhance the aesthetic outlook of your website but it can also help in increasing your ranking. Not to mention, image can help you convince the potential customer to hit the BUY button.

Benefits of Website Validation

Posted on by
Reply

Even a perfectly running website needs to be validated. Before we discuss the reason why we need to validate a website, we will discuss first what it means to be validated? Website validation is process of writing and designing a website in a ‘cleanest’ possible way and testing it against industry standards.

I would like to quote an excerpt from W3C website on how they view the importance of validating the website. It states: “Validation is a process of checking your documents against a formal Standard, such as those published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for HTML and XML-derived Web document types. It serves a similar purpose to spell checking and proofreading for grammar and syntax, but is much more precise and reliable than any of those processes because it is dealing with precisely-specified machine languages, not with nebulously-defined human natural language.”

Here are some benefits you could get in validating your website.

1) Compatibility

When you fully validated your website, you don’t have to worry that your website will display unpredictably in different browsers. For instance, your website may work perfectly on Internet Explorer but it would have problem displaying on Mozilla Firefox and Safari because you “coded it differently.” The validation process makes the code uniform, which also means that you will not have an unprofessional and unpredictable looking website or run the risk of losing potential customer who does not use Internet Explorer.

2) Search Engine Optimization

A website with “clean” codes are more SEO friendly than the website with many “loose coding.” Search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing indexed “clean” pages faster than those who are not. The easier the search engines indexed your site the faster they can find your content. Another thing is, if your website is not validated it is more possible that search engines will place more emphasis on the wrong part of your code as a result your site could be missing out on being found for the most appropriate searches.

3) Accessibility

Validation could make your site readable. It would allow you to use many accessibility techniques such as the use of ALT tag on images.

4) Faster loading

Validating your website can help a lot in improving its load time which is very essential in creating good impression to your visitors. Commonly, conventional websites utilizes tables and use extensive amount of tags for formatting the page structures as well as the content. These could contribute in the slowing down of your load time.
However, the use of CSS separates the structure from the content and gives the browsers less code to trawl through before they can successfully render the page. Validation also aids the browser in displaying the site faster as there is no ‘loose coding’ for the browser to get tangled up in or waste time trying to ‘fix’.