Try these 4 useful tips and optimize your website locally

Are you aware that ‘nearly 40% of all search queries have some sort of local intent’? And most of the people (as much as 70%) Google or Yahoo before consulting their local classifieds or yellow pages. With this blog post I would like to throw light on some really useful tips on how to optimize your website copy for local search (Google and Yahoo maps to be precise) -

• Know your place
  When I say ‘know your place’, I actually mean geography. You should know all the variations of names with which your work place is associated and use these names creatively in one form or the other in header or strong tags and at least once in title tags too. If you are selling pizzas in Denver, instead of writing just ‘yummy pizzas’ in h1 tag, you may want to use ‘the most yummy pizzas in Denver’, this might prove to be a longer tail, with higher conversion traffic. So make sure that you include all the landmarks and places of interest when you write your website copy. For geographical research Wikie can be surprisingly useful for you.
• Play with categories
  If you are running a restaurant, targeting broader keyword categories like restaurant and bar, it won’t be such a smart thing to do, instead – ‘Best ‘Mexican food’ restaurant in Denver’ is a longer tail with a broader category that is more likely to convert. You can have more pages on your website targeting keywords like ‘best ‘Chinese’ food at ’15th street’ instead of ‘best restaurant’.
• Local Business Directories
  This is extremely important for your local search, make sure that your website is present in the local directories like Google Local Business Center, BBC, Talking Phone book, SuperPages etc. If not all, at least Google Local Business Center.
• Web Analytics
  Use Web analytics to monitor your website and watch out closely for the keywords people are associating your website with and insert those bubbling keywords into your website copy.

You may also want to refer to this wonderful post on Google’s local search algorithm.

Posted in SEM | No Comments »

Your PPC campaign – Why is it more lucrative in the hands of professionals?

So many times, we come across people who are in a dilemma of whether they should handle a PPC campaign on their own or should they outsource it to some internet marketing agency and leave the job to the professionals. If you ask this question to me, I would say – Unless you are not an ‘Adwords Qualified Professional’, it’s better to outsource it to a specialized agency because of its sheer time and complexity factor. In a PPC campaign, stakes are high and you have to be really spontaneous and have to constantly track your ads to see what’s working and what’s not. PPC is not only about driving traffic to your website, but its about driving ‘qualified’ traffic to your website. Following are more reasons, why it’s advisable to count on professionals:

1. Click fraud: Even though Google, Yahoo! & MSN are doing a reasonably good job to detect click frauds so far, but unfortunately fraudulent clicks still effect almost all PPC campaigns. An online marketing agency can work with dedicated PPC professionals equipped with customized PPC tools and third party PPC solutions like click tracks to detect, report and get refunded for any kind of click fraud.
2. Qualiy Score: Quality Score is the basis for search engines to measure the quality and relevance of your ads. Quality score also determines your minimum CPC bid for Google and the search network. Quality score is proportional to your keyword’s click through rate (CTR) on Google, and the relevance of your Google ad, keyword, and yes, landing page too. Quality score directly effects your keywords minimum cost per click and its position in the search results. So if you are just an average internet marketer, you can have a hard time achieving and maintaining good quality score.
3. Keyword research is the main stay of any PPC campaign. Guess work can hurt you a lot. Only an online marketing firm with an in-depth understanding of SEO/SEM will find you the most profitable keywords which will bring you qualified traffic. It’s imoportant to differentiate between keywords that bring ‘only traffic’ and the keywords that bring ‘sales convertible traffic‘.
4. Experience: It’s not easy for a non-professional to understand and profitably implement the concepts of SEO, landing page relevancy and quality score to his PPC campaign. SEO/SEM companies do this every day and can quickly identify problem areas and take corrective measures instantly. And moreover, Google and Yahoo! update their protocols regularly. One has to stay updated all the time.
5. Time: PPC is not a one time implementation but rather an ongoing profitability process. Time is money, and PPC management can be a real time consuming task. Hiring professionals for your PPC requirements will definitely save your time and you will be able to concentrate more on other high ROI activities of your business.
6. PPC ideas tend to cross pollinate within (and sometimes even outside) an industry genre. If one thing works well in case of one company, there is a high probability that it will also work for the other related companies as well. So why not leverage on someone’s experience?

It is quite obvious that PPC is not an alternative to SEO; for real profitability both must go hand in hand. Running a PPC campaign requires a deep knowledge about Search Engines and as I mentioned above – time is money. You should outsource PPC to safer hands and utilize your time in other aspects of your online business.
PS: Please don’t take this blog post as a sales call, infact it is some thing that every smart entrepreneur should do if he understands the difference between traffic and qualified traffic. Generating qualified traffic requires real Internet expertise.

Posted in PPC | 2 Comments »

Let’s get it right: 11 most essential design principles

Looking back at the past RedAlkemi blog posts, I think we have talked enough about SEO/SEM and I feel obligated to deviate to some thing that excites me as much as SEO does – Website Design. I understand how frustrating it can be for a website designer to limit his creative ability to create a website from search engine point of view. And likewise, it can be a real nightmare for an SEO, to optimize a website that is poorly designed and is a member of ‘usability hall of shame’. So let’s talk about some most essential principles of website designing (& usability):

1. Precedence (Guiding the eye)
Precedence is one most important characteristic that a successful website should have (if a high bounce rate is not an issue for the website owner). I believe that it is in the hands of a designer, how he controls the eyeballs of the visitor on his website. Yes, it depends on the requirement of the website owner, how much weight he would like to give to a particular section of a website. The basic rule here is – first thing should come first – for example, In most cases, company logo (and not login window) is where the visitor should immediately see, as he opens a website so that he knows, which website he has arrived to. This just doesn’t stops here, as it is the duty of the designer to guide the visitor’s eye through a sequence of steps. For example:

Following design functions control the visitor’s eye balls:

• Position – where on the website the element is located?
• Color – If the color is bold or subtle?
• Contrast – Important function in Web 2.0 layouts
• Size – Bigger the object, higher is the precedence (unless every thing is big)
• Design Elements – Arrows, flipped sticker icons etc

2. Breathing Space
So many times I come across website designers, who think website designing is all about utilizing every square pixel of the screen area by filling it with maximum stuff. But I feel that, more vacant space you leave on the screen, easier it will be for you to divert the eyes of the users on the intended objects. To create space, you can compromise on vertical scrolling (not horizontal off course). Following are the important elements of spacing:

• Line spacing
  Remember that eyes are more comfortable reading text lines with medium line spacing. Too little and too much of line spacing can equally hamper the text readability and precedence as it may spill the visitor’s eyes. You can control the line spacing in CSS with ‘line-height’.
• Padding
  With few exceptions, the text should never touch surrounding elements like table borders, images etc.
• White Space
  White space is a technical term and when I say white space, it doesn’t necessarily has to be white in color. ‘White space’ refers to empty spaces on the screen. Expert designers use this white space to give a balance to the whole design lay out and ample white space makes the design look more elegant. To understand this art, open some fashion magazine and see how the publishers use white spaces to highlight the products in car and watch Ads.

3. Navigation
This is the design aspect closest to usability of a website, when the user gets lost on the website, wondering where to go? Make sure that this doesn’t happens to your visitor.

• Navigation: Buttons and other navigation items on the website should be easy to find, identify and understand.
• Orientation: ‘Top’ buttons, bread crumb navigation, back button, sub headings, sitemap and site search are some important elements of healthy orientation on a website.

4. Worst Case scenario:
Consider these factors in advance, so as to avoid end moment surprises (some real unpleasant ones )
You might pick a dazzling font for your copy, but is it available on the user’s computer, what if not? Your design looks amazing in 1100px, but is it creating horizontal scroll?
What happens when the user resizes the window? Did you forget to keep your design center aligned?

5. Typography
This is how you can control your body copy:

• Font choice : Make sure, you are using standard HTML fonts. These fonts can make your layout look elegant, retro, flashy, professional, festive etc.
• Font sizes: Even though small fonts look more sophisticated, they are hard to read. So use a readably big font size. Modern Web 2.0 layouts allow you to use big fonts without looking ugly.
• Spacing: I have already discussed this above.
• Line length: To understand line length, if you open up a newspaper, you will notice that text is presented in small lines and multiple columns. Avoid elongated sentence lines.
• Color: Avoid extra bright, too high or too low contrast colors
• Paragraphing: Stick to left aligned text.

6. Usability

• Adhere to standards: To avoid confusions, adhere to the web standards and do the expected. For example, don’t underline a letter, if you don’t want to link it; as most people tend to expect an underlined word to link to some other page. Doing otherwise can cause confusions.
• Action blue print: Make a list of all the tasks that your customer might want to perform on your website. Then look for ways to make these tasks easy for the visitors to perform in minimum steps in order of importance of each task.

7. Alignment
Alignment doesn’t necessarily mean that the design elements should be in a straight line, but it means every thing should be consistently placed on the page in a set pattern. Aligning will make your design look more ordered and digestible.

8. Clarity (sharpness)
Keep the design sharp – pixel by pixel.

• You may want to use ‘sharp’ text in photoshop.
• Ample contrast to keep the borders clearly defined.

9. Consistency
Consistency means, you must have a clear theme in your mind before starting the design, so that you can select colors, font, buttons, spacing, illustration, pictures etc. that compliment to the website theme. An inconsistency in the design will make it look unprofessional and low in quality. So make early decision and stick to them. Smart CSS will help you achieve this consistency. Even if your website design is bad, a consistent website design will still look better then an inconsistent website design.

10. Design Maintenance
Do the design elements cross each other too much? When you make a change in one ‘div’, do the adjacent ones collapse? Keep all the design elements separated from each other (as much as possible) as the designs with the elements related to each other are easy to build but at the same time are very hard to maintain.

11. Use CSS smartly
Use CSS as often as possible, specially in the case of large websites. If you are to use buttons at multiple places of all the pages on your website, you may want to make a button in CSS and attach it to every ‘DIV’ where you want to place that button. Yes, by doing this you compromise on flexibility of these buttons, but you save a lot of time.

Posted in Web Design, Web Usability | 4 Comments »