Yogi Land

One of the biggest measurements of a website’s success is the stickiness of its visitor base. Generally web masters would rather have 1,000 visitors who return regularly (they are “stuck to the site”) as opposed to 3,000 visitors who only visit once or twice. These days the web is massive, carving out a niche for your site and gaining a following within that niche is the key to success. There are many reasons why you should try to make your website as sticky as possible. Visitors who return regularly are more likely to purchase some of your products or content. If you have a membership site, then retaining your member base is critical for growing your income and long term success. Also, a faithful following will encourage viral promotion of your site. Search engine optimization can be a costly and time consuming task and your site’s listing can be hammered down by the powers that be (Google) in the blink of an eye. If you gain a faithful user base though, they will tell their friends and family about your site and encourage them to use it as well. Viral marketing is the cheapest and most effective type of marketing there is and making your site and content desirable is the only way to achieve this phenomenon. There are “five C’s” of stickiness to remember, and they are: Content Regardless of the site’s design, without good content, the visitor will not come back or stay at the site for more than a few minutes. “Content is King” is a cliché, but true. High quality content is far and away the most important factor in attracting people back to a Web site consistently, and keeping them there for more than a few minutes when they do visit. It is said, in fact, that content is what drives 75 percent of consumers to return to their favorite sites. In addition to your site being content rich, try to also keep it fresh. At least part of your site will be regularly updated, preferably at least once a month. This is why web sites which resemble online brochures fail. Delivering the same content in a blog, posted in installments, can be much more effective. This will encourage users to come back regularly, as they check in to see what new content you’ve added lately. This is stickiness in a nutshell. Community When a site attracts enough visitors with similar interests it has the potential to develop into a “community.” That can be very powerful for the site owner. Providing message forums, chat rooms, podcasts, user profiles, blogs, etc. are all tools to allow your visitors to interact with both you and each other. This also makes your site VERY sticky if you are able to develop a thriving community. Rather than visiting your site once a month people may begin to visit it multiple times a week. Having a thriving community can be viewed as developing a site which is constantly developing its own content. Rather than requiring you to spend hours developing content, you can instead monitor the postings on your site to ensure they retain the kind of atmosphere you want for your site. As time goes by you may also be able to appoint some of your more responsible members to monitoring positions to do this job for you as well. Communication Communication is equally important as content and community. Communication includes building and maintaining your list, reaching out to people on your list, and interacting with visitors to your site. Try to respond to any question, comments, or feedback you receive promptly. This builds relationships with your visitors and will keep them coming back. One of the best ways to reach out to customers is to offer quality, free information. This is basically a sample of what your site has to offer, and should always help address the questions your visitors came to your site for answers for. The very nature of the web stresses that you consider offering more free content to your customers than most other mediums do. You have too much competition to be stingy. One of the most effective means of providing content to customers and developing a list of potential customers at the same time is to offer a free guide to visitors who provide you with a name and email address. For example, if you run a site teaching real estate tips and tricks, after your visitors have seen your “foot in the door” content located on your “splash page,” offer them the first lesson of your course on real estate for free in exchange for their name and email address. You benefit from this by having names to attach to the IP addresses of your visitors. This provides you with more information about who is being drawn into your site. It is also important you use a quality auto-responder for this step, as communication is a critical part of your site and must be handled professionally. One last note on communication: Be sure to provide your name and contact information clearly throughout your site. It will frustrate and turn away visitors if they have a question or comment and cannot figure out how to reach you. By providing a name and place to reach you it also helps contribute to the last two “C’s…” Commerce and Consumer Confidence These are perhaps the two most important things that get overlooked in websites. First, effectively promote your site by using professional marketing and search engine optimization for the niche your site seeks to fill. Provide reliable, safe, and secure means for your customers to purchase your for-pay content. If your ordering method does not look safe, all your efforts working to sell your content to your visitors will be lost if they get to the order page and you look like an unprofessional, fly-by-night operator. Always use a secure ordering form. Offering a money back guarantee can be extremely helpful to reassure customers. Lastly, respect your customer’s privacy. Make it clear you will not sell their names, personal information, or email addresses. People hate spam and will be hesitant to identify themselves to you out of fear of having their information sold if you do not provide some kind of assurance against this. A clear and easy to locate privacy policy is necessary.

Search engine algorithms are shrouded in total secrecy. So what works in SEO and what does not is merely the result of an analysis of sites that make it to page #1. Some times the keywords show up sooner than expected, at times they do not. It's very difficult to measure the effectiveness of an SEO campaign because the time frame for results is prolonged. With the mushrooming of SEO companies and the vagueness of operations, finding the right company can be an issue. True, SEO is no science, but it can have a scientific approach. The results are not instantaneous like PPC but results should be visible after 3 months into a program. Okay… give or take a few months for the vagaries of Search Engines that like to alter their algorithms just when your site is all set to take off! The problem with SEO is that it is too vague a field. We can only guess what works and what does not. Broadly there are five factors that are said to do 70% of the work.

1. Well optimized code
2. Well Optimized Metatags
3. Header Tags, Alt tags
4. Keywords in the URL
5. Backlinks to the site

If your SEO company is smart enough to integrate all these together, chances are that by the fourth month your SERPs should be somewhere around rank 10-12 for moderately competitive keywords. Competitive keywords take much longer and the effort for increasing the positions in page 1 increases proportionally with every position. There are two ways in which you can check if your company is really working on your website. 1. Set up Google Alert on your company's name. Once an alert is set up, every time a directory picks up your link or a blog picks up your article or the company does a press release, Google will pick it up and deliver it into your mailbox. The larger the number of alerts the more your SEO company is working. 2. Use a tracking account. Google Analytics is free and is improving with feedback. Ask your SEO company to set up tracking in analytics and get your account id and password so that you can check occasionally. SEO is unfortunately a long drawn out process. How long should one wait before deciding that the SEO company is taking you for a ride? When you are six months into an SEO program and you face any of the following scenarios it's time to fire your SEO company.

Scenario #1: Six months into the campaign there is no improvement in search traffic.

Scenario #2: Your traffic has increased but you are not getting any conversions.

Scenario #3: You have not even made it to page 2 for your targeted keyword.

Scenario #4: The company's report shows a lot of increased links but there is hardly any boost in rank.

Scenario #5: Your keywords are stagnated where they were.

Scenario #1: Six months into the campaign there is no improvement in search traffic Why is it so? Maybe they are not working at all OR Maybe they are targeting all the wrong keywords. Very competitive keywords may bring in more traffic volume but they take longer (read upto 12-24 months) to optimize. To maximize your ROI, professional SEO companies choose a mix and match of low competition, moderate competition and high competition keywords. If your SEO company did not take this approach, it's time to fire them. How to Check: Insist upon adding Google Analytics (a free tool) to your site and visit it regularly. Scenario #2: Your traffic has increased but you are not getting conversions Maybe it's a genuine mistake which can be rectified OR Maybe you are getting a lot of spam traffic because the company has posted the site at improper places just to show stats of increased traffic. Believe me this happens quite a lot with unprofessional companies who want to gain SEO credibility. The unknowledgeable client gets taken in. How to Check: Visit analytics. Click on traffic sources. Check all the traffic types – Referral, search engine and direct. Check the type of sites the referral traffic is sending, check the type of keywords. If all of these are okay, then you need some serious website marketing not just SEO. Scenario #3: You have not even made it to page 2 for your targeted keyword. Maybe the targeted keywords are too competitive OR Maybe all the aspects of SEO are not being covered by your company. This is a tricky issue. If you are satisfied with your keyword movement over the months maybe just a push is needed. Otherwise you need to check what the company is doing. How to Check: Simply type your keyword in the search bar. Check page #1 for your URL. If it's not on page #1 it should be on page #2 after 6 months of the campaign for at least some of the keywords. It should show up. If it isn't there, call up the SEO company and demand an explanation. Scenario #4: The company's report shows a lot of increased links, but there is hardly any improvement in rank. Maybe the ranking will improve gradually OR Maybe the company is trying to impress upon you that it has increased your links. This is false reporting and not genuine SEO. In the long run these links will harm your site. Keep away from the company. How to Check: Occasionally, in the Google toolbar type the following to see the number of links to your website – links:www.domainname.com. Analyze the relevancy of the site linking back to your website. If the links are from spam sites, fire the company. Scenario #5: Your keywords are stagnated where they were. Suppose you were already on page #3 or page #2 for the keywords and approached a company to take you to page #1. But you haven't moved. Maybe the company's taking you for a ride OR there is no other reason. Just fire the company. They are showing no results. There may be other scenarios which have not been covered in this article. It's very difficult to know if the company is working hard enough to get you on page #1. Keeping constant contact with the company is a good idea. Ask for a monthly comparative report and track the improvement in links, traffic and keyword positions. Get an action plan of the month by the company. Track the action plan. You will see results soon enough!

Professional website developers know the importance of web design and the role it plays in making a website successful. Designing a successful website is no easy task, especially for someone who is new to the world of web development. With the help of web development applications many people can and do create decent websites. But decent in most cases is not good enough to make a site successful from a traffic or financial standpoint. There are five crucial components of web design that you must focus on in order to make a site valuable to its visitors and successful for you.

• SEO – Getting free traffic to your site.
• Usability – Ease of navigating around the site and finding desired information quickly.
• Aesthetics – Visual appeal.
• Content – Valid, up-to-date, relevant information.
• Graphics – Eye candy that relays relevant visual information to the visitor.

SEO

Before you ever lay down a byte of HTML code for a site, you have to know and understand at least the basics of SEO and how it fits into the design. SEO is the art of designing a site in a fashion that gives the site an advantage for obtaining free and abundant traffic. The number one aspect of SEO is selecting keywords relevant to your site. The keywords you select should be based on high usage, low competition and relevancy to your topic. Once you select keywords you can then begin the development of your site. Keep in mind keywords are a critical aspect of the design. The keywords you choose will be applied within the design in strategic fashion to benefit the flow of traffic to your site. To understand more on how to implement SEO you should read and learn more about this important subject. If you don't, your website success will be difficult to achieve.

Usability

Your website must be easy to navigate and designed in a way that makes it easy to find information. Visitors will not stay long if it takes more than one or two clicks to get the information they want or if it takes brain power to figure out how to get the information they want. One of the goals of your site design is to keep usability easy, and simple. To do this, apply the following three fundamentals of usability.

• Provide a site search tool. A visitor in a hurry can quickly find the info they desire then move on to the action they desire.
• Provide simple, intuitive and consistent site navigation. This provides visitors the tool they need to leisurely explore their way through your site.
• Provide logical and simple to follow content.

The message of a site should start off in a simple and basic fashion with well defined links pointing the way to more detailed information or explanation as needed. In the cases above, the goal is to make it easy for your visitor to find the information they want without frustration or difficulty. Doing this well will have a positive effect on increasing the return of your visitors.

Aesthetics

A website has to look clean, uncomplicated and strike a balance in layout that is pleasant to the visitor. Pleasing aesthetics come about when the colors of a site complement each other, the graphics blend and lend continuation of the theme and the layout brings unity and openness to the page. Often overlooked by novice designers is the color palette of the site. While you can select color in a willy-nilly fashion and still provide a visually appealing site, a better idea for color selection should be based on an understanding of the color wheel and proven color strategies. Many web designers often view a web page as an opportunity to blast a visitor with lots of information in hopes this will convince the visitor to take action. Usually this results in a quick exit due to the overwhelming visual effect and complicated look. A better approach is to provide less content and open space (referred to as white space) to allow visitors eyes to scan and explore with ease.

Content

An important feature of any website is the quality of the text content. Visitors come to a site expecting to find answers to their questions, solutions to their problems or for entertainment value. The content offered at your site must be well-written and without grammatical or spelling errors. It also has to be relevant to the theme of your site, with valid, up-to- date information for your visitors. Content is King!

Graphics

You can have a functional and usable website without graphic elements. However, if there are similar sites to yours that employ graphics, guess which site will get the most traffic. The necessary companions to any well-designed site are the images and illustrations that grace its pages. The images can't be any willy-nilly graphic that you might think is cool. Graphic imagery has to support your branding, and communicate the message you are trying to convey. Before you incorporate graphic elements into your site, take some time to look around the web. Notice what looks good and how elements are laid out. These same layouts techniques can be used as models for your site. The Internet is a highly competitive business arena. To be successful with a commercial website, you have to keep these five crucial web design elements in mind. Contrary to what many will tell you, it is rarely possible to have commercial success without the benefit of a professional website. This is not to say that you must hire a professional, however you must implement professional design elements to improve your chances for success.

From month to month I have the opportunity to present 4 different webinars on different topics related to Internet marketing to brand new online business owners. The reason I bring this up is because no matter what the topic I am presenting on, I usually get asked the same question by completely different random people. They are all wanting me to “look at their site” and give them a “quick, what do you think?”. These people are wanting to know if their site is ready to “go live” (although I never really understand why people ask that question) but for these people, and this post – I have come up with what I’d like to call “The 5 Minute SEO Site Audit Checklist”. If you have a brand new site, and haven’t done any kind of SEO before, this will be a great list of reminders that will set you off on the right foot.

URL canonicalization and 301 re-dirs

One of the first things I look for on any domain I am giving a health check on is the URL canonicalization. In My Opinion it does not matter if you pick proper URL canonicalization pointing to the www’s or non-www’s, but you need to pick one and stick to it. I personally always choose the www’s because more people (from my experience) tend to link to you with the full URL. So you need to get into your .htaccess file and make a few edits. Any variation of the homepage URL needs to be done this way too – for example you need to have the /index.php also re-direct to the main URL (however you have it set up) Bottom line here, you need to make sure all variations of your URL point to the same way you set it up. Any extension of your URL like:

• http://www.example.com/index.php
• http://www.example.com/index.htm
• http://www.example.com/default.html
• http://www.example.com/default.php
• http://www.example.com/anything (that goes to homepage)

All need to be pointed to the main – http://www.example.com (without any extensions). You also need to make sure that you don’t have any dev links that need to be 301-ed to their new addresses so you don’t have any bad or dead links on the site. You can handle all these changes via the .htaccess file. Here is a little more in depth look into 301 re-directs via a post I did on it a few months back. Here’s the code:

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

(Make sure your Apache installation has mod_rewrite enabled.) As long as your Apache installation has mod_rewrite enabled then you should be able to use this fix on almost any host.

Unique Title Tags and Meta Data

I will go to Google and run a site: command and see all of the pages that are indexed just to make sure that there are no duplicate content issues and that all pages seem to be individual and unique with their own title tags and meta data. If your site is not right – all results that come back will look exactly the same, and if the title and data that comes back is all the same – you have a problem!

Search Engine Friendly

Check to make sure the CMS you are using is search engine friendly. Are your URLs search engine friendly? Are you using keywords in the naming structure of your URLs or just automatically created jibberish by the builder? Are you able to include header tags? Alt Tags?

Has the site been submitted to Google Webmaster Central?

By submitting your site to Google you are able to get your whole site indexed properly on Google, and they are able to show you any errors your site may have. There are so many tools that are offered here that you need to become aware of, but for the sake of “The 5 Minute SEO Site Audit” I just want to make sure the site has been submitted.

Check for Duplicate Content

If you are selling products and are using a supplier with their descriptions and info, I am going to make sure there is no duplicate content issues. If you are using the same content that 1,000 other people are using, there might be a problem. I would always suggest making sure you do everything you can to make sure that you have no duplicate content of any kind on your site.

In Conclusion

Again, this is just a quick “What I would do” SEO Audit checklist of what I look for when “checking out” brand new sites. These are a few of the steps that I would recommend anyone new to Internet business and SEO should check out before really thinking they are ready to make money with their website. I know this info may seem basic to a lot of us that have been doing it “forever”, but you woul be surprised how many people still do the simple things wrong!

I'm gonna give away a Huge Targeted Website Traffic Secret the gurus don't want you to know! A secret to get increased website traffic for FREE! I could charge $47 for this secret if I wanted to… But I'm not. I'm gonna piss off a lot of website traffic gurus by giving you this secret for free. This one secret I'm about to share with you is better than most of the snake oil being peddled on the internet by the so called "website traffic gurus"… And the website traffic gurus are charging as much as $97 for their snake oil! So how do you increase targeted website traffic for free? Writing articles or having them ghost written for you. However there's a little more to it than just writing articles…you gotta know which keywords to write your articles around and which sites to submit them to… And I'm gonna tell you how… Read On… First thing you gotta do is find your keyword niche to base your article on…. I'll tell ya how I did it… My website is about "How To Make Money Online". So I went to wordtracker.com and used their free trial… I typed in my keyword "How To Make Money Online" and got 15 other related keywords along with each ones KEI (keyword effectiveness index). In a nutshell, look for the keywords near the top of the list. The higher the KEI, the more popular your keywords are, and the less competition they have. This means you have a great chance of getting to the top of page 1 on Google. The keyword niche I used was the one at the top of the list with the highest KEI, in my case "How To Make Money Legitimtely Online". I then wrote an article around the keyword phrase "How To Make Money Legitimtely Online". I know this is a mis-spell, this was done on purpose when I did my keyword research on wordtracker.com free trial. My article got listed 4 TIMES on the FIRST PAGE of Google in minutes!!! All I did was write one article around the keyword phrase "How To Make Money Legitimtely Online", posted it on goarticles.com, squidoo.com, and Digg.com. In 30 minutes my article was listed (and still is as of this writing) 4 TIMES on the FIRST PAGE of Google's generic content, not the sponsered links on the right side of Google's page where you have to pay, but Google's generic content in the middle of the page… And this did NOT cost me one red cent to get listed 4 times on Googles first page… AND I'm competing with 2500 other sites on Google! Read On For The Proof… Don't believe me, go to Google, type in the keyword "How To Make Money Legitimtely Online" (without the quotes and with the mis-spell), and you will see my article listed 4 times…under squidoo.com, goarticles.com, and http://digg.com/ These are 3 traffic sucking sites! So find your keyword niche phrase on wordtracker.com free trial, write an article around that keyword phrase, post your article on those 3 sites I mentioned above, and get ready for increased website traffic for FREE! Then repeat this process over and over and get massive payloads of increased website traffic for FREE!! To your Success!