Search Engine Optimization Virtuo.Ca

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Bernard Charlebois
VP, Market Development
Virtuo.ca CMS Technologies

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Virtuo.ca CMS Technologies Inc.
2662 Innes Road, Ottawa, Ontario, K1B 4Z5
(613) 590-1111 – www.virtuo.ca

Table of Contents

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

2. A brief history of search engines

3. White hat vs black hat techniques

4. The factors that affect your web site’s ranking

5. Building a site that is search engine friendly

6. Knowing and understanding your target audience.

7. Identifying the right keywords and phrases.

8. Introduction to pay per click campaigns

9. The importance of visitor statistics and web analytics.

10.Other methods of increasing traffic to your web site.

11. How to keep visitors once they find you.

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1. Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume and quality of
traffic to your websites from search engines via natural or organic search results.

Search engines index millions of web sites and yours can be buried deep within those
results if it is not optimized properly. Building a web site or adjusting an existing one
so that it comes up on the first pages is what this seminar is about.

Over 70 % of consumers use a search engine to find the product or service they
need. To be found by these individuals, your site must first be found by search
engines and second, your site must have a high ranking.

If they can’t find you you’re losing business opportunities to your competitors.

2. A brief history of search engines

The Early Beginnings of the Internet and the World Wide Web

In 1957, after the U.S.S.R. launched Sputnik (the first artificial earth satellite), the
United States created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) as a part of
the Department of Defense. Its purpose was to establish U.S. leadership in science
and technology applicable to the military.

Part of ARPA's work was to prepare a plan for the United States to maintain control
over its missiles and bombers after a nuclear attack. Through this work the ARPANET
— a.k.a. the Internet — was born. The first ARPANET connections were made in
1969 and in October 1972 ARPANET went 'public.'

Almost 20 years after the creation of the Internet, the World Wide Web was born to
allow the public exchange of information on a global basis. It was built on the
backbone of the Internet.

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Archie, Veronica, and Jughead

The very first tool used for searching on the Internet was called "Archie". (The
name stands for "archives" without the "v", not the kid from the comics). It was
created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal. The
program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public
anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creating a searchable database of
filenames.

While Archie indexed computer files, "Gopher" indexed plain text documents.
Gopher was created in 1991 by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota. (The
program was named after the school’s mascot). Because these were text files,
most of the Gopher sites became Web sites after the creation of the World Wide
Web.

Two other programs, "Veronica" and "Jughead," searched the files stored in
Gopher index systems. Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to
Computerized Archives) provided a keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in
the entire Gopher listings. Jughead (Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy
Excavation And Display) was a tool for obtaining menu information from various
Gopher servers.

I,Robot

In 1993, MIT student Matthew Gray created what is considered the first robot,
called World Wide Web Wanderer. It was initially used for counting Web servers to
measure the size of the Web. The Wanderer ran monthly from 1993 to 1995.
Later, it was used to obtain URLs, forming the first database of Web sites called
Wandex.

According to The Web Robots FAQ, "A robot is a program that automatically
traverses the Web's hypertext structure by retrieving a document, and recursively
retrieving all documents that are referenced. Web robots are sometimes referred
to as web wanderers, web crawlers, or spiders. These names are a bit misleading
as they give the impression the software itself moves between sites like a virus;
this not the case, a robot simply visits sites by requesting documents from them."

Initially, the robots created a bit of controversy as they used large amounts of
bandwidth, sometimes causing the servers to crash. The newer robots have been
tweaked and are now used for building most search engine indexes.

In 1993, Martijn Koster created ALIWEB (Archie-Like Indexing of the Web).
ALIWEB allowed users to submit their own pages to be indexed. According to
Koster, "ALIWEB was a search engine based on automated meta-data collection,
for the Web."

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Enter the Accountants

Eventually, as it seemed that the Web might be profitable, investors started to get
involved and search engines became big business.

Excite was introduced in 1993 by six Stanford University students. It used
statistical analysis of word relationships to aid in the search process. Within a
year, Excite was incorporated and went online in December 1995. Today it's a part
of the AskJeeves company.

EINet Galaxy (Galaxy) was established in 1994 as part of the MCC Research
Consortium at the University of Texas, in Austin. It was eventually purchased from
the University and, after being transferred through several companies, is a
separate corporation today. It was created as a directory, containing Gopher and
telnet search features in addition to its Web search feature.

Jerry Yang and David Filo created Yahoo in 1994. It started out as a listing of
their favorite Web sites. What made it different was that each entry, in addition to
the URL, also had a description of the page. Within a year the two received
funding and Yahoo, the corporation, was created.

Later in 1994, WebCrawler was introduced. It was the first full-text search
engine on the Internet; the entire text of each page was indexed for the first time.

Lycos introduced relevance retrieval, prefix matching, and word proximity in
1994. It was a large search engine, indexing over 60 million documents in 1996;
the largest of any search engine at the time. Like many of the other search
engines, Lycos was created in a university atmosphere at Carnegie Mellon
University by Dr. Michael Mauldin.

Infoseek went online in 1995. It didn't really bring anything new to the search
engine scene. It is now owned by the Walt Disney Internet Group and the domain
forwards to Go.com.

Alta Vista also began in 1995. It was the first search engine to allow natural
language inquires and advanced searching techniques. It also provides a
multimedia search for photos, music, and videos.

Inktomi started in 1996 at UC Berkeley. In June of 1999 Inktomi introduced a
directory search engine powered by "concept induction" technology. "Concept
induction," according to the company, "takes the experience of human analysis
and applies the same habits to a computerized analysis of links, usage, and other
patterns to determine which sites are most popular and the most productive."
Inktomi was purchased by Yahoo in 2003.

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AskJeeves and Northern Light were both launched in 1997.

Google was launched in 1997 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page as part of a
research project at Stanford University. It uses inbound links to rank sites.

In 1998 MSN Search Open Directory were also started. The Open
and the
Directory, according to its Web site, "is the largest, most comprehensive
human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast,
global community of volunteer editors." It seeks to become the "definitive catalog
of the Web." The entire directory is maintained by human input.

3. White hat vs black hat techniques

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

Hidden Text
o Using white text on a white background
o Including text behind an image
o Using CSS to hide text
o Setting the font size to 0

Hidden links are links that are intended to be crawled by Googlebot, but are
unreadable to humans because:

• The link consists of hidden text (for example, the text color and
background color are identical).
• CSS has been used to make tiny hyperlinks, as little as one pixel high.
• The link is hidden in a small character - for example, a hyphen in the
middle of a paragraph.

• Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.

Cloaking

Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and
search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site
to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.

Some examples of cloaking include:

• Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of
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images or Flash to users.
• Serving different content to search engines than to users.

Sneaky Javascript redirects

When Googlebot indexes a page containing Javascript, it will index that page but it
cannot follow or index any links hidden in the Javascript itself. Use of Javascript is an
entirely legitimate web practice. However, use of Javascript with the intent to
deceive search engines is not.

• Don't send automated queries to Google.

Automated queries

Google's Terms of Service do not allow the sending of automated queries of any sort
to its system without express permission in advance from Google. Sending
automated queries absorbs resources and includes using any software (such as
WebPosition Gold™) to send automated queries to Google to determine how a
website or webpage ranks in Google search results for various queries.

• Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.

Keyword stuffing

"Keyword stuffing" refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an
attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in Google's search results. Filling pages with
keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site's ranking.
Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately
and in context.

• Don't create multiple pages, sub domains, or domains with substantially
duplicate content.

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Duplicate content

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across
domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.
Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content
could include:

• Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages
targeted at mobile devices
• Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
• Printer-only versions of web pages

However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an
attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive
practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees
substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results.

• Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.

• Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie
cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original
content.

Doorway pages

Doorway pages are pages specifically made for search engines. Doorway pages
contain many links - often several hundred - that are of little to no use to the visitor,
and do not contain valuable content. HTML sitemaps are a valuable resource for your
visitors, but ensure that these pages of links are easy for your visitors to navigate. If
you have a number of links to include, consider organizing them into categories or
into multiple pages. But in doing so, ensure that they are intended for visitors to
navigate the sections of your site, and not simply for search engines.

• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds
value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to
visit your site first.

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4. The factors that affect your web site’s ranking

List of Best and Worst practices for designing a high traffic website

Here is a checklist of the factors that affect your rankings with Google, MSN, Yahoo!
and the other search engines. The list contains positive, negative and neutral factors
because all of them exist. Most of the factors in the checklist apply mainly to Google
and partially to MSN, Yahoo! and all the other search engines of lesser importance.

Keywords

1 Keywords in This is one of the most important places to have a +3
<title> tag keyword because what is written inside the
<title> tag shows in search results as your page
title. The title tag must be short (6 or 7 words at
most) and the keyword must be near the
beginning.

2 Keywords in URL Keywords in URLs help a lot - e.g. - +3
http://domainname.com/seo-
services.html, where “SEO services” is the
keyword phrase you attempt to rank well for. But
if you don't have the keywords in other parts of
the document, don't rely on having them in the
URL.

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3 Keyword density Another very important factor you need to +3
in document text check. 3-7 % for major keywords is best, 1-2
for minor. Keyword density of over 10% is
suspicious and looks more like keyword stuffing,
than a naturally written text.

4 Keywords in Also very important, especially for the anchor +3
anchor text
text of inbound links, because if you have
the keyword in the anchor text in a link from
another site, this is regarded as getting a vote
from this site not only about your site in general,
but about the keyword in particular.

5 Keywords in One more place where keywords count a lot. But +3
headings (<H1>, beware that your page has actual text about the
<H2>, etc. tags) particular keyword.

6 Keywords in the Also counts, though not as much as anchor text, +2
beginning of a title tag or headings. However, have in mind that
document the beginning of a document does not necessarily
mean the first paragraph – for instance if you use
tables, the first paragraph of text might be in the
second half of the table.

7 Keywords in Spiders don't read images but they do read their +2
<alt> tags textual descriptions in the <alt> tag, so if you
have images on your page, fill in the <alt> tag
with some keywords about them.

8 Keywords in Less and less important, especially for Google. +1
metatags Yahoo! and MSN still rely on them, so if you are
optimizing for Yahoo! or MSN, fill these tags
properly. In any case, filling these tags properly
will not hurt, so do it.

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9 Keyword Keyword proximity measures how close in the text +1
proximity the keywords are. It is best if they are
immediately one after the other (e.g. “dog food”),
with no other words between them. For instance,
if you have “dog” in the first paragraph and “food”
in the third paragraph, this also counts but not as
much as having the phrase “dog food” without
any other words in between. Keyword proximity is
applicable for keyword phrases that consist of 2 or
more words.

10 Keyword phrases In addition to keywords, you can optimize for +1
keyword phrases that consist of several words –
e.g. “SEO services”. It is best when the keyword
phrases you optimize for are popular ones, so you
can get a lot of exact matches of the search string
but sometimes it makes sense to optimize for 2 or
3 separate keywords (“SEO” and “services”) than
for one phrase that might occasionally get an
exact match.

11 Secondary Optimizing for secondary keywords can be a gold +1
keywords mine because when everybody else is optimizing
for the most popular keywords, there will be less
competition (and probably more hits) for pages
that are optimized for the minor words. For
instance, “real estate new jersey” might have
thousand times less hits than “real estate” only
but if you are operating in New Jersey, you will
get less but considerably better targeted traffic.

12 Keyword For English this is not so much of a factor because +1
stemming words that stem from the same root (e.g. dog,
dogs, doggy, etc.) are considered related and if
you have “dog” on your page, you will get hits for
“dogs” and “doggy” as well, but for other
languages keywords stemming could be an issue
because different words that stem from the same
root are considered as not related and you might
need to optimize for all of them.

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13 Synonyms Optimizing for synonyms of the target keywords, +1
in addition to the main keywords. This is good for
sites in English, for which search engines are
smart enough to use synonyms as well, when
ranking sites but for many other languages
synonyms are not taken into account, when
calculating rankings and relevancy.

14 Keyword Spelling errors are very frequent and if you know 0
Mistypes that your target keywords have popular
misspellings or alternative spellings (i.e.
Christmas and Xmas), you might be tempted to
optimize for them. Yes, this might get you some
more traffic but having spelling mistakes on your
site does not make a good impression, so you'd
better not do it, or do it only in the metatags.

15 Keyword dilution When you are optimizing for an excessive amount -2
of keywords, especially unrelated ones, this will
affect the performance of all your keywords and
even the major ones will be lost (diluted) in the
text.

16 Keyword stuffing Any artificially inflated keyword density (10% and -3
over) is keyword stuffing and you risk getting
banned from search engines.

Links - internal, inbound, outbound

17 Anchor text of As discussed in the Keywords section, this is one +3
inbound links of the most important factors for good rankings.
It is best if you have a keyword in the anchor text
but even if you don't, it is still OK.

18 Origin of inbound Besides the anchor text, it is important if the site +3
links that links to you is a reputable one or not.
Generally sites with greater Google PR are
considered reputable.

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19 Links from similar Having links from similar sites is very, very useful. +3
sites It indicates that the competition is voting for you
and you are popular within your topical
community.

20 Links from .edu These links are precious because .edu and .gov +3
and .gov sites sites are more reputable than .com. .biz, .info,
etc. domains. Additionally, such links are hard to
obtain.

21 Number of Generally the more, the better. But the reputation +3
backlinks of the sites that link to you is more important
than their number. Also important is their anchor
text, is there a keyword in it, how old are they,
etc.

22 Anchor text of This also matters, though not as much as the +2
internal links anchor text of inbound links.

23 Around-the- The text that is immediately before and after the +2
anchor text anchor text also matters because it further
indicates the relevance of the link – i.e. if the link
is artificial or it naturally flows in the text.

24 Age of inbound The older, the better. Getting many new links in a +2
links short time suggests buying them.

25 Links from Great, though it strongly depends on which +2
directories directories. Being listed in DMOZ, Yahoo Directory
and similar directories is a great boost for your
ranking but having tons of links from PR0
directories is useless and it can even be regarded
as link spamming, if you have hundreds or
thousands of such links.

26 Number of The fewer, the better for you because this way +1
outgoing links on your link looks more important.
the page that
links to you

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27 Named anchors Named anchors (the target place of internal links) +1
are useful for internal navigation but are also
useful for SEO because you stress additionally
that a particular page, paragraph or text is
important. In the code, named anchors look like
this: <A href= “#dogs”>Read about dogs</A>
and “#dogs” is the named anchor.

28 IP address of Google denies that they discriminate against +1
inbound link links that come from the same IP address or C
class of addresses, so for Google the IP address
can be considered neutral to the weight of
inbound links. However, MSN and Yahoo! may
discard links from the same IPs or IP classes, so it
is always better to get links from different IPs.

29 Inbound links This does not affect you in any way, provided that 0
from link farms the links are not reciprocal. The idea is that it is
and other beyond your control to define what a link farm
suspicious sites links to, so you don't get penalized when such
sites link to you because this is not your fault but
in any case you'd better stay away from link
farms and similar suspicious sites.

30 Many outgoing Google does not like pages that consists mainly of -1
links links, so you'd better keep them under 100 per
page. Having many outgoing links does not get
you any benefits in terms of ranking and could
even make your situation worse.

31 Excessive linking, It is bad for your rankings, when you have many -1
link spamming links to/from the same sites (even if it is not a
cross- linking scheme or links to bad neighbors)
because it suggests link buying or at least
spamming. In the best case only some of the links
are taken into account for SEO rankings.

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32 Outbound links to Unlike inbound links from link farms and other -3
link farms and suspicious sites, outbound links to bad
other suspicious
sites
neighbors can drown you. You need
periodically to check the status of the sites you
link to because sometimes good sites become bad
neighbors and vice versa.

33 Cross-linking Cross-linking occurs when site A links to site B, -3
site B links to site C and site C links back to site
A. This is the simplest example but more complex
schemes are possible. Cross-linking looks like
disguised reciprocal link trading and is penalized.

34 Single pixel links when you have a link that is a pixel or so wide it -3
is invisible for humans, so nobody will click on it
and it is obvious that this link is an attempt to
manipulate search engines.

Metatags

35 <Description> Metatags are becoming less and less important +1
metatag but if there are metatags that still matter, these
are the <description> and <keywords> ones. Use
the <Description> metatag to write the
description of your site. Besides the fact that
metatags still rock on MSN and Yahoo!, the
<Description> metatag has one more advantage
– it sometimes pops in the description of your site
in search results.

36 <Keywords> The <Keywords> metatag also matters, though +1
metatag as all metatags it gets almost no attention from
Google and some attention from MSN and Yahoo!
Keep the metatag reasonably long – 10 to 20
keywords at most. Don't stuff the <Keywords>
tag with keywords that you don't have on the
page, this is bad for your rankings.

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37 <Language> If your site is language-specific, don't leave this +1
metatag tag empty. Search engines have more
sophisticated ways of determining the language of
a page than relying on the <language>metatag
but they still consider it.

38 <Refresh> The <Refresh> metatag is one way to redirect -1
metatag visitors from your site to another. Only do it if you
have recently migrated your site to a new domain
and you need to temporarily redirect visitors.
When used for a long time, the <refresh>
metatag is regarded as unethical practice and this
can hurt your ratings. In any case, redirecting
through 301 is much better.

Content

39 Unique content Having more content (relevant content, which is +3
different from the content on other sites both in
wording and topics) is a real boost for your site's
rankings.

40 Frequency of Frequent changes are favored. It is great when +3
content change you constantly add new content but it is not so
great when you only make small updates to
existing content.

41 Keywords font When a keyword in the document text is in a +2
size larger font size in comparison to other on-page
text, this makes it more noticeable, so therefore it
is more important than the rest of the text. The
same applies to headings (<h1>, <h2>, etc.),
which generally are in larger font size than the
rest of the text.

42 Keywords Bold and italic are another way to emphasize +2
formatting important words and phrases. However, use bold,
italic and larger font sizes within reason because
otherwise you might achieve just the opposite
effect.

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43 Age of document Recent documents (or at least regularly updated +2
ones) are favored.

44 File size Generally long pages are not favored, or at least +1
you can achieve better rankings if you have 3
short rather than 1 long page on a given topic, so
split long pages into multiple smaller ones.

45 Content From a marketing point of view content -2
separation separation (based on IP, browser type, etc.)
might be great but for SEO it is bad because when
you have one URL and differing content, search
engines get confused what the actual content of
the page is.

46 Poor coding and Search engines say that they do not want poorly -2
design designed and coded sites, though there are hardly
sites that are banned because of messy code or
ugly images but when the design and/or coding of
a site is poor, the site might not be indexable at
all, so in this sense poor code and design can
harm you a lot.

47 Illegal Content Using other people's copyrighted content without -3
their permission or using content that promotes
legal violations can get you kicked out of search
engines.

48 Invisible text This is a black hat SEO practice and when spiders -3
discover that you have text specially for them but
not for humans, don't be surprised by the penalty.

49 Cloaking Cloaking is another illegal technique, which -3
partially involves content separation because
spiders see one page (highly-optimized, of
course), and everybody else is presented with
another version of the same page.

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50 Doorway pages Creating pages that aim to trick spiders that your -3
site is a highly-relevant one when it is not, is
another way to get the kick from search engines.

51 Duplicate content When you have the same content on several -3
pages on the site, this will not make your site look
larger because the duplicate content penalty
kicks in. To a lesser degree duplicate content
applies to pages that reside on other sites but
obviously these cases are not always banned –
i.e. article directories or mirror sites do exist and
prosper.

Visual Extras and SEO

52 JavaScript If used wisely, it will not hurt. But if your main 0
content is displayed through JavaScript, this
makes it more difficult for spiders to follow and if
JavaScript code is a mess and spiders can't follow
it, this will definitely hurt your ratings.

53 Images in text Having a text-only site is so boring but having 0
many images and no text is a SEO sin. Always
provide in the <alt> tag a meaningful description
of an image but don't stuff it with keywords or
irrelevant information.

54 Podcasts and Podcasts and videos are becoming more and more 0
videos popular but as with all non-textual goodies,
search engines can't read them, so if you don't
have the tapescript of the podcast or the video, it
is as if the podcast or movie is not there because
it will not be indexed by search engines.

55 Images instead Using images instead of text links is bad, -1
of text links especially when you don't fill in the <alt> tag. But
even if you fill in the <alt> tag, it is not the same
as having a bold, underlined, 16-pt. link, so use
images for navigation only if this is really vital for
the graphic layout of your site.

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56 Frames Frames are very, very bad for SEO. Avoid using -2
them unless really necessary.

57 Flash Spiders don't index the content of Flash movies, -2
so if you use Flash on your site, don't forget to
give it an alternative textual description.

58 A Flash home Fortunately this epidemic disease seems to have -3
page come to an end. Having a Flash home page (and
sometimes whole sections of your site) and no
HTML version, is a SEO suicide.

Domains, URLs, Web Mastery

59 Keyword-rich A very important factor, especially for Yahoo! and +3
MSN.
URLs and
filenames

60 Site Accessibility Another fundamental issue, which is often +3
neglected. If the site (or separate pages) is
inaccessible because of broken links, 404 errors,
password-protected areas and other similar
reasons, then the site simply can't be indexed.

61 Sitemap It is great to have a complete and up-to-date +2
sitemap, spiders love it, no matter if it is a plain
old HTML sitemap or the special Google sitemap
format.

62 Site size Spiders love large sites, so generally it is the +2
bigger, the better. However, big sites become
user-unfriendly and difficult to navigate, so
sometimes it makes sense to separate a big site
into a couple of smaller ones. On the other hand,
there are hardly sites that are penalized because
they are 10,000+ pages, so don't split your size in
pieces only because it is getting larger and larger.

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63 Site age Similarly to wine, older sites are respected +2
more. The idea is that an old, established site is
more trustworthy (they have been around and are
here to stay) than a new site that has just popped
up and might soon disappear.

64 Site theme It is not only keywords in URLs and on page that +2
matter. The site theme is even more important for
good ranking because when the site fits into one
theme, this boosts the rankings of all its pages
that are related to this theme.

65 File Location on File location is important and files that are located +1
Site in the root directory or near it tend to rank better
than files that are buried 5 or more levels below.

66 Domains versus Having a separate domain is better – i.e. instead +1
subdomains, of having blablabla.blogspot.com, register a
separate domains separate blablabla.com domain.

67 Top-level Not all TLDs are equal. There are TLDs that are +1
domains (TLDs) better than others. For instance, the most popular
TLD – .com – is much better than .ws, .biz, or
.info domains but (all equal) nothing beats an old
.edu or .org domain.

68 Hyphens in URLs Hyphens between the words in an URL increase +1
readability and help with SEO rankings. This
applies both to hyphens in domain names and in
the rest of the URL.

69 URL length Generally doesn't matter but if it is a very long 0
URL-s, this starts to look spammy, so avoid
having more than 10 words in the URL (3 or 4 for
the domain name itself and 6 or 7 for the rest of
address is acceptable).

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70 IP address Could matter only for shared hosting or when a 0
site is hosted with a free hosting provider, when
the IP or the whole C-class of IP addresses is
blacklisted due to spamming or other illegal
practices.

71 Adsense will Adsense is not related in any way to SEO ranking. 0
boost your Google will definitely not give you a ranking bonus
ranking because of hosting Adsense ads. Adsense might
boost your income but this has nothing to do with
your search rankings.

72 Adwords will Similarly to Adsense, Adwords has nothing to do 0
boost your with your search rankings. Adwords will bring
ranking more traffic to your site but this will not affect
your rankings in whatsoever way.

73 Hosting Hosting downtime is directly related to -1
downtime accessibility because if a site is frequently down, it
can't be indexed. But in practice this is a factor
only if your hosting provider is really unreliable
and has less than 97-98% uptime.

74 Dynamic URLs Spiders prefer static URLs, though you will see -1
many dynamic pages on top positions. Long
dynamic URLs (over 100 characters) are really
bad and in any case you'd better use a tool to
rewrite dynamic URLs in something more
human- and SEO-friendly.

75 Session IDs This is even worse than dynamic URLs. Don't use -2
session IDs for information that you'd like to be
indexed by spiders.

76 Bans in robots.txt If indexing of a considerable portion of the site is -2
banned, this is likely to affect the nonbanned part
as well because spiders will come less frequently
to a “noindex” site.

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77 Redirects (301 When not applied properly, redirects can hurt a -3
and 302) lot – the target page might not open, or worse – a
redirect can be regarded as a black hat technique,
when the visitor is immediately taken to a
different page.

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5. Building a site that is search engine friendly

Webmaster Guidelines

Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if
you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you
to pay very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines," which outline some of the
illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index
or otherwise penalized. If a site has been penalized, it may no longer show up in
results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites.

Design and content guidelines

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be
reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of
your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to
break the site map into separate pages.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and
accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure
that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or
links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
• Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and
accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character),
be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as
static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them
few.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Technical guidelines

• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search
engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as
JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from
seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have
trouble crawling your site.
• Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that
track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking
individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different.
Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots
may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the
same page.

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• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This
feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has
changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you
bandwidth and overhead.
• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers
which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your
site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots
when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you're
using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google
webmaster tools.
• If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the
system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl your
site.
• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-
generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search
engines.

Quality guidelines

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or
manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading
practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-
known websites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive
technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who
spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much
better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who
spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

If you believe that another site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please
report that site at
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport. Google
prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so they attempt
to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports they receive are used
to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.

Quality guidelines - basic principles

• Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or
present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is
commonly referred to as "cloaking."
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of
thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a
website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help
my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
• Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking
or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad
neighbourhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely
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by those links.
• Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings,
etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of
Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as
WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

6. Knowing and understanding your target audience.

Why do you need to know? Because there will always be other businesses competing
with you, advertising the same or similar products and hoping to attract the same
potential customers. Knowing who your customers are means knowing the right
things to say to get them to buy from you, not someone else. It also means not
spending time and money talking to the ‘wrong’ sort of people, who won’t ever be
interested in what you have to offer.

You need to identify the different types of customers you have and those you want,
then you can ‘tailor’ your message to meet their different needs. If they’re young
rather than elderly, if they’re wealthy professionals working in the city or people
working at home, you’ll talk to them differently and by different means.

The more you can find out about your customers the better. Look at where they live.
If a lot of your customers come from a particular place, there’s a high chance you
have other potential customers in the same area. Maybe you can focus your efforts
right there and simply drop a leaflet in their letterboxes.

No business has enough money to get their message out to everyone. You need to
decide what types of customers are likely to make you the most money, think about
where to find them, then work out the best ways to reach them and get them to
come to you.

Why do your customers buy from you?

Another important factor to consider in marketing your business is to understand
why your customers buy from you. It may be something obvious like location or
service, or it may be something unexpected.

Rather than thinking about just selling things, it’s better to think about what you’re
helping people to buy.

First you need to understand your business and ‘know who you are.’

Ask yourself some basic questions...

• Q What do you sell? How many or how much? It can help if you make a list.
• Q What’s the one main thing that distinguishes you from your competitors,
the one thing that people associate only with your business that will draw
people to you?
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• Q How is your product different or better than your competitors’ products?
In terms of quality, features, reliability, guarantees, price, what locations you
cover or anything else you can think of.

• Q Think about how your product helps your customers – what does it do
for them? A haircut for example is more than that; a good cut leaves the
customer feeling better about themselves than when they came in.

HOW WELL DO YOU UNDERSTAND YOUR BUSINESS?

• Q Do you know which are your best selling products?
• Q How easy is it for people to find a substitute for your product, or simply
not buy it at all?
• Q Each year, think about the appeal of your products – is it time to update
features or prices or anything else to keep buyers interested? Don’t make
changes just for change’s sake – any improvements must give your
customers better value.
• Q Look at last year’s sales. Are some products selling more, or less, than
a year ago? Adapt and change to suit.
• Q Do you have products that aren’t selling because your customers don’t
know you offer them?
• Q Can you list every product or service you sell and how much money
each makes as a percentage of your total sales?

LOOK AT YOUR COMPETITION

Who are your direct competitors – the ones you’re losing business to?

What are their strengths and weaknesses and how could you win some of their
customers? Don’t aim too high. Think about the businesses you’re losing customers
to right now – not those you might like to be up against in the future.

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7. Identifying the right keywords and phrases.

Brainstorming

The first step you need to take is to simply sit down and write down keywords. Write
everything. Do not discard any idea that comes into your mind. You will brush up
that extensive list later on. Consult your old web site (if there is one) and even some
documentation from the sales department. Consult your internal search logs (the
logs on your server) to track where your visitors came from and if possible, extract
more keyword combinations. Essentially, you will find out what you are missing.
Even if you're not sure about a certain keyword, that it will prove relevant for your
purpose, write it down anyway. It may lead you to something more closely related.

If you feel that you have "the writer's block", have a brainstorming session. The
main purpose of this session is to make you and the other participants think outside
the box. Interact with people, ask for their opinion and get their feedback. You can
get invaluable ideas and suggestions from a multitude of sources, such as your
colleagues, clients, or friends. Remember to always think like a customer. This
is a rule of thumb in marketing. Remain focused on the prospective customers and
try to understand how they think.

Keep in mind that searchers often mistype words when searching the Internet. Try to
think of the most common spelling mistakes for your keywords and include them in
your list. Don't neglect those words that are written preferentially with a hyphen or
without it, or those that are written with or without spaces between them. Add them
to your list.

Another thing that you have to pay attention to is the language that the targeted
audience uses. Take jargon into account, and make use of it if you consider
necessary.

At the end, begin brushing up your list. Remove any words that, even if they
describe your products / services perfectly, are simply too common and aren't
searched for too often. Work on your list until you get a number of keywords that
you consider the closest match to what you are looking for.

There are some basic rules that you need to follow when choosing keywords in order
to receive relevant traffic on your web site:

• Don't use single words. Phrases are better than words.
• Be relevant. Make sure that the description of your web site reflects what you
have to offer.
• Be a mind reader. Try to anticipate your prospective visitors' needs and meet
them.

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• Be specific. Choose keywords with a narrower focus to face less competition.
• Localize your keywords: make use of your geographical location, but avoid
getting too specific. Also, be aware of the differences between words in
different locations (e.g. elevator (US) - lift (UK), sweater (US) - jumper
(UK)). Perform your optimization process accordingly to get the best results.
• Choose a primary keyword for which to optimize your web page, and some
secondary keywords that can be helpful in increasing the number of your
potential visitors who use them in their search.
• Use the available keyword research tools. They can be of great help, but don't
neglect your own abilities.
• Test your final list on Google (home page). It's time consuming, but it's a
must. Otherwise you will end up using keywords that have very little chance
of ranking at least reasonably well in search engines.
• Make sure you use 3-4 different (but related) keywords on each of the pages
of your web site. This approach has been proven to be quite successful.
• Pay attention to your keyword placement. The best places in the HTML layer
are title tags, header tags, ALT tags, anchor texts, bold/italic tag content,
URLs, meta-tags and comments.
• Don't overlook misspellings of your selected keywords. Add them to your list.
• Review and rewrite your site to include the keywords you have selected.
• Use an internal site search function if you have a large site. Your visitors will
navigate and find the info they're looking for much easier. You can also see
exactly the terms they're searching on.
• Check keyword density (how many times a keyword is used on a page divided
by the number of words on that page). Theoretically, the higher it is, the
better, but this could turn against you. You could risk getting penalties form
search engines.
• Target highly searched terms that have as little competition as possible.
Nevertheless, if you happen to find a keyword with little competition, don't
include it on your web site just for this reason alone.
• Focus on the conversion rate: the percentage of Internet users that perform
searches using the keywords that you have selected and convert into buyers
(of goods or services).

Finally, make sure that you have seen this process through, and that you haven't
overlooked any of the steps and procedures that are recommended for SEO. And
don't forget that less traffic with more sales is always better than more traffic with
fewer sales.

To "brainstorm" something means that you're going to dedicate every part of your
thought resources to a particular situation or problem. Brainstorming as part of the
keyword researching process is important because it helps you come up with
keywords and phrases to use in your content and site structure.

So, the first thing you'll want to do is to sit down and write every single imaginable

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word that someone might use in a search engine to find your site. For example, if
you are constructing a site on beaded jewellery, you might come up with the
following:

• Beads
• Beaded jewellery
• Bead crafts
• Bead projects

However, not every person who is looking for “beaded jewellery” will come up with
these particular terms. Therefore, you need to brainstorm for any and all keywords
and phrases that people might use, such as:

• Handmade jewellery
• One of a kind jewellery
• Unique bead art
• Custom necklaces
• Special occasions (this could include birthdays, anniversaries, Mother’s Day,
etc.)
• Handmade
• Handcrafted
• bead gifts
• birthstone bracelets
• unique bead art
• glass bead
• beadwork
• necklaces
• earrings
• crafted anklets

8. Introduction to pay per click campaigns

Pay Per Click Advertising - What Is It?

Pay-per-click advertising (purchasing sponsored links on search engine results
pages) is often pitched as a stop-gap measure while waiting for a search engine
optimization campaign to take effect. But I would argue that pay-per-click
advertising (PPC) can be an integral, ongoing part of any search engine optimization
(SEO) campaign.

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Benefits of a Pay Per Click Advertising Program

• Speed: PPC listings can be launched very quickly. Unlike organic SEO,
there’s no need to wait for the search engines’ spiders to perform a deep
crawl of your site.
• Reach: PPC provides additional traffic to your site. It is particularly effective
for highly competitive search phrases where it may be extremely difficult to
get a top 10 organic listing. You can save your SEO effort for more fruitful
targets and use PPC to get on that top results page.
• ROI (return on investment): PPC can be extensively tracked. Statistics like
Cost-per-conversion are quite valuable for comparing your campaign ROI
against other marketing tactics. Furthermore, this data is reported to you
accurately and quickly.
• Experimentation: When researching potential search phrases, you will
likely find some that are a good match for your website. But typically there
are others that are intriguing but questionable. Do you want to risk optimizing
your site for marginal terms, only to find that the conversion rates for these
visitors are dismal and the resulting leads are unlikely to be customers? PPC
campaigns provide a low-risk test bed for keywords, enabling you to
determine if a full site optimization campaign is worthwhile.

What's the catch in a pay per click advertising campaign?

The relative drawbacks of PPC are cost and longevity. Some PPC keywords are highly
competitive (and therefore costly). And unlike SEO efforts which can yield free traffic
for years, PPC traffic will last only as long as you continue to pay for it.

Tips for a Successful Pay Per Click Advertising Campaign

Have a well-defined keyword strategy. This starts with a rigorous keyword
analysis. If you are unsure of how to do this, or lacking access to database
tools, you may want to consult a professional. Your keyword strategy is where
you’ll decide which keywords to optimize for and which to bid for with PPC.

Launch with one platform first. While you may want your PPC ads to get
maximum exposure, I recommend launching with one PPC provider initially. There
is some administrative overhead that goes with each PPC system, particularly
when disallowed ads are factored in. With some PPC providers, it’s not uncommon
to have more than 25% of your ads rejected, requiring multiple revisions.

Test, test, test Once you’ve rolled out a batch of PPC ads, monitor progress for
about a month. By then you should have a good idea of which keywords are
working and which aren’t. You should also have a good idea of what
creative/landing page combinations are earning the best conversion rates. This is
your opportunity to test whether those questionable keywords are worthy of an
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SEO effort.

Extend the campaign. Armed with performance info, you can now roll out your
campaign to other PPC providers. The PPC ad creative may not be directly
applicable because of different character count limitations, but you’ll have a good
idea of what to do with more or less words. You can also stagger implementation
of each PPC provider, using campaign insights to further refine your approach.

Pay Per Click Advertising Programs

Here are some good pay per click programs you might want to check into:

• Google Adwords:the most popular one out there because of it's ease of
use and high return rate.
• Yahoo Search Marketing: sponsored search, content match, and more.
• Ask Jeeves Sponsored Listings: different plans for different needs, all
laid out in an easy to understand format.
• MSN Paid Search Advertising and options for paid listings: at the
time of this writing just getting started, but definitely one to watch.
• Pandia's Guide to Pay Per Click Search Engines: Excellent round up
of links to PPC programs, management tools, and more.

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9. The importance of visitor statistics and web analytics.

Why do you need statistics?

1. To track popular site entry points

Without statistics you would have no way of knowing where visitors are entering
your site. Visitors will not always enter through your home page because you will
be indexed for pages deeper in your site.

By knowing where visitors enter, you can devise monetization
strategies based on popular entry points. You may need an opt-in form on a
popular page so visitors can join your mailing list, you may need an advertisement
on that page. Whatever the case may be, it is vital that you know all of your sites
most popular entry points.

2. Track where visitors are coming from

There is no way to gauge your SEO success if you don’t know where
your visitors are coming from. You wouldn’t know whether you are
gaining visitors from Google, Yahoo or MSN or any of your link
partners. You wouldn’t know who is linking to you at all. This is no way to run a
serious online business. If you are serious then you need stats. Knowing where
your visitors come from is called your referrers and can be easily accessed in your
servers referrer logs.

3. Track the keywords that visitors use to find your site

You should also be keeping a record of the keywords that your visitors are using to
find your site. These are keywords that you may not find in your favorite keyword
research tool. Keep a log of all of these keywords as they may indicate new
content that needs to be added to your site. These keywords can be found in your
servers referrer logs.

4. Find out where visitors are navigating within your site

It is very important to know where visitors are going within the
navigation of your site. What is your most popular entry point? Where do visitors
navigate within your site? What is the most popular area of your site? A good
statistics program can shed light on all of this. You will rank better if the search
engines see that visitors navigate to more than one page on your site. The more
the better.

5. Find out how long visitors are staying on your site.

To the search engines, a good indicator of quality content is how long a visitor
stays on your site. A good statistics program will tell you this vital information. If a
visitor is staying on your site less than 5 seconds, then you have some work to do
on your content. You have worked hard to get that visitor now ensure that you

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have good content to keep your visitor there as long as possible.

6. Expose weak content due to low visit time

A sure indicator of weak content is fast exit from the entry page by
your visitors. Expose and work on all of your weak points.

7. Expose exit points

By monitoring your statistics you will find your sites most popular exit points. Are
these natural exit points or do they indicate a content issue? Without stats you will
never know. A good statistics program will shed light on all of this.

Last Update: 17 Feb 2008 - 06:38

Reported period:

Summary
Reported period Month Feb 2008
First visit 01 Feb 2008 - 00:58
Last visit 17 Feb 2008 - 06:03
Unique visitors Number of visits Pages Hits Bandwidth
606 1114 116758 211878 520.33 MB
Viewed traffic *
(1.83 visits/visitor) (104.8 pages/visit) (190.19 hits/visit) (478.29 KB/visit)

Not viewed traffic * 314496 314720 1.80 GB

* Not viewed traffic includes traffic generated by robots, worms, or replies with special HTTP status codes.

Monthly history

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Days of month

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Days of week

Hours

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Countries (Top 10) - Full list
Countries Pages Hits Bandwidth

United States us 49261 83302 223.77 MB

Canada ca 41359 78379 192.05 MB

Unknown ip 25908 49754 98.66 MB

Germany de 72 75 1.69 MB

European country eu 36 67 834.31 KB

Netherlands nl 33 33 640.80 KB

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Hosts (Top 10) - Full list - Last visit - Unresolved
IP Address
Hosts : 1501 Known, 280 Unknown (unresolved ip)
Pages Hits Bandwidth Last visit
606 Unique visitors
cmr-208-97-109-12.cr.net.cable.rogers.com 25671 48670 91.96 MB 15 Feb 2008 - 20:04
cpe001c10a674e6-cm0014f8c5d158.cpe.net.cable.rogers.com 21537 28343 32.25 MB 16 Feb 2008 - 17:03
bas5-ottawa23-1088842658.dsl.bell.ca 14291 21377 37.93 MB 14 Feb 2008 - 12:17
ottawa-hs-209-217-122-136.s-ip.magma.ca 3887 4759 10.49 MB 13 Feb 2008 - 14:35
gw-city-plantagenet.storm.ca 2146 2359 4.28 MB 15 Feb 2008 - 14:13
rmoc.on.ca 1883 10438 6.75 MB 15 Feb 2008 - 15:07
cpe001346a8e409-cm0011aea767b4.cpe.net.cable.rogers.com 1734 2366 6.03 MB 16 Feb 2008 - 16:07
Others 38084 84579 309.57 MB

Robots/Spiders visitors (Top 10) - Full list - Last visit
29 different robots* Hits Bandwidth Last visit
Unknown robot (identified by 'crawl') 298009+739 1.73 GB 17 Feb 2008 - 06:29

Googlebot 2880+65 17.25 MB 17 Feb 2008 - 06:14

Yahoo Slurp 1584+116 9.25 MB 17 Feb 2008 - 06:28

Turn It In 1100+4 5.77 MB 09 Feb 2008 - 22:53

MSNBot 751+301 4.82 MB 17 Feb 2008 - 06:28

Unknown robot (identified by 'robot') 329+70 2.01 MB 17 Feb 2008 - 04:46

Feedfetcher-Google 362 1.41 MB 17 Feb 2008 - 06:28

Nutch 209+58 1.30 MB 16 Feb 2008 - 15:12

AskJeeves 158+57 891.68 KB 16 Feb 2008 - 23:26

SBIder 76+71 449.81 KB 16 Feb 2008 - 12:08
* Robots shown here gave hits or traffic "not viewed" by visitors, so they are not included in other charts. Numbers after + are
successful hits on "robots.txt" files.

Visits duration
Number of
Number of visits: 1114 - Average: 547 s Percent
visits
0s-30s 567 50.8 %
30s-2mn 135 12.1 %
2mn-5mn 94 8.4 %
5mn-15mn 122 10.9 %
15mn-30mn 63 5.6 %
30mn-1h 66 5.9 %
1h+ 65 5.8 %
Unknown 2 0.1 %

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File type
File type Hits Percent Bandwidth Percent
php Dynamic PHP Script file 73420 34.6 % 124.15 MB 23.8 %

gif Image 41354 19.5 % 10.95 MB 2.1 %
jpg Image 36687 17.3 % 155.21 MB 29.8 %
phtml 35300 16.6 % 165.22 MB 31.7 %

js JavaScript file 7009 3.3 % 8.60 MB 1.6 %

html HTML or XML static page 5931 2.7 % 32.30 MB 6.2 %

css Cascading Style Sheet file 5410 2.5 % 3.87 MB 0.7 %
png Image 4660 2.1 % 541.97 KB 0.1 %
Unknown 1613 0.7 % 16.78 MB 3.2 %

pl Dynamic Perl Script file 454 0.2 % 2.18 MB 0.4 %

rss 36 0% 491.59 KB 0%

pdf Adobe Acrobat file 1 0% 5.77 KB 0%

src 1 0% 28.32 KB 0%

doc Document 1 0% 5.77 KB 0%

osrc 1 0% 28.32 KB 0%

Pages-URL (Top 10) - Full list - Entry - Exit
Average
888 different pages-url Viewed Entry Exit
size

/vm/libraries/imageThumb 54350 1.18 KB 1 16
nails.php

/scripts/dashboard.php 10309 1.15 KB 8

/vm/newvisual/calendrier.p 7556 12.16 KB 11 5
html

/vm/newvisual/catalogue_d 4656 1.45 KB 131
isplay.phtml

/vm/newvisual/whitepage. 4512 1.63 KB 5
phtml
Operating Systems (Top 10) - Full list/Versions -
Unknown

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Operating Systems Hits Percent
Windows 209308 98.7 %

Unknown 1545 0.7 %

Linux 614 0.2 %

Macintosh 410 0.1 %

OS/2 1 0%

Browsers (Top 10) - Full list/Versions - Unknown
Browsers Grabber Hits Percent
MS Internet Explorer No 206185 97.3 %

Firefox No 3241 1.5 %

Unknown ? 1390 0.6 %

Mozilla No 632 0.2 %

Safari No 317 0.1 %

LibWWW No 78 0%

Opera No 23 0%

Netscape No 11 0%

Konqueror No 1 0%

Connect to site from
Origin Pages Percent Hits Percent
Direct address / Bookmarks 17173 97.1 % 17731 80.6 %
Links from a NewsGroup
248 1.4 % 518 2.3 %
Links from an Internet Search Engine - Full list
248 1.4 % 3741 17 %
Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines) - Full
list
Unknown Origin

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Search Keyphrases (Top 10) Search Keywords (Top 10)
Full list Full list

Miscellaneous
Miscellaneous
Add to favorites (estimated) 613 / 606 Visitors 101.1 %

HTTP Status codes
HTTP Status codes* Hits Percent Bandwidth
302 Moved temporarily (redirect) 7041 95.4 % 15.01 MB
206 Partial Content 192 2.6 % 8.34 MB
401 Unauthorized 82 1.1 % 30.88 KB

404 Document Not Found 40 0.5 % 13.95 KB

301 Moved permanently (redirect) 19 0.2 % 5.61 KB
416 Requested range not valid 1 0% 327 Bytes

* Codes shown here gave hits or traffic "not viewed" by visitors, so they are not included in other charts.

Web analytics is the study of the behaviour of website visitors. In a
commercial context, web analytics especially refers to the use of data collected
from a web site to determine which aspects of the website work towards the
business objectives; for example, which landing pages encourage people to
make a purchase.

Data collected almost always includes web traffic reports. It may also include e-
mail response rates, direct mail campaign data, sales and lead information, user
performance data such as click mapping, or other custom metrics as needed. This
data is typically compared against key performance indicators for
performance, and used to improve a web site or marketing campaign's audience
response.

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10. Other methods of increasing traffic to your web site.

Traditional marketing and promotions:
Billboards, radio, television, print, direct mail

Contests:
Have contest that drives visitors to your web site. Have them sign in and
leave their contact information to enter the contest.

Regular Newsletters:
Sending out newsletters or tips and tricks on a regular basis keeps your
business top of mind with your customers.

Information:
Make you site a valuable source of information for visitors. Make sure you
include a send to a friend functionality.

Email campaigns: MUST BE PERMISSION BASED. Once again this keeps you top of
mind with your current and potential customers.

11. How to keep visitors once they find you.

Web site’s ability to keep visitors on site, or its success in encouraging visitors to
come back repeatedly is called website stickiness.

When talking about Web site stickiness, marketers are referring to a Web site’s
ability to keep visitors on site, or to its success in encouraging visitors to come back
repeatedly. A successful sticky marketing campaign uses a number of techniques
designed to get visitors to ’stick’ to the site.

Here are some of the tips that may help make your Web site sticky or even stickier:

Content
Introduce appealing content to your Web site. It doesn’t have to be directly related
to the reason visitors originally come to your site, but it may encourage them to
come back again. Here are some ideas for content you might like for your Web site:

• Newsletters and articles
• Tutorials and frequently asked questions
• Glossaries
• A calendar of upcoming events
• Daily weather reports and stock quotes
• Location maps
• Thoughts for the day and favourite quotes
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• Feedback mechanisms — forms, blogs, forums
• Free fun (viral) stuff like competitions, postcards, video clips and games

Bookmarks
Make it easy for a visitor to find the pages that particularly interested them, by
adding a bookmark button to the page. Bookmarked pages can be easily stored and
then retrieved by visitors from their Web browser (i.e. Internet Explorer or Mozilla
Firefox) as their own favourites or bookmarks.

Send to Friend
Add a ‘Send to a Friend’ button to your Web pages. If people value your content,
they may end up encouraging new visitors to come to your site for you.

Print Page
Make your content accessible in print. It’s a very handy function for features such as
maps and tutorials.

Site Search
If your content pages or ’sticky’ resources are becoming reasonably extensive,
consider adding a site search function, so it becomes easier for site visitors to
retrieve information.

Site Map
Include links to every Web page on your site map - it serves as an index for site
visitors and search engines.

Special Future
Focus on adding special features to your site that sets your Web site apart from your
competition’s. Have a look at what they are or are not doing.

If you want even more inspiration and ideas for developing your sticky marketing,
browse around online and start noting down what you particularly like about some of
your favourite sites. Remember, the longer your site visitors stay on your site, the
longer they are exposed to your company’s products or services.

References and credits:

www.webreference.com
www.webconfs.com
www.about.com

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Search Engine Optimization Virtuo.Ca

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