Lots of people loudly proclaim the importance of inbound links. In fact, depending on your niche, up to 80% of your rank in Google may depend on your ability to conduct an ongoing link blitz. Not to mention all the traffic well placed links can deliver up.

If this is so, then why aren’t more pursuing links?
Good question.

Like most worthwhile things in life there’s a dirty little secret no one talks about when it comes to links. That is, few detail the effort involved to manage an ongoing link blitz. And I should know. I just did such a blitz and got 29 confirmed links out of 75 attempts. Granted any initial burst of links added to virginal links pages is a snap to manage. Find potential candidates using the method of your choice, add their info to your links pages, solicit the link either by email or filling out a form on the potential partner’s site, sit back and wait to be showered with links.

What’s the big deal?
Well, each new linking attempt adds to the management overhead. Fail to manage your link blitz properly and sooner or later you’ll find you’re failing to get any links at all. Fail to get links and all too soon you’ll find your search engine rankings are headed south into oblivion rather than upwards towards #1.

The management process I use is simple. Still it takes effort or that dreaded four letter word - WORK. But it’s a necessary evil if you want to stay on top of your linking campaign.?

So here are 8 helpful tips:?

Tip 1: Fill Her Up - Wisely
While you need to keep the pipeline of linking candidates full, it’s a good idea to avoid:

• Zeus links pages, because many times they are chronically PR deficient, often sporting a PR of zero. Suggesting banishment by Google.
• Framed sites, since you can’t really tell the PR of the framed links page.
• Links pages with more than 100 links. But for sure links pages bigger than 101K in size since Google won’t crawl pages bigger than that.

Tip 2: Keep on Keeping on
For success in the long run it’s best to establish a regular solicitation routine you can maintain. Unless I’m on an all out blitz, I shoot to get out 5 link requests a day four days a week per site. With a 30%+ response rate that gives me six or seven new links a week.
HINT: Getting five requests out takes 15 minutes or less assuming you’ve done the prep work of finding potential link partners, their contact and linking info and have gotten up the reciprocal links on your links pages. Once you know your typical hit ratio this is something you can ultimately delegate to a virtual assistant.?

Tip 3: Like Santa Make a List
It’s vital you maintain a master list of those approached. If you don’t, after a while you won’t know who you have solicited to trade links and who you haven’t. This becomes a bigger problem the more link trading you attempt to do.?
HINT:? Depending on how many links I’m pursuing, I create a file of linking activity either for the day or for the week per web site.

Tip 4: The Devils in the Detail
Inside that file I like to list the specific page my link should appear on, along with the partner’s contact info, plus the linking info I put up on my site. This makes it easier to verify a given link is up.

Tip 5:? Date Stamp It
I include an HTML comment with each link that tells me when I put it up. That way you know how long you’ve been link partners.

Tip 6: Are You a Linkmate?
Keep track of who lets you know they’ve linked up. In some niches, no-none will. In others most will let you know they have, just depends. But you want to know so you don’t go hunting theirs down in your final sweep before removing those who didn’t trade.?

Tip 7: Times Up
Wait a reasonable amount of time. Then remove those that didn’t reciprocate from your links pages. Pain in the neck? Yes. But vital, if you want to keep your links pages clean and avoid rewarding those who couldn’t be bothered to link to you.
HINT: I’ve found if someone is going to link up they’ll usually do it sooner rather than later. Especially if you have an attractive linking opportunity (higher PR… fewer links per page…quality content). For me 10 days is reasonable.

Tip 8: Stash for Later
Don’t ditch that list of those who failed to link up. Just because they didn’t do so today doesn’t mean they won’t in the future. As your site grows and the PR improves you’ll want to re-approach them in 3-6 months. Having a list of past candidates handy makes doing so easy.

By John Gergye

Oooo … cookies. And the real kind at that! Hmmm. Chocolate chip or maybe one of those oatmeal raisin ones? Or what about those almond things? Oh, it’s murder to have to decide which to pick.

You might think the same is true when you try to figure out what you want to measure on your website. But actually, all choices are not equal when it comes to your ebusiness data and the metrics that transform it into meaningful information. To be blunt, most data you don’t want.

But don’t worry. I’m about to pass the plate. Except I’m going to point out which Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) should comprise the basics of your online measuring, testing and optimization activities. So, please, help yourself to a KPI!

I figure it goes without saying that the actions you are trying to motivate your visitors to take should be intimately related to your business goals. But I’ll say it anyway, just in case. I want you to be clear about what you are trying to do, so you’ll know how to go about doing it.

Let me say here, though, that after the almighty Conversion Rate, one of the most important indicators you can keep an eye on, regardless of your line of business, is your Page Rejection/Abandonment Rates. Whenever you see high values for this metric, you immediately want to examine that page with a fine-toothed comb for persuasion architecture issues! You’re getting a wake-up call that the page isn’t working!

Ecommerce and Retail Sites
Here the basic objective is to increase sales and decrease marketing expenses. KPI should include:

• Conversion Rate: the likelihood of successfully driving a visitor to purchase
• Cost Per Visitor: the cost of each site visitor to your business
• Average Order Value: changes in the overall audience makeup and the affect on the online revenue patterns
• Percent New Visitors: the number of potential new customers landing on your site
• Ratio of New to Returning Visitors: the ratio of new to previously acquired visitors
• Page “Stickiness”: the likelihood of successfully retaining a visitor who arrives at a key landing page

Once you’ve got these under your belt, you’ll want to take a more advanced examination: measure inventory mix, trend reporting, satisfaction and frequency, and other predictive modelling techniques.

Lead-Generation Sites
The objective is to increase and segment a business’s ability to generate leads and close the transaction. When you examine your Page Rejection/Abandonment Rates, play close attention to your critical contact pages.

• Conversion Rates: the likelihood visitors will download white papers, sign up for mailings, subscribe to a newsletter
• Ratio of Leads to Close: the likelihood a lead will complete the transaction
• Percent New Visitors: the number of potential new customers landing on your site
• Length of Visit: the amount of time a visitor spends on your site in a given visit
• Ratio of New to Returning Visitors: the ratio of new to previously acquired visitors
• Page “Stickiness”: the likelihood of successfully retaining a visitor who arrives at a key landing page
• Percent of Visits by Entry Page: efficacy of marketing messages at driving visitors to the site

Content Sites
The objective of most content sites is to increase readership, the level of interest and the amount of time your visitor spends on the site. Toward that end you will want to measure:

• Conversion Rates: the likelihood folks will sign up with you, subscribe, register or ask to receive information
• Length of Visit: the amount of time a visitor spends on your site in a given visit
• Average Page Views: the number of pages the visitor visited can indicate the strength of your visitor’s connection to the stuff you provide
• Heavy User Share: percentage of your overall audience that consumes the largest volume of content
• Percent Returning Visitors: percentage of retained visitors returning to your site
• Cancellations: the likelihood your subscriber will bid you farewell through unsubscribing

Self-Service and Support Sites
Here you want to increase customer satisfaction and decrease your support inquiries. Measure decreases in visit length, inbound call-centre metrics, and customer satisfaction metrics.

• Conversion Rate: the likelihood that a user will successfully locate the information needed
• Length of Visit: in this instance, a decreasing number is a good thing. You want to make the process of using your site efficient.
• Percent of Visits Under 90 Seconds: you want to make the site efficient, but not difficult to use. Measure the percent of your audience that is unlikely to have found the information they sought
• Percent Returning Visitors: percentage of retained visitors returning to your site
• Percentage of Visits by Entry Page: top entry points into support content, many of which may be driven from external searches
• Top Internal Search Phrases: not a KPI in the “traditional” sense, but very important to identifying new trends in support needs
• Customer Satisfaction Metrics: you also want to determine if the site is successfully handling problems previously directed to your inbound call-centre

Are there more indicators? Yep, but they are not necessarily critical to managing your online efforts. Can you make up your own? Absolutely. You can measure whatever you please if you think it helps you achieve your business goals.

The thing is, start measuring. Through your numbers, you possess powerful information. You don’t need to grope in the dark or drown in an overwhelming ocean of digits. It doesn’t even require genius to work with this stuff. It just requires that you do it. Just like brushing your teeth after you eat.

Another K … cookie, perhaps?

By John Borthwick

Do’s and Don’ts of a Professional Website
A professional website is, above all else, professional. What constitutes professional though? This question has been asked by many, and the answers are as varied as those asking the question. There are at least a hundred or more possible aspects to consider, some consisting of parts of others, such as demographics and content. Each factor has its own affect on how customers perceive a website.

Being professional is an attitude portrayed by you, the business owner, your business and your website. You don’t have the luxury of smiling real big, wearing your best suit, and shaking hands with the customer. Your site has to do that for you. This brief list of what to do and what not to do when creating a professional website is only the beginning, one small step towards success.

DO’S
1. Know Your Visitors
Your site should be designed to fit their needs and wants. If you’re selling, know the demographics of the people you’re selling to. If you’re just providing information, know who you are targeting. Rule of thumb: Know more about your audience than they know about you.

2. Know Your Product
As strange as that may sound, people know when a site offers products or services that they themselves know little about. If you are letting someone else write the content for your site and that someone doesn’t know the product, then your customers won’t know it either. Anticipate questions from customers and answer them before they are asked.

3. Make Your Site Visually Pleasing
Just because bright red and bright blue are your favourite colours doesn’t mean that they should be the dominant colours on your site. Red and blue are at different ends of the spectrum and will give viewers a headache if viewed too long. You want to make viewers feel welcome, comfortable, and that they are able to trust you.

4. Outline the Concept of the Site Before It is Created
Know the answers to those golden questions: who, what, when, where, why and how. While these questions apply to your demographics they are also helpful in deciding what information is truly important and what isn’t. Pinning down your tacit knowledge is often a challenge, and not all tacit knowledge is valuable. What do you want the customers to know and what do the customers want to know?

5. Make Your Prices Readily Available
Hide your prices and customers will wonder what else you are hiding. Don’t wait until after you ask for their credit card information to tell them how much it costs. You don’t make sales that way; what you do make is frustrated customers who tell other potential customers to stay away from your site.

6. Keep Your Site Credible
Back up what you say with statistics or links to articles that support your claim. If you have experts in your company, highlight them. Show the customer that there are REAL people running the business. Update the content as often as possible - if updating the content isn’t possible, add links to news articles and update those links. It is time consuming, but in the end it is worth the time and effort.

7. Ask for Input from People Who Know Nothing about Your Product/Service/Business
This is the best way to get true feedback. People who know nothing about what you are doing can find the smallest mistake and ask the best questions. They can give you a fresh perspective on your site and sometimes your business. They don’t know what you know, and they often see what you don’t.

8. Use Images that Portray Confidence
You want the customer to trust you right? Then show them that you believe enough in yourself and your product that there is no doubt that you are trustworthy. Dress for success. You wouldn’t wear snow boots on a hot summer’s day, would you? Then don’t let your site wear images that could make you look cheap and untrustworthy.

9. Keep Your Site Translator-Friendly
This can sometimes be challenging as we tend to use different terminology than other countries. What we would consider ‘normal phrasing’ may be considered ‘odd’ or offensive to someone else. Avoid slang and test your site with a translator. See which words are translated and which ones aren’t, then try to figure out why.

10. Be Consistent Throughout the Site
Making each page of your site different can be entertaining to teenagers and new internet users, but most of your potential customers aren’t new to the internet. If a viewer feels as though they’re on a different site each time they click a link on your site, they are likely to go to another site. Consistency counts in site design and professionalism, and your customers will expect it.

DON’TS
1. Don’t Guess Who You Are Trying to Reach With Your Site
‘Guesstimation’ is for horse shoes and card games. If you don’t know your demographics, then you might as well have thrown your site together.

2. Don’t Get Too Technical
Your customers are the ones reading your site, so it should be written for them. Sure, your competition might read your site as well, but they already know the business jargon. Besides, you aren’t trying to sell to them anyway. Remember, other business owners may browse, but your customers are your buyers.

3. Don’t Give Your Customers A Headache
There are 256 colours available for site design. 216 of those are browser ’safe.’ Just because there are an abundance of colours does not mean that they all should be used at once. Warm colours shouldn’t be used with cool colours because of the conflicting hues. Meanwhile, bright colours make the eyes work harder to focus and after a few minutes will likely give your viewers a headache.

4. Don’t Keep Content That Isn’t Being Read
Keeping track of what your customers are actually reading is very helpful. You want a customer to peruse your site as completely as possible. The more they know, the better your chances are that they will purchase or sign-up. If a page isn’t being read then try something else. Rewrite it. Add psychological triggers. Rephrase. Find a way to make the page valuable.

5. Don’t Repeat the Same Information on Every Page
The viewer doesn’t want to read the same material over and over. Give them new, fresh information on each page. If they want to go back and read the previous page, give them that option.

6. Don’t Hide Contact Information
You’ll find conflicting information on this topic. Some designers will tell you to put your contact information on every page, but customers tend to find that redundant. One page with multiple ways to contact you is more effective even if the customer never visits the page. Just having the page there tells them that you can be reached and that you really are there for their convenience.

7. Don’t Use Animations
Some would say use animations to draw attention to your ad, product, and �new� idea/newsletter/etc. but by following that suggestion you frustrate the customer. Flashing, moving objects distract the eyes. A customer is there looking for information, if their eyes are distracted while reading, their comprehension decreases while their frustration rises. The use of colours such as yellow and orange become helpful in this area. Bolding or italicizing words is another way to emphasize phrases, or items you want the customer to notice.

8. Don’t Use Multiple Fonts
It only takes the eye seconds to adjust to a new font, but those seconds are distracting to the mind. Different sizes, styles, and colours are confusing. Choose one font and stick with it. Consistency is more important than creativity when it comes to text.

9. Don’t Take Control Away From the Viewer
Creative cursors, full screen browsers, and other ‘entertaining’ aspects of site design are great, if your target audience is teenagers or new internet users, but for a professional website they give the appearance of being cheap, second rate, and amateurish.

10. Don’t ‘Bunch Up’ the Text
Add spaces between paragraphs so customers don’t feel overwhelmed with information. Placing a small picture pertaining to the content gives the eyes time to relax before reading further.

By Wynn Wilder