Optimized Page Example

# 1 – Page URL

URLs that contain relevant words provide users and search engines with more information about a page than an ID like “page1.htm” or oddly named parameter would. It is recommended that you use lowercase characters and hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) to separate the keywords and phrases in your URLs. In addition, keywords closest to the domain name will carry the most SEO weight.

# 2 – Page Title

Page titles are an important aspect of search engine optimization because they appear at the top of your browser window and/or browser tab and also in search engines on the first line of results. Like the page URL, keywords closest to the left carry the most SEO weight and should be less than or equal to 65 characters. If the title is too long (greater than 65 characters), search engines will show only a portion of it in the search results.

# 3 – H1 Header

There are six sizes of heading tags, beginning with <h1>, the most important, and ending with <h6>, the least important. Stick to one H1 tag per page and use H1 for top-level heading only. Using more than one H1 tag is entering the “spam zone” and can make it hard for users to scan the content and determine where one topic ends and another begins.

# 4 – Summary Content

The content is one of the most important factors of search engine optimization. By successfully weaving your keywords into your content you are more likely to be relevant for keyword searches in addition to improving your on page keyword density. As a general rule, you should repeat your targeted keywords roughly two to five times every hundred words. We successfully achieved a 4.9% keyword density ratio under our “Website Design and Website Development Services” header.

# 5 – H2 Header

When optimizing subheadings imagine you’re writing an outline, put some thought into what the main points and subpoints of the content on the page will be and decide where to use heading tags appropriately.

# 6 – Body Content

We successfully achieved a 3.3% keyword density ratio under our “Website Design Services” header.

# 7 – Links (Anchor Text)

Anchor text is the clickable text that users will see as a result of a link, and is placed within the anchor tag. With appropriate anchor text, users and search engines can easily understand what the linked pages contain.

# 8 – Image Filename and Alt Attribute

Image File Name: website-design-and-website-development-portfolio.jpg

Alt Attribute: Website Design and Website Development

Similar to the URL, lowercase characters and hyphens are best to separate the keywords and phrases rather than underscores. If a user is viewing your site on a browser that doesn’t support images, or is using alternative technologies such as a screen reader, the contents of the alt attribute provide information about the picture. Keywords that are placed in the image alt attribute appear when you mouse over an image, and since this text shows, make sure the text is relevant to your image. In addition, optimizing your image filenames and alt attribute makes it easier for image search projects like Google Image Search to better understand your images.

# 9 – H2 Header

#10 – Body Content

We successfully achieved a 6.5% keyword density ratio under our “Website Development Services” header.

As with all things SEO, we recommend constant testing and refinement. Keyword optimization is all about striking a healthy balance. You need to use your keywords and phrases enough to gain the SEO benefits, but not so much that it detracts from your site.

Having a better understanding of your visitors, where they came from, what search terms they used to get there and how they interact with your site can help you interpret information essential to the success of your website and online marketing initiatives. Here are just a few of the things you can uncover by installing a web analytics program.

• What keywords are people typing into search engines that lead them to your website?
• What sites are referring traffic to your site?
• What are the most commonly viewed pages on your site and how are they used?
• What pages of your site do not get any traffic?
• How effectively do your landing pages entice visitors to click further into your site?
• From which pages do people exit your site?
• Where and why are visitors abandoning your shopping cart?

And this is just a fraction of what a good web analytics program can do for you. For the more advanced users, setting up campaign tracking is fundamental to measuring the success of your online marketing efforts. Whether you use email newsletters, Facebook pages, Twitter, or traditional online search ads, monitoring and tracking the effectiveness of your campaigns is key to maximizing and optimizing your campaign efforts. Listed below are just a few of the things every successful website owner should be tracking, to attract more traffic and grow sales overtime.

• Social Media Campaigns
• Email Campaigns
• AdWords Campaigns
• SEO Campaigns
• Geographic Locations
• Sales Goals & Funnels
• File Downloads, Newsletter Subscriptions & More

The more you know about your visitors and their behaviors, the better you can tailor your website to suit their needs. Just as your brand is defined by what your customers perceive it as, your website works the same way. If your website doesn’t have any analytics installed, you are missing a great opportunity to know exactly what your customers want and how you can give it to them.

Here is the link to our blog that is under analysis, www.lightfin.com/blog/ from April 20, 2010 to June 13, 2011 spanning 420 days or 1 year, 1 month and 25 days.

As you can see, our first blog post appeared on April 20, 2010. Before understanding how our blog has improved and increased traffic to our website over time, it is important to get a baseline of the traffic we would have received, if we had not integrated our blog into our website. The data below represents the time span from April 20, 2010 to June 13, 2011. All images have been taken from Google Analytics, a free software that allows you to gain more information on the way visitors visit your site and interact with it.

The first image below shows that Lightfin would have had 282 pages viewed a total of 36,959 times, if we had not integrated the blog into our website.

 
The second image below shows that with the addition of Lightfin’s blog, 180 additional pages were viewed a total of 4,445 times.

 
Conclusion:
With the integration of our blog into the Lightfin website, over the past 420 days, we were able to increase the total amount of traffic to our website by 12%, while increasing the amount of indexed pages by 64%. Imagine what a blog could do to your website!

Below are some tips to increase your social media success and likeability.  (Despite the fact that we are referring to “likeability,” a known Facebook term, these guidelines apply to all social media platforms).

1. Respond to both positive and negative comments.  One of the strongest ways for a brand to establish a relationship is by personally and directly engaging with individual consumers.  Make sure to thank customers who post positive comments.  These people are valuable as they are likely your brand advocates, spreading the word about your brand for no cost.  Conversely, it is critical to respond quickly and decisively to negative comments before they spread.  Chipotle is known to respond quickly to complaints and offer $5 gift cards to avoid losing a potential lifetime customer.
2. Be real and authentic. Share insights from real people in your company.  Bring your brand to life by telling the story of how it got started and where it is going in the future.  Show behind the scenes footage.  You can even discuss some of the hardships or stumbling blocks in your business.  This type of transparency is a huge draw for followers and humanizes the business.
3. 3. Offer value at little to no cost. If you want to keep them coming back for more…give them what they want.  B2B companies can offer webinars, whitepaper, and interesting articles.  B2C companies can offer product giveaways, discounts, and contests.  For example, Extra Gum gave a free pack of gum to every Facebook fan to show its appreciation!
4. Don’t sell. It is important to reinforce that social media is primarily a method of communication, not an extension of an ecommerce site.  There is a fine line between aggressively selling and making it easy to buy.  Consumers will follow/like you as long as they don’t feel pressured to buy.

Listen, participate in the discussion, and follow these four steps to boost your social media likeability.

Inbound marketing is what a company does internally to attract qualified leads.  Generally, inbound marketing is much cheaper than outbound marketing, and some marketers would argue that in today’s digital world, it is more effective as well.  Unlike outbound marketing, inbound marketing is not a one time expense; it’s an ongoing investment that must constantly be updated to stay current.  You should optimize your online efforts to take advantage of three different components of inbound marketing:

1. Content including blogs, e-books, and whitepapers – value added offerings that give a consumer incentive to either learn more, come back to the site, or hopefully purchase a product/service.
2. Search Engine Optimization involves maximizing your website’s organic search results.  This can be done through a variety of ways such as link building, keyword research, and proper website organization.  For more on SEO, check out The Basics of SEO.
3. Social Media has the potential to amplify the reach of your business, thus increasing brand awareness.  It gives your business a more authentic method of communication that can build lasting relationships and customer loyalty. To learn more about the impact of social media, check out The Power of Social Recommendations.

Inbound marketing also allows better targeting than outbound marketing.  Instead of reaching out to individuals on a mass scale only to receive a response rate of less than 1 percent, inbound marketing brings consumers to you because they have an interest in your product or service.  Businesses can then follow up with these leads and receive much improved conversion rates.

We don’t advocate that you completely drop your outbound marketing; just optimize your inbound marketing first.  Who knows, if your inbound marketing is done correctly, that could be enough by itself.

If you want to learn more about what Lightfin Studios can do to optimize your inbound marketing, visit our contact page.

What is a QR Code?

A QR code, short for quick-response code, is a specific matrix barcode that can be scanned and read by a smart phone application.  A QR code can be encoded with text, a URL, or other forms of data.

Marketing Implications

The goal of the new-age marketer is to engage with consumers in order to develop a lasting relationship.  It seems that QR codes have presented an opportunity to do just that.  QR codes provide low cost advertising and can be seen anywhere from print advertisements in subways to product packages in stores.  These codes allow marketers to communicate with consumers, therefore promoting higher recall of the “quick-requested” product.  Many marketers believe that QR codes empower customers by giving them a better understanding of the product by accessing detailed information about the product at their fingertips.  Some of the typical information that consumers can get from QR codes is product reviews, product assembly instructions, warranty information, and much more.

The benefits to the marketer are just as immense as those to the consumer.  QR codes provide marketers with measurable analytics for an easier ROI calculation that justifies the marketing expense.  Below are just some of the questions that can be addressed:

• Which product/advertisement is scanned, at what time, and in what location?
• Which products are scanned most often?
• Was the scanned product purchased?
• How much time elapsed between the scanning and purchasing of a product?

Additionally, once a user opts-in to a QR code service, a company can see what type of products a customer is buying and send him/her targeted brand messages.

This marketing method is exclusive to people with smart phones, but luckily for marketers, the smart phone population is growing at an unprecedented rate.  According to a February survey of U.S. smart phone users by MGH, a Baltimore social-media marketing company, 32 percent of respondents said they have scanned a QR code.

How much is too much?

Information has never been more readily available than it is today.  QR codes have been put atop buildings in Times Square and even on the back of t-shirts!  But how much is too much when it comes to marketer driven campaigns?

It all comes down to social authority. As creepy as it may sound, Google has a way of knowing who is a “trusted source” on Twitter.  When searches are done through Twitter to find users, the trusted users will rank highest.  But Twitter authority goes even further than that.  If a highly trusted Twitter user tweets a URL, that URL gets a boost in its search ranking.  Your social authority not only encompasses the original content you tweet but also secondhand content.

Facebook works in a similar way.  Although search engines do not gather personal wall data, they do take into account the links that are shared on Facebook Fan Pages.  A link that is shared by an authoritative source is weighted more heavily in search results.

By tracking the authority of social network users, Google has successfully decreased the amount of spam that shows up in search results.  Although spam is no longer as prevalent in search results, it is still rampant throughout the web.  Google has developed a “nonfollow” tag to solve this issue.  For example, when a blogger gets people to visit his site by advertising a link, “finance your home with zero interest,” Google puts a “nonfollow” tag directly in the link.  This lets users know that the link leads to a non-credible site and hopefully will stop spammers from falsely advertising to draw traffic.

Some things never change – people have always judged you by your integrity and authority. Some things do – people are now judging your integrity and authority online…and it matters.

35 percent of respondents stated that their main social media goal for the year is to increase Facebook “Likes” and find new fans.  The reason these “Likes” have become so valuable is because they act as an online personal recommendation.  When you see that someone you trust (family member/ friend) “likes” a product or brand, you become much more inclined to purchase or at least look into that offering.  A personal recommendation is known to be the most trusted form of advertising due to its authentic, non-marketer-driven origins.  Secondly, the act of “liking” a brand/product opens up a dialogue between the consumer and the brand.  The comments, messages, and updates of a brand are also posted to every users’ home-feed who likes the brand, effectively keeping the brand top-of-mind.

Check out some of these stats that illustrate the power of social recommendation…

• 53 percent of people on Twitter recommend companies and/or products in their Tweets, with 48 percent of them delivering on their intention to buy the product    (ROI Research for Performance, June 2010)

• Consumer reviews are significantly more trusted — nearly 12 times more — than descriptions that come from manufacturers, according to a survey of US mom Internet users (eMarketer, February 2010)

• In a study conducted by social networking site myYearbook, 81 percent of respondents said they’d received advice from friends and followers relating to a product purchase through a social site; 74 percent of those who received such advice found it to be influential in their decision    (Click Z, January 2010)

We are just scratching the surface on the true power of social media.  Social media humanizes a business by engaging as a person instead of a website or store.  Social media increases awareness.  Social media drives web traffic.  Social media can be used as a customer service hub.  Social media has moved from a fad, to a potential business tool, to an integral part of a business’s marketing plans.