While in San Francisco last week, I took a two hour trip north of San Francisco to the webcasting studio's of TWiT.tv (This Week in Technology) in Petaluma, California.

This fabulous (web only) broadcast station, (http://twit.tv) has as many as five shows a day, and I spent a whole day meeting their team and interviewing Leo Laporte on the technology used in the station including sitting in on his shows.

Over the course of the day, I met with their technical staff, Eileen Rivera (Supervising Producer and featured below on mixing desk), CEO Lisa Kentzell and Sarah Lane (host of iPad today & The Social Hour) and was also given a guided tour through the operations and technology that powers the studio.

We're looking forward to applying what we learnt towards Rocket! tv, the establishment of our own interactive education and support webcast station for our Business Catalyst clients & reseller partner network. So stay tuned!

* Special thanks to Eva Laporte for organising my time with Leo & Lisa at TWiT.tv :)

 

 

Google Adwords Packages We are pleased to now be able to offer specialised Google Adwords  and SEO services through our partnership with Ausclicks. Working together with Ausclicks, we are able to offer specialised Google Adwords & Analytics bundles to suit all needs and budgets. Contact us today to get started - bundles start from as low as $500 (not including ad spend)
Free Setup - Nab Transact The Adobe business catalyst ecommerce tools support a myriad of payment gateways, however we are pleased to advise that we can now offer to all our clients a special deal with NAB, utilising the Nan Transact gateway. Download information regarding this special offer now! We are happy to discuss this further with you if you wish. This offer is available to all our customers across Australia. A NAB Business Transaction Specialist is also very happy to speak with you, wherever you are,  about this arrangement. You do not need to be a NAB customer to take advantage of this offer.  Contact us to find out more
Facebook Timeline Facebook never stands still, the most recent change is Timeline for Business. This will effect all business pages from the 31/3. We are conducting some information sessions on this next week, but get in quick as they are filling up fast! Secure your place now
The Rocket is on the launchpad Are you keeping up with our new building? We are starting to get excited to see it taking shape and looking forward to all the extra room, for staff and clients. If you haven't been keeping up to date - find out more at our blog.

 

Having your website reach the performance levels you desire isn’t easy. It takes constant monitoring and measurement of visitor data to optimise web usage. This is where Web Analytics comes in. Not only is web analytics useful for measuring website traffic but it is also an effective tool for both business and market research.
 
By tracking user behavior, we can begin to see how they are interacting with our website and how we can begin to communicate more effectively to our audiences. In this article we’ll take a closer look at how Web Analytics can be utilised and what effect this has on the design process.

What is Analytics?

Every time a visitor reaches your site, the web server records this transaction. This data is then processed by Web Analytics software to produce detailed reports and charts. This software is most commonly available in web-based applications such as the popular Google Analytics, which allows you to see what’s going on with your website through cold hard data.

1. Measurement

Web Measurement is the process by which Web Analytics is utilised. While hits were popular in the early days of the internet, analytics have become much more sophisticated over the years.  Basic metrics – such as visits, bounce rate, referrers, and conversions can be measured after determining the outcome you want your website to accomplish.

 

2. Bounce Rates & Exit Rates

Bounce Rates and Exit Rates are two metrics to analyse in determining whether or not you’ve grabbed the attention of your users successfully. Exit rates will tell you how many people left the website through a particular page, while bounce rates tell you how many people left the website without visiting a second page.
 
The potential drawback to measuring user behavior using bounce rate is when your website is intended to find what they are looking for on the entry page, as opposed to sites with well-defined conversion steps requiring multiple page views. In the latter case, bounce rate is a good metric to use in indicating conversion success.

3. Referrers

Where the visitor came from is a good metric in understanding why some visitors convert. A referrer is a website that sends you traffic. In addition to search engines, referrers send you traffic as well. Seek out those in your industry or network to build positive, meaningful relationships – whether it be through social network activity, blog conversations, or even writing articles in your niche. More conversions may end up coming from human referrals than search engines, as these individuals are likely in your industry and can see the need for your product or service moreso than the rest.

4. Call to Action Clicks

Your design should appeal and inspire your target audience to take action. Does the design make them feel like they are getting value from your services and, more importantly, are they clicking on the call to action buttons? Analytical tools provide reports to easily understand what users do on your site and where they are clicking. Alternately, you can use A/B testing to help test different designs and determine which is the most effective.

5. Conversions

If you’ve gotten this far, you know you’ve satisfied most of your visitors and gotten their attention. The crucial step now is to get them to convert. A conversion is a term used by marketers to describe the final outcome of a site visit. Don’t thwart your visitors from completed the intended action. This means optimising your web forms for your users and making the form submission or checkout process as user-friendly as possible.
 
The metric for measuring conversions is Funnels and/or Paths taken. Tools allow you to track funnels and paths to conversions. If you’re on a tight budget, Google Analytics’ goal and funnel-tracking can also be used.

Conclusion

With Web 2.0 and Analytics, a culture of improvement has been laid before us. We can gauge more accurately how visitors are interacting with your content. With these tools, the ability to improve the experience your online customers have is at your fingertips. In some cases, you no longer have to guess or wonder why your site is getting the results it is. How is web analytics working for you?

(this article was originally posted here)

When first starting out with your website, or even for those people who have had a website for a long time, understanding the basics of page titles can seem a mystery.

Most people still talk in keywords, and whilst this is important as it feeds into on page SEO and ultimately your page title, it is the actual page title field itself that is the most important area of each page at your website.

 

 

The Adobe Business Catalyst platform makes it easy for you to take control of your page title and keywords to get the best results from your website leading to quality traffic.

For a little 3 step tutorial on how to edit your page titles  - just click here!

Our top 7 tips are listed below

 

1. Write short Titles

Ideally your page title should have a maximum title length of 64-70 characters. This is mainly a display feature, Google spiders will still read the text, but a user will not see the full text in search results.

2. Identify your Keywords

Identify the keyphrases of your web page’s content. List down all possible words describing the content of your page. Step in the shoes of the user and list all the relevant search terms that he/she may formulate. The words used in your title will be displayed in search engine results as a clickable link. Therefore it should contain your page’s main keywords.

3. The important goes first

Start your title by adding the important keywords that you found during research. The words appearing first are considered to be more important.

4. Use targeted keywords

Choose specific keywords for your title in order to have more targeted traffic.

5. Be descriptive

Make sure that your title summarizes the content of your web page. In this way users will know what the topic of your page is, when it appears in the search results. This will help you decrease the bounce rate and increase the click through rate.

6. Create unique titles

Make sure you use unique titles for each web page. Duplicate titles might lead to duplicate content issues.

7. Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing or any other spam technique should be avoided. Even if you manage to rank first, an “over optimized” title will reduce your click through rate.

Don’t forget that you should always write webpage titles and content that is attractive to users!

By trying to achieve high rankings, people can forget that the most important factor of success is that users’ “click” on the website link.

The Adobe Business Catalyst Platform makes it easy for you to control your page title tags, giving you the power to maximise your search results. The latest round of enhancements to our platform has made this even easier for clients.

To make changes follow these 3 easy steps!

1. Go to the page you wish to make changes on - Via Websites - Web Pages

The new page title field will be visible straight away

2. Enter in the Keywords you wish to appear in your page title

Refer to our blog post 7 tips to boost your SEO results from Page Titles for more information

Save and Publish your page as normal

3. Your page title will now be amended, you can check this at the live site.

 

Note: When we build our sites, often clients do not know what to put on each individual page of their site, so we embed code that dynamically creates a page title tag for you (that summarises the key aspects of your business as well as the page name). Please contact us if you are ready to create unique page titles in this manner so we can amend our code.

This does not replace the actual PAGE TITLE that appears within the body of your content

 

Google just launched Google+, their answer to Facebook.

Our thinking is that the success of this new social network relies heavily on Google's 200M+ pre-existing Gmail Users that even then may still not ensure it's success (remember 'Wave'?).

For more info check out the Google promo video below, take a guided tour or this story at Mashable.com that comments on new features that are very un-Facebook.

Yes, you read it right - what on earth is 'on page seo'?

I have had this blog post in my head for a while now, and couldn't think of really clear cut example to describe how this helps your site ranking until now.

And it happened with one of our latest launches. Yay!

We had a site launch on Monday and 3 days later they are on page one of Google for their target key word searches.

How did this happen so fast!

3 simple steps

When we build a site we focus on 3 simple things to get your site noticed and ranking high inside Google lickety split!

1. Appropriate Page Title tags and Heading tags
2. Good key words that fit with your business
3. On page SEO - search engine optimisation.

I have spoken about the top 2 in the past - but what does number 3 mean?

If your site is about Chocolate Cake, then you would mention the words Chocolate and Cake alot - right?

Of course you would!

What is your key message?

You would be surprised at the number of clients who can find it hard to get to the heart of what their key pages are really about.

Well, if your site was about lighting and lights, I bet you would use those words quite regularly in your website copy. This is exactly what happened with B and B Lighting.
 
Have a look at their site - looks great, a clean and simple design, loaded with lighting goodies and just look at their lead in copy for the home page.  The team at B and B Lighting really focussed on what their business and website is all about!

You might need to have a different 'on page SEO' focus for various landing points at your site - ask yourself the question - if I had to summarise this page into 3 words - what would they be.

If you can't keep your page to a simple theme - then create a new page.

If you are confused about your key message - what will Google make of it! Or a potential customer?

It doesn't get much simpler than that - and really that is what it is all about.

If they can do it - so can you!  Call us now to discuss how we can get your site ranking better using the tools you already have.

How to get your customers to convert

Any sales process has a variety of methods to get the customer to convert, to commit, to open up the wallet!

What should you be doing at your website to trigger the same response?

Know your customer

Many businesses still make the mistake of thinking a website is just a brochure 'on the internet' for products and that it will magically just work!. They create it, leave it, and wonder why it’s not generating any traffic, let alone converting visitors.

It’s impossible to make an entire website relevant to everyone that visits. Instead, businesses should tailor separate sections of the website to what their customers will be interested in.

We are working on a site right now with 2 distinct audiences, teenage girls and their mothers. Our challenge in the design and structure is to meet those 2 different targets and we are guided by what our client tells us about what she undeerstands of her market.

Who are your customers and what are they looking for?

How do you segment them, it could be age, it could be demographic, it could be desires and goals, it could be needs and wants. Your answers will determine the content that will be on key landing pages of your site.

What do you want people to do when they get to a page?

You need to be clear about what it is you want visitors to do when they arrive on a page. Clear Calls to Action are critical for the key pages of your site - in fact all p-ages should have some kind of call to action on them - a point to reading and acting on the information.

Be mindful what the 'conversion' might be  - is it a order, a booking form, email subscription - what is the action you want to see happen?

K.I.S.S - Keep it simple stupid

We also advise our clients against making call's to action too hard - yes, you need to get information and you need to segment details - but don't make it a burden - you have about 10 seconds to get them to respond.  If your form or process is confusing or long winded - you can forget it. Just get the bare facts - you can grab the rest of the information in a more personal follow-up.

Analyse

Finally, pay attention to how your visitors respond to your triggers, review your weekly reports and then collate your monthly data. For more in-depth analysis, talk to us about Google Analytics and how this tool can provide additional information to support your sales methods.

We have quite a few clients who are now using our Pulsar Package coupled with ongoing Customer Care to really understand what is occurring with visits and traffic and assist with getting more clients 'over the line'

Well maybe that is a slight exaggeration - but Blogs are a powerful method of improving your website's ranking within google and make your entire website a more attractive and enticing option for viewers.

Here are a few reason's why!

Blogging gives your products and services personality. People like to do business with people they like. By reading your blog posts they get an idea of the kind of business that you are, how you do things and your style.  This personal aspect of blogging is one of it's most powerful characteristics.

Blogging is entertaining. Yes, blogging can be great fun. You might think that your products and services are a little dull, but someone, somewhere is interested in what you have to say! Particularly if your industry is a topic in the media at any given time -  Got something to say? Just say it. Invite comments from your readers, get a conversation going with your viewers, this enhances your credibility and encourages vital word of mouth!

Blogging encourages community. It's all about content - fast, useful and entertaining content that people enjoy reading. A recent example from our own client base involved Lordan's Saddlery blogging about the dramatic horse rescues during the QLD floods. This one little article generation huge interest and traffic for them - people interested in horses are likely to be interested in saddles!

Blogging is inexpensive. If you already use our email marketing tool, then you already can have access to our blog tool for free! Yep - just contact us and we will set up your blog TODAY! If you don't have email marketing and would like to get started with a blog, talk to us today about implementing a blog at your site! Our blog tool is fully integrated with your other website tools, so everything is all kept together making web administration a dream!

Search engines love blogs! It is said in many SEO forums that Google staff are great bloggers and subsequently Google spiders and indexes blogs more frequently that normal web sites. This may just be a rumour, but if you blog regularly there's a good chance Google and the other major search engines will spider your blog at the same interval looking for your new content. In additinal our tools are activing pushing your content to Google and BING each day, letting them know that more content has been created!

So what are you waiting for, get Blogging today!

I have included a list of Top 10 Tips for beginning bloggers and our Customer Support Team are happy to integrate and get you going today!

Another great article in the Sydney Morning Herald today about ecommerce and online sales - highlighting yet another reason to get selling online!

Soaring Rents quicken online retail revolution.

For quite a few years now Australia has lagged the world in the take up of ecommerce stores, many of the big retailers have dabbled but not really entered into the fray and consequently have seen large slices of market share go offshore, but what is happening locally?

In  2010 we saw a huge leap in requests for online stores - large and small - everything from selling a few items to selling thousands of items online.

Why?

Many of our smaller retailers often can struggle for customers, floods, droughts and slow throughput past a traditional bricks and mortar business can play havoc with cashflow.

Working with us over the last 12 months, many of our clients have taken the leap from simple website to full e-commerce and are now selling all over Australia and overseas.

Don't miss this growth opportunity!

By including a combination of seamless catalogue and shopping cart integration and email marketing coupled with appropriate search engine optimisation techniques and the clever and cost effective use of social media, our clients have seen entire new revenue streams and loyal customers enter their online stores.

Good brands help, good prices of course (because let's face it, all online shoppers are looking for bargains!) but most importantly our successful ecommerce clients take on board the tips we provide and strategies we develop with them to sell more online.

If you believe that 2011 is the year to get selling online - speak to us now, browse our Galaxy package samples, speak to our customers.

We know we can build your online brand and grow your revenue stream through successful selling online!

The follow video is great overview of ecommerce growth in Australia in the past year and the trends for 2011