Writing copy for the Web that grabs attention and gets the results you want takes special skill and attention.

Oftentimes, companies will forgo writing web copy and repurpose brochure copy. Writing copy for the web is remarkably different than writing copy for print. Here are a few tips to make sure your web content is spectacular and resonates with site visitors.

Before any web copy is written, the following information should be available to the web copywriter(s).

1. SEO/SEM Report or Findings – the web copywriter will use the report as a guide to segue words or phrases that will help ‘optimize’ the content web page.
2. Persona or Voice of Customer - understanding the attributes of customers that you want to engage at your content web page will help dictate the impact statements or ‘headings and sub heads’ for the section (different and distinct from navigation or menu).
3. Functional Web Page Elements – understanding what other functionality will appear on the page will help the web copywriter(s) craft content that will work collaboratively with feature boxes, call to action scenarios or other promotional items.  Having a layout or ‘wireframe’ of what will appear on the page will work well here.

Now that the web copywriter has a clear vision of the type of customer, how the customer gets to the page and what the customer will likely experience, they are ready to begin writing.

1. Headings and Sub Heads - On the web, you can ‘make or break’ interaction to your web pages with headings. A good one makes it easier for readers to understand the significance of the content and will likely get them to read more. Headings and sub heads should be short, clear and concise ranging from 7 – 10 words.
2. Amount of Content – Begin by envisioning a ‘picture paragraph’ – that is, content that is solid and clear enough to get the point across and fall ‘above the fold’ (fits within the visitor window). Remember that shorter is better – paragraph length should be no more than 50-60 words.
3. Editing – It is always advisable from both a quality assurance perspective and from a visitor’s view to have someone review and edit web copy.  Reason simply, diverse users to the web content may not interpret or understand what has been written and may need some ‘dumbing down’ for the content to resonate. 

Whether you're trying to sell products or services at a business or commercial site or if you just want to let people know the latest at your personal site, content is just as important as any of the other elements that constitute the overall brand strategy for your web site – chose wisely.

Resources:

Net Words: Creating High-Impact Online Copy by Nick Usborne

Content is King! Evaluating Content Management Systems

Best,

Denice MacDonald

Let's face it, successful SEO is hard.  Reason simply, SEO is not a want, it is a necessity.  According to Jill Whalen, CEO and founder of High Rankings, "...a sick web site leaves money on the table".

Without proper web page optimization, an organization is losing out on search engine visibility and possible customer conversion.  One of the first diagnostic tests in your SEO checklist is to see how Google views your home page (or any page of your site) by taking a look at how it looks in Google's "text cache."

Additional warning signs (symptoms) include:

• Missing page content
• Missing navigational links
• List of unlinked words
• Keyword stuffed paragraphs that aren't normally visible

Although a good exercise, it is only the first step in elevating an organization's web page rankings.  

For more information and Search Engine Guidelines visit:

• http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/
• http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/index.html
• http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx

Lastly, stay connected on latest SEO trends, reviews and content sharing at:

• http://www.SEOMoz.org

Best

Denice MacDonald

[Credit: Jill Whalen, CEO and founder of High Rankings]

One of the most important sections of a web site is the web form page. Whether the goal of your site is to get visitors to sign up for your e-mail newsletter, fill out a form for more information, get a quote or purchase a product online, every aspect of your form can potentially impact conversions, and therefore should be carefully examined.

When first thinking about creating web forms, you must think beyond the input fields. When your visitors look at a web form, it’s not just a one-time decision that is being made, but more likely a series of mini-decisions. Does this graphic grab my interest? Does this headline make me want to learn more? Do I want to provide my e-mail address? Do I want to give out my phone number? Should I hit the Submit button? Do I want to refer to a friend?

Anything that is created on the form page, from top to bottom, creates or motivates a decision to act.

Here are some aspects of a web form page you should consider:

1. Headline - create a sense of urgency in an impact statement that appeals to YOUR customer - cliche one-liners won't work here.
2. Form layout - less is more here, keep it simple and easy to understand.
3. Pricing - make it clear what the price is AND include value (free shipping, discounts etc.).
4. Fields - include only fields that are necessary - too many fields will cause a visitor to opt-out.
5. Opt-in copy - should be enticing and include privacy/spam language.
6. Links - ahhh....links will not only entice but also steer customers to learn more about you or your affiliates.
7. Submit buttons - believe it or not, the size, shape and placement of your submit button can make or break the final step (conversion) of your web form.

How do you know if the web form is meeting a visitors criteria? 

Similar to a web content page, layout the form in a wireframe - outlining exactly where fields, graphics and other interactive features will reside.  Compare against customer expectations, demographics and psychographic needs.  

In some instances, the web form is the first impression of your organization if it is used in conjunction with trade show lead generation, custom landing page supporting an adword campaign or simply a direct custom URL to a product.  Remember, your goal is to get the customer to act.

Additional Resources:

Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks by Luke Wroblewski

Creating Wireframes

Optimizing Web Forms

Many organizations are obsessed with volume – measuring their web metrics strategy by how many web pages that were viewed or by how many people that have visited. In many cases, this type of information is meaningless as it is not directly linked to a web plan or strategy.

Whether its web site traffic analysis, search engine optimization or tracking business success metrics, you need to develop a web strategy ‘up front’ to support measurement objectives. This thought process seems so fundamental but rarely exercised.  Take these simple rules:

A strategic plan for evaluating your web site will help you:

1. Collect only the data you need to make informed, strategic decisions
2. Identify priority “action areas” for improvement, measure the impact of those actions; and keep your customers coming back
3. Determine benchmarks and performance goals you should aspire to, and the extent to which you’re achieving them
4. Determine whether you’re getting a return on the investment you’ve made to build, operate and maintain your web site(s)
5. Evaluate how well your web site is performing relative to competitors, your company's brand, mission statement or hiring criteria

Develop a plan – a strategy – and review and adjust it regularly by asking these questions:

• What do you need to measure
• What are your requirements
• How will you measure it
• What tools will you use
• What methodologies are needed to gather the data you need
• What will you do with the results
• How will the results help meet the goals for your web site and your company's mission
• How does the plan fit with your company's overall strategic and performance plan

Once armed with this process and validation, you will find that your ROI exceeds expectations.

Great Resources:

Coremetrics Web Metrics
Get powerful web site metrics with the leading provider

Web Measurement Data Fast
ClickTracks web measurement shows behavior, conversion, groups, SEO

WebTrends Analytics
Marketing Intelligence Solutions, leading analytic & metrics software

Web Analytics
Compare web analytics products and get a free report sample from CMS Watch

Best,

Denice MacDonald

According to Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Webmaster Central Blog: “URLs are like the bridges between your website and a search engine's crawler.  Crawlers need to be able to find and cross those bridges (i.e., find and crawl your URLs) in order to get to your site's content”. 

If your URLs are complicated or redundant, crawlers are going to spend time tracing and retracing their steps. However, if your URLs are organized and lead directly to distinct content, crawlers can spend their time accessing your content rather than crawling through empty pages, or crawling the same content over and over via different URLs.

Susan provides exceptional learning in a slideshare that can be accessed here.

More tips:

Length of URLs - keep your URLs as short as possible and try to remove all unnecessary folder names. The shorter the URL, the higher the keyword density and the better for your placement in search engine results. Likewise, the closer your main keywords are to the beginning of the URL, the better.

Keywords in URLs - use the same main keywords your webpage is optimized for as this should be the search phrase you want to rank high on. Expanding the range of keywords should not be done in an URL, this should be done in <h2> or <h3> tags or plain text.

Use Hyphens - try not to use underscores in URLs as they are not used as dividers by Google. Use hyphens, periods, or commas instead. Hyphens or dashes are more user friendly and people will find your URL easier to remember. If you use underscore, you will actually have to search on “keyword1_keyword2” to find your webpage. Using hyphens will allow your pages to be found using “keyword1-keyword2” etc. 

Best

Denice MacDonald

A heat map is a picture of a web page that shows where users click when they visit a particular page.  From a techy perspective, a heat map is artificial intelligence that simulates human vision during the first 5 seconds of exposure to visuals.  

How does it work? 

The areas that are clicked most often appear in red (hot spot), while the areas clicked least often appear in blue or with no color at all.   

Why should you care? 

Heat maps are a tool used by web developers as part of usability testing. Understanding how visitors behave when they visit your web site is crucial to improving its effectiveness – not to mention conversion.  

Looking at the image to the right, it appears that MacDonald Consulting needs to improve image placement on the header and within center copy real estate to increase visitor interaction and conversion. Doing so will encourage visitors to click on header links (top blue area to the right within the graphic).

How to build a website heat map:

Two of the most popular heat map generator applications are FuseStats and CrazyEgg but they charge for their service.  

Feng-GUI, however, offers free access to their service but there are some restrictions.

Best

Denice MacDonald

You finally launched a much-anticipated Web 2.0+ web site and you can’t wait to hunker down and review your analytics. How do you gauge if your analytics for your site are appropriate, measurable and definable? And most importantly, who in your organization would benefit? 

Moving from a silo to a working team 

In the past, most web sites were created and managed within a silo. Now, it is recommended that organizations have a dedicated department or team leader focused to web statistics, watching the performance of various campaigns and then analyzing certain key metrics leading to higher ROI. After keen observation and reporting, useful recommendations are made to the various departments regarding how to increase conversions. 

Connecting the dots 

In many cases, the statistical information from web pages are important to the sales and marketing department as they relate to collaborative online and offline initiatives. The information technology department may find the numbers helpful in determining browser and network bandwidth needs. Web designers would be interested in the numbers to determine if each web page is attracting the number of visitors it should.

If a web page, or the entire site is underperforming, the web traffic statistics will reflect this and specific parts of the web site may need to be re-designed to attract more traffic. Lastly, management will want to see that the ongoing investment in the web site is yielding a definable ROI. Connecting disciplines and/or departments will help the organization perform on all four cylinders - defining and redefining web strategy as necessary. 

Web analytics – the PLAN 

Start with figuring out what you want to do with web analytics. You need to have a plan to have an idea of what your return will be on your investment. Again, this will include collaboration with other departments and disciplines. Then, you will need to select an analytics tool that works in tandem with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the organization resulting in reporting that makes sense to the various stakeholders. 

The right tools

Not all analytic tools are alike. Take time to review and possibly demo various options. Here are a few popular and time-tested solutions worth reviewing.

Google Analytics

IndexTools

Omniture's Site Catalyst

Unica's Net Insight

Web Trends

Coremetrics

For web statistics 'best practices' and more, visit: The Web Analytics Association 

Best

Denice MacDonald

How are you really going to fare during this tough recession? Simply by measuring everything you do on the web. So to help you out, I'm providing all the great tools that will accelerate conversion rates and increase web ROI -- not to mention tools to help you keep an eye on your competition! 

Once you start diving into a few of these, you will get the gist on which ones will meet your needs.

1 -- Rankings, Demographics and Usage

• http://www.quantcast.com/

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2 -- Key Organic Words and Adwords Traffic

• http://www.semrush.com/

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3 -- How Your Site Fares Against Your Competition

• http://www.compete.com/

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4 -- Reciprocal Links/Keyword Ads and Variations

• http://www.alexa.com/

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5 -- Paid Words

• http://www.keywordspy.com/

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6 -- SEO Competitive Analysis/Benchmarking

• http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

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7 -- Sign up for Website Grader

• http://website.grader.com/

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8 -- Web Analyzer (analyzes customer web logs – this one is free)

• http://www.quest.com/funnel-web-analyzer/

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9 -- All types of SEO Tools for Free

• http://www.seomoz.org/

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10 -- Web Analytic Thought Leaders

• http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/

Best

Denice MacDonald

Internal search relates to keywords that people use while visiting your web site. On average, 10% of all visitors to web sites will use ‘search’ for one reason or another.

When using internal search, visitors are able to search web site content on their own terms, specify their intent through refinements and evaluate related content for further exploration and discovery¹. If there is a disruption in finding content or if visitors feel that they do not get satisfying results, they will abandon the effort and possibly leave the web site altogether. 

How do you know if your internal site search is meeting visitor expectations? And more importantly, is the internal search function aiding in converting visitors? Internal site search is successful only when it works in tandem with well defined content or properly segmented product or services (navigation and taxonomy).

Check these quick metrics to gauge the effectiveness of your web site’s internal search: 

What is the average number of searches per visit? The average is roughly 2-3 times per visit. A ratio above this benchmark could be a sign that your content is not relevant or your navigation structure needs work. 

What is the percentage of visitors going directly to search from their initial entry page? For example, a retail site with a high percentage of new visitors going directly to search is probably not optimal. Visitors should be able to get to product by navigation, product links or targeted content. 

How many searches resulted in “0 matches” as a percent of search attempts? You want this number to be as low as possible. Misspellings, buzzwords, the use of phrases associated with a competitor, or even lack of your search solution crawling all your content can be the issue. You would be surprised how often the entire site is not crawled (sections such as about, news etc.) with site search concentrating solely on product results.

What percent of visitors gave up on your search and abandoned your site from the search page as a result of too few or too many results?  Moreover, if a null page is returned, are there help, FAQs or ‘suggestions’ to keep the visitor interested? 

Excerpts:

• Kick Butt with Internal Site Search Analytics¹
• Internal Search Report  
• Internal Search: 7 ways to ensure your users can find your information

Internal Search Tools and Resources:

• Endeca
• Fast Search (Microsoft Subsidiary)
• Google Search Appliance 

Best

Denice MacDonald

Flash and AJAX are two technologies that enhance the user experience on a web site and are supported by almost every browser and operating system.  Only pitfall -- this technology is not SEO-friendly.

However, in early July, Adobe Systems Incorporated announced the company is teaming up with search industry leaders to dramatically improve search results of dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs). Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines.

This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can now be confident it can be found by users around the globe.

BUT, a few technical bloggers out there say that the technology is not quite there yet:

Flash's New SEO is Over-Hyped by IckyDime

Flash indexing and SEO; Remember testing? by "Dion"

This blogger definitely has some sound solutions for Flash and SEO challenges: 

4 SEO Solutions for Flash by Benj Arriola

Best,

Denice MacDonald

Does your Web site deserve to succeed? According to Sarah at OneUpWeb, it doesn't if you're not constantly testing to make sure that it is easy to navigate, delivers the right kinds of information and snags conversions (be they subscriptions, lead generations or actual sales).

Hours of SEO work and carefully researched pay-per-click campaigns are practically worthless if the landing page doesn't convert users -- or they get lost in the process somewhere else on the Web site. Sarah suggests testing factors like your site's checkout process (if there is one), conversion click paths, as well as multiple image and text layouts to KNOW which features are working -- not just assume. She also offers a strategy for determining which site factors are most important for you to test, from products, to presentation to channel factors. 

In summary:

Test your site post launch to insure the user is getting to where they need to go (click paths, conversion etc. – including checkout if e-commerce enabled) 

Supplement highly interactive ads with contextual ads (measure both)

Two Word Searches: Nearly 32% of all searchers around the globe use two-word search queries, according to research from Amsterdam-based OneStat

Search engine ‘boxes’ can have both word search and ‘suggested’ search for optimum user interaction to sites 

Read Full Article Here

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Need help - try out these guys:

Charlie Sweet, Web Technology Manager at Aloha Inc. (specialty: full service)

Eric Herzberg, Owner, Linkage Internet Consulting (specialty: pay-per-click)

Denice MacDonald, President, MacDonald Consulting (specialty: link building and search engine marketing)