User Experience

Managing your website analytics is already difficult, but when you don’t understand the traffic metrics, then it’s just about impossible.  Bounce rate is a commonly misunderstood metric.

What is a Bounce?

A bounce is a visitor who arrives on your site, views one page, and immediately leaves your website. By this definition, the bounce rate is the total number of visits with only one page view divided by the total number of visits to your site.

The key word in the definition is “page”.  Most people...

Read More » »

What is the one thing your Chamber of Commerce website can't do? Lose a prospective member of course!

If your website is the 24/7/365 salesperson it's supposed to be, you need to make sure there is no chance a prospect is going to walk away because they can't find your join button. This button will lead your site visitor to your defined target page to be a member. The resulting page can also serve as a sales pitch to why they should become a member and what the ROI is for membership.  Here is an...

Read More » »

At WebLink, we've long said that Chambers of Commerce were the original social networking platform and involvement in the business social scene is crucial for your organization.  As the pinnacle of your local business community, your Chamber should always look for additional ways to engage your audience and measure your results. This list features super helpful social tools that make the most efficient use of your time communicating and engaging the businesses in your community.

While engaging...

Read More » »

As we continue to down the "List of Best and Worst practices for designing a high traffic website" breakdown, we're now ready to talk about Keyword Phrases.  Specificly, we're looking at what additional groups of words you could used to be found for the essentially the same thing.

We're going to use the Eau Claire Area Chamber of Commerce as our example.  For the Chamber to maximize its chances to be found in the search engines, they would want to use as many variations of their name as they can:

...

Read More » »

In this post from the "List of Best and Worst practices for designing a high traffic website" we're talking about Keyword Proximity.

9.  Keyword Proximity

When we're talking about keyword proximity, we're simply talking about how close your keywords are to each other.  Now this really is only an issue if your target is a multiple-word keyword like this - Chamber Membership Management Software.

The key to this is to get your text as close as you can to each other.  You'll still get some value from...Read More » »

I was just recently told meta data has minimal impact on search.  I was a little surprised at that statement.  Yes, according to the "List of Best and Worst practices for designing a high traffic website", meta data has lost some of it's power to influence.

8.  Keywords in Meta Tags

According to the guys at Webconf.com:

"Less and less important, especially for Google. 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...

Read More » »

So to continue on thy conquest of "List of Best and Worst practices for designing a high traffic website", we're entering the land of Keywords in <alt> tags.

7.  Keywords in <alt> tags

Since search engine spiders can't determine what the make up of a image file they use text descriptions to get an idea.  These text descriptions are know as <alt> tags.  This feature is also used for the visually impaired.

So if I wanted to be sneaky, I could say that the image file with this post was about Technology...

Read More » »

Next up on the "List of Best and Worst practices for designing a high traffic website" is the use of keywords in the beginning of a page.

The beginning of the document can be really important when it comes to what is indexed by the search engines.  According to the guys at WebConfs.com, this might not play as big a role as the other keyword-related topics, but still is important.

Once again, we'll stay home for our example and use the WebLink Case Studies page.

Screen Capture from WebLink... Read More » »

The headings are the font tags like this - <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc.  You'll only get the value out of "Keywords in the headings" if you actually use headings.  We see the use of <font size="18px"> in place of the practice of using headings a lot and you'll be losing out on a valuable SEO best practice.

If we take a look at the WebLink International - Website Design page, we'll see that we used the title of the page "Website Design" in the <h1> format and the heading of "Elevate your Website" in...

Read More » »

The next post on the "List of Best and Worst practices for designing a high traffic website" is about keywords in the anchor text.

4.  Keywords in anchor text

And no, that's not the type of anchor we're talking about! :)

Anchor text is defined as the visible text component of a hyperlink in a page. For example, here is an anchored text using one of our targets:  membership management software.

The reason anchor text is important is because a link is considered a vote from the site that link comes...

Read More » »

I have no excuse for not posting sooner - expect my dog ate the list I was using.  Not really, but it worked in 2 grade and it didn't help that I was a cute little guy!  :)  Anyway, I'm back and ready to continue on the "List of Best and Worse practices for designing a high traffic website" list.  Up next:

3.  Keyword density in document text

The term keyword density (KD) is define by the percentage of targeted words that are part of your page content.  For instance if you have a 100 word document...

Read More » »

Number 2 on the list of best and worst practices for designing a high traffic website:  Keywords in URL

2.  Keywords in URL

This one is pretty easy.  Simple put if you have the name of the page that corresponds to the content of the page which will fall in line with the keywords of that page, then you'll accomplish by default.  They won't say you can't hit water if you fell out of boat if you can pull this one off!  ;)

Here is an example of a page that is talking about membership at the Lake... Read More » »

Here we are at the beginning of a beautiful stretch of SEO highway!  :)  Are you as excited as I am here?  Ok, enough of that...let's rock out!

The first of many posts on SEO to-do list found on the webconf.com website is working keywords into your <title> tag.

Keywords in <title> tag

The <title> tag is found in the head code of your website page.  Here is an example from the Boston Chamber of Commerce website which was just recently launched:


The value of putting your keywords into the <title> tag...Read More » »

Ok boys and girls; pull up the boot straps for this one.  I'm going to break down the "List of Best and Worse practices for designing a high traffic website" article found on the webconfs.com website.  Once a week, I'll add a post that gives you a simplified explanation how you can use this information to improve your own website.



Now the page you'll land on talks about "15 minute SEO list" and I'm not sure why.  It might take you 15 minutes to read it, but to implement anything here will take...Read More » »

Your website is a membership sales person whether you know it or not and it’s probably the best ‘employee’ you have.  Never calls in sick, never asks for a raise and lets you know everything that is going on.

The first two are simple to understand, but the third point can be confusing.  How does your website tell you anything?  By leveraging the web analytics, or web stats, from your website you can tell a LOT about what is going with your organization and what your users are looking for.

By using...

Read More » »