Putting strong effort into optimizing your site for search engines is commendable and certainly helps visitors find you and ytour products and services.  But, what will they find when they get to your site?  The SEO may be professional, but your visitors are looking for more than a pretty title tag!

Here are a few tips on how to make sure your site is ’sticky’ and convinces visitors to stay put:

Header Tags: Not Just for SEO Anymore-Careful use of H tags (headers) throughout your site can help with SEO by acting as a place to inform search engines of important keywords and areas of emphasis in your copy.  However, headers also help with site visitor ADD by grabbing visitors’ attention and helping focus them on important areas of content.

Fast Loading Pages-You know how it is. You visit a site, only to find a slow loading Flash introduction or a page that loads piece by precious piece, taking ten, fifteen, thirty seconds to load.  I know I don’t stick around for those sites, no matter how badly I want their product or service.  Your visitors won’t stick around either.  Make sure your website is written with clean code and all images and materials are optimized, and it loads quickly, or your visitors will bounce!

Printable Content-Your important content should be printable, especially if it’s a long piece or multiple pages.  A well-placed ‘Print this page’ icon or text helps your visitors, and while it’s printing, they may just browse around your products or store! 

Speaking of Content…content is king! If you regularly add fresh, usable content to the site that they can’t find on competior sites, you can gurantee they’ll stick around to read it!

The nuns were right! Grammar counts! Sure, no one’s going to reach through your monitor with a ruler and knuckle smack you for writing poorly composed content for your site.  Your visitors will make their opinion known, however, and leave your site fast if there are many grammatical and spelling errors.  It also reflects on your products, unfortunately.  Have a professional content developer or someone with good writing skills create your content, if you can’t.  A professional and clean site makes people feel secure in their interactions with your business and ensures more purchases.

FREEBIES! Do you have any free software, samples, white papers and the like that would be of value to your visitors?  Make them downloadable right from you website!  People LOVE freebies and will stick around to browse your site while their goodies download and will visit often, to see what else you might offer on a regular basis!

Those are just a few of many tips to keep people on your website. 

In a post the other day at the International Industrial SEO blog, I mentioned that in South Korea, home internet connection speeds of 20mbps are the norm, and 100mbps is possible in newer developments.  When watching the Olympics last night, I saw a commercial for a new fiber optic internet service, finally bringing speeds of up to 20mpbs to homes in the US.  Of course, this isn’t available in all areas yet, but it might be part of a new start in internet trends, something which the Olympics may help as well.

Yesterday, NBC announced that 50% of people using mobile phones to access the NBC Olympics sites and view videos were doing so for the first time.  That’s over 200,000 people every day trying out mobile media.  They’ve also seen millions of users send and view videos from NBC’s Olympics website.  The men’s 4×100 relay alone has been streamed over 1.7 million times.  Although most people are still watching Olympics on TV, there have been huge increases in traffic to Olympic related sites, with Yahoo!’s and NBC’s sites leading the way.  Again, the Olympic fever is drawing people to the Internet and websites to learn information, watch videos, and more.  Along the way, they’re also learning about new technology and its accessibility.  For those with mobile phones watching Olympics videos, they now know that their phone is a way for them to easily access the internet and find information.  Hopefully they’ll take that knowledge and use their mobile search abilities more often.  If we get better, faster internet connections as well, online media will definitely enjoy more popularity than it already does.

Blogging may also get a small boost as well.  It’s very popular already, and major news outlets like NBC and the NY Times are keeping them.  Most are written by reporters, but there are some written by athletes.  There’s nothing terribly new in these blogs in terms of how they’re delivered to readers or website visitors or the content, but maybe they are still reaching an audience that is new to blogs or has yet to see what a blog can do for spreading information and encouraging interaction online.   You can read more about blogging and businesses in this post.

If you’re wondering how this all might affect your industrial business, think of it in terms of longer internet trends.  The Olympics may only be a two-week event, but so far they’ve opened the door to new mobile users, millions of people are streaming and sending videos, and telecommunications companies are advertising faster, better internet.  All this media might not bring a new conversion tomorrow, but it has opened the door to our future internet possibilities.  Now it’ll be up to websites to provide the content and media to encourage internet users to make the most of their online experience.  And then those conversions will come.  Bottom line: Provide a content rich site that will attract visitors, with media, good text, and good usability.

Google reached its highest market share yet last, accounting for 70.77 percent of all U.S. searches last month. Yahoo came in second with 18.65%, followed by MSN with 5.36% according to HitWise.

If you follow your website’s sites analytics, this will come as no surprise. I’ve seen more and more sites getting over 70% of the search engine traffic from Google. It’s clear Google is going to continue to dominate the search engine market for many months, possibly years, to come. Here are some ways you can increase your rankings in Google:

1 Update your pages and/or create new ones on regular basis. Once a week is best, monthly will still help. Examples: create an FAQ or Industries Served page. Add PDFs, CAD drawings, images, or freshen up the copy of existing pages.

2. Set up a Google Webmasters Tools account and create a custom XML site map. This will help your site get crawled on a regular basis and it also tells Google what are the most important pages of your site.

3. Get more quality links to your site. The number and quality of your incoming links has a big impact on your rankings. One way to build links is to contact all the organizations you belong to and ask them to link back to you.

As a follow up to the post ‘Business Blogs-Who Needs ‘Em Anyway?’, I thought I would post a link to another blog with a great list of the top corporate and business blogs.

 Enjoy!

 15 Companies That Really Get Corporate Blogging

We’ve all been to the bank and have seen the promotional banners exclaiming: “Let us make your money work for you!” Your website should be working for you, too!  A well-designed industrial website with great organic ranking is a real money-maker.  RFQs will tumble into your inbox and you’ll receive plenty of conversions on your contact forms, too.

But how do you know if your site is meeting it’s potential or is a real money-pit?

Here’s a handy checklist so you can do a quick site audit on your website!

Design aspects of your website

• Splash Page-A splash page on a website is in the top five worst mistakes you can make with a site design, in my opinion.  It might even be fighting with frames for the number one spot. A splash page for a site is useless other than providing a graphical entrance point, often built in Flash, and rarely containing any relevant and useful content or links. 
    
  The majority of splash pages do not contain navigation of any kind, leaving users without the latest version of Flash enabled out in the cold, with no means of entering or navigating the site.  It also blocks search engines from entering the rest of your site.  Your “welcoming entry page” is really a locked door, preventing your site from ranking and your visitors from making a successful conversion.
• Frames-I don’t just optimize sites, I also design and I have to say…my stomach clenches when I see frames on a modern website.  Sure, I can let it slide if it’s a site from 1998, but a recent design?  That’s just a mean thing to do to a web design client.  There is no way to SEO a site with frames, plain and simple. If your site is in frames, whether it’s an old site or new (shudder!), a re-design is definitely in order!

 

• Flash-There’s been a lot of chatter recently about how Flash is now able to be spidered and indexed by search engines, but this is a long way from a foolproof truth.  Full Flash designs are great for multimedia approaches where use of the latest web technology is warranted, such as for education, music or gaming sites.  However, if your site is built completely in Flash and you aren’t the Rolling Stones, nor do you sell video games, you might want to re-think your site’s design.  

  While aspects of Flash designs are spiderable, it’s still piecemeal and there is no guarantee that all of your site will be found by the search engines.  You can make some concessions though, by either designing an HTML version of your site to offer visitors and the search engines, or you can re-design the site with both Flash and HTML.  Read more about how to choose between HTML and/or Flash for a search engine friendly website.

Technical Issues

• Dynamic URLs-If you are using a content management sysytem or database that hasn’t been designed with SEO in mind, you may see this kind of URL: http://www.mydomain.com/details.asp?state=california&county=orange-county.  That is one ugly URL!  And not very accessible for the search engines or your visitors.  URLs with many variables such as the one above are called query strings, and they can become quite cumbersome.  They are difficult for your visitors to remember and search engine spiders will often abandon them if they are too long, leaving entire sections of your site unspidered. 

  The solution is to spend a little time incorporating URL rewrites into the site.  URL rewriting involves masking the dynamic URLs with static URLs. The long-winded URL above becomes masked by an SEO- and user-friendly one like this: http://www.mydomain.com/details/california/orange-county.  Isn’t that pretty?  Google’s spiders think so!

• Navigation and menus-Take a look at your navigation.  Is it image-based or built with Flash?  If so, it’s definitely not search engine friendly.  Flash menus are shiny and pretty but can prevent spiders from exploring your entire site and if your visitors don’t have the proper version of Flash, they won’t see your navigation at all.  Image-based navigation is also difficult to spider, because search engines can’t read the text in the images.  If your ALT tags are inaccurate or missing completely, you lose out on the opportunity to gain ranking for important keywords in the navigation.

  Every page in your site is an opportunity to incorporate the keywords and phrases that will bring you traffic.  Good navigation is key to making sure the search engines reach every page and rank you for the keywords you’re focusing on.  In a perfect world, your navigation would be text-based and styled with CSS.  Each naviagtion link would contain the keywords of the page you are linking to, to ensure relevance and enhanced page rank.  Your menu is a major roadmap to your site, for searchengines and your potential customers.  Help them along with a clearly defined, text-based navigation.

• Sitemaps-If your web designer is worth their salt, they added an HTML sitemap to your site.  This is the basic sitemap that all websites should have.  It is essential for visitor usability, as it acts as a ’search’ function if your site doesn’t have one, or visitors reach your 404 error page and don’t know where to go next.  It’s also critical for SEO, as it’s basically a list of the key pages of your site, organized and in order, for the search engines to follow.

  Better still is to implement an XML sitemap.  This is a step up from a basic XML sitemap that is only visible and readable by the search engines.  They are highly customizable, can be dynamically generated and list every page available that search engines may not be able to find otherwise.  Read more about dynamic XML sitemaps here.  With an HTML and XML sitemap in place, your site is a veritable beacon to the search engines, with deeper indexing nearly guaranteed.

Your site should be working hard for you and the points listed above can really help your site move up in rankings and search engine presence.  It’s only a start, but what a great start to make!

Let us make your site work for you!  To learn more about industrial and commercial website search engine optimization, contact us!

It used to be that a well-designed site (or even a badly designed one!), a healthy dose of thoughtful and ethical site optimization and well-placed backlinks used to be sufficient for top placement in the SERPs (search engine result pages).  With the advent of Universal Search in mid-2007, businesses have been challenged to keep their websites performing well in the search engines.

To explain, search engine results used to be made up of comparisons of websites’ pages to each other, with those most relevant to the search term appearing in the results.  With Universal Search in place, results are now made up of ‘vertical’ search results, namely: blogs, news, video, local search/maps, images, products and books.  This blending of vertical search and web search makes for a more ‘unified’ web and offers greater relevancy and choice to those using a search engine such as Google, Yahoo or MSN.

Universal Search focuses heavily on social media, and new SEO strategies for your industrial or commercial website must be used to keep up with the amount of multimedia content being added to the web every day.  Here are few suggestions for staying ahead of the game!

Create Opportunities for Client Participation

A blog is a great tool for businesses to reach out to their clients and site visitors.  It also allows clients to engage you in ways that weren’t possible in older business communications models.  Not all businesses need a blog, but if it’s appropriate for your marketing presence, by all means start a business blog!  Through the implementation of streaming media, podcasts, pictures and more, you can bring your visitors right into your company, giving them a deeper level of personal contact.

Incorporate Multimedia into Your Online Marketing Strategy

There’s more to your business presence on the web than your website!  Leverage the power of the web to integrate multimedia materials into your website, blog and more.

• Google image search is a powerful search tool-ensure that you use standard naming conventions for your site and blog images, use keyword-rich file names and create ALT tags that are readable but also incorporate keywords.
• Google Video and YouTube-There are many ways to reach out to potential customers with a well-produced company video!  You can film a case study or two, demonstrating a process or product that was particularly innovative.  A short film of a mechanical process can illustrate the versatility or efficiency of a machine or machining system.  And you can’t beat a clip of a client giving a testimonial or positive review to show others that you’re in touch and run a great business!When uploading your videos to YouTube or Google Video, be sure to use a readable description and title tag that include some of your important keywords.  You can also create a dedicated ‘Videos’ page on your website to showcase your videos, with optimized tags and content.

Make Sure Your Local Search Presence is Strong

• Google Local Business Center, Yahoo Local and other local searches are a goldmine!  By integrating local search SEO strategies into your website, you have the ability to offer your customers accurate, real-time mobile search results. You also give your potential customers the ability to find you and call you for services without ever visiting your website.  Read more about the benefits of local and mobile search here.

Keep Content on Your Site Fresh and Appealing

• You can keep visitors on your site longer by making sure you add relevant and appealing content on a regular basis.  You can offer pricing deals, whitepapers, spec sheets, news items, special events and updated product information.  The sky’s the limit with your site and/or business blog!  The more relevant and useful content you offer, the more your visors, and the search engines will want to visit again and again!

By taking a careful inventory of your company’s digital assets, optimizing them for use on the web with search engines in mind and creating new materials and content on a regular basis, you can make the most of Universal Search and maintain your place in the top of the SERPs!

Tracy’s post the other day on cross linking keywords inspired me to write this post on calls to action. The go hand in hand with cross linking, but instead of highlighting the importance of a keyword, they encourage your website’s visitors to complete an action, whether it’s requesting contact information or reading an FAQ to learn more. Calls to action can help you move and direct your websites visitors through the site. Links in these statements help you emphasize what pages are important, whether they’re cross linked keywords or a link to the RFQ and facilities lists pages.

To show you how many clicks calls to actions can receive, here are some examples:

“To begin your industrial website’s redesign, contact Ecreativeworks to request a quote today.”

As you can see, the “contact Ecreativeworks” link got 14% of the clicks on that particular page. That’s a lot of clicks! That first sentence has a lot of action in it. The visitor is told how they can begin a website redesign and encouraged to begin that process.

“Be sure to check out the basics, like wire and cable.”

11% and 10% of visitors clicked on simple terms like “wire” and “cable,” respectively. A simple reminder or encouragement to “check out the basics” obviously goes a long way. Anticipating a visitor’s needs, such as wire and cable in addition to specialty products, is an important aspect of a good call to action.
Again, good calls to action can help you cross link and direct your traffic flow, encouraging conversions and helping you share your information and expertise. What are some good calls to action you’ve written or seen lately?

Cross linking is when you link from one page of your industrial site to another within the copy. Here’s how it works. Google gives more weight in the algorithm, or “credit”, to a keyword that is in a link. Google also gives credit to the page that you are linking for that keyword. So you get a “two for one” credit for “electroplating” when you cross link with that keyword. MSN and Yahoo also give more credit to a keyword in a link, so you’ll improve your keyword rankings there as well. Remember to use your keywords in your links! It’s a good idea to cross link to pages outside your site occasionally, as long as it’s not to your competitors.

Cross linking is also great for usability. It’s easier for a person to click on a link in the copy while they’re reading then it is to look back to the navigation to find the next place to go. When you look at this overlay from Google Analytics, you can see where people are clicking on the links within the text:

Cross linking does take some time to do, but it’s worth it – better keyword rankings, more search engine traffic, and improved usability. What other benefits have you seen from cross linking? Do you have any tips on how to cross link between pages?

There are many reasons why a visitor may find their way to your 404 error page–a site redesign may result in broken or outdated links, your web designer may have misspelled your URLs or a visitor could simply have mistyped a web address.  The thing is, your 404 page is often one of the pages with the highest traffic on the site! 

With so many visitors reaching your site on an error page, it’s easy to understand why they might think the site is broken or become frustrated and bounce right off the site without ever trying to find what they need.  You can remedy this situation easily and also use it as an opportunity to optimize another page on your site for the search engines! 

 Here’s how!

•  Change the error text on the page from the dull and uninviting statement ‘The page you are looking for cannot be found’ to something more human and inviting.  Welcome them with something more along the lines of ‘We’re sorry! We can’t find the page you are looking for’. 
• Add useful links or attractive buttons to help your visitors navigate to popular areas of the site.  For example, check out this truly engaging and useful 404 error message.  This site offers links to explore, friendly suggestions on how to find the item in question and the best part: a verbal smile!  The site welcomes the visitor and walks them through with ease.
• Search eninge optimize your error page with keywords and phrases.  This is a great opportunity to choose your page content carefully and include important keywords for additional exporsure.

Giving your visitors attractive and helpful assitance on the 404 page can definitely increase page views and decrease bounce rates.  Give it a shot!

Ecreativeworks has launched a new blog to complement the Industrial Search Engine Marketing blog!

The focus of International Industrial SEO is all about foreign search engine optimization for industrial and business to business websites. The blog aims to cover a wide range of topics related to industrial websites and their presence in international search engines. Topics include keyword research, translation, and international Internet usage. We encourage readers to leave comments and questions on posts so we can help them to better understand international SEO and how business to business websites can use it to attract visitors and increase conversions.

We’re very excited to share some of the information we’ve learned through our international internet marketing. It’s an easy way for our clients and those in industry to better understand the work we do and how good SEO is necessary for business websites.

Stop by International Industrial SEO today!