Understanding your website’s bounce rate can be the key between creating a more user friendly or profitable website. The 5 articles below should hopefully help you to do that:

How to Analyze and Improve the ‘Bounce Rate’ for Your Website

Getting users engaged with your content can result with a sale, subscription, bookmark and return visit. One of best ways to increase reader engagement is to make sure that your site architecture interlinks related content and displays them in a way which encourages the user to click around. If the first article doesn’t result in a subscription, the second might.

30 Simple Ways of Improving Bounce Rate and Conversion Rate

It’s obvious: Rankings and traffic do not mean much when the website visitors bounce off and you fail to convert them to buyers, subscribers or whatever you desire your visitors to do for you. Some industry insiders even suspect bounce rate to be a ranking factor itself already.

What is Your Bounce Rate?

Why is your bounce rate an important thing to keep an eye on, and better yet what the heck is your web site bounce rate? I will answer those questions and let you know the best ways to lower your bounce rate and get people staying on your web site a little ‘bit longer.

Stop Bouncing: tips for website success

Bounce rate is insightful because from the perspective of a website visitor, it measures this phenomenon: “I came; I puked; I left.” (OK, technically it also means the number of sessions with just one pageview.) While metrics like visitors show the number of people who came to your site, bounce rate will tell you how many of those people were unimpressed and left your site without taking any action (not even dignifying the site with a single click!).

How Bounce Rate Can Help You Pinpoint Site Problems

A bounce is a one-page visit. “I came, I landed, I left.” Bounce Rate is the rate at which bounces occur, that is, the number of bounces on a page divided by the number of people who entered the site on that page.

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Whilst on twitter, I came across this nice little tool to help grade your blog via a tweet by Rutiso It then provides an analysis of your blog and outputs a score out of 100. It functions/looks vry similar to hubspot’s ever popular Website Grader.

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‘Is Alexa Traffic Rank Important??’ is something a client asked me the other day, and I realised I didn’t have a definite answer to give them… I found the following 4 articles to be very useful!

1 ) SEO Book: http://www.seobook.com/archives/000944.shtml

Over the last few days my Alexa has doubled from around 13,400 to around 6,800. Wow I am great. Not really!
If you looked at my actual server logs you would see that traffic has been fairly constant over the past week with only a small uptick in traffic of about 5 percent. Why the huge increase in Alexa rankings then?

2) Google Success: http://www.google-success.com/how-important-is-alexa-ranking-for-webmasters.htm

The main problem with Alexa is its rankings are based on users who have installed the Alexa toolbar onto their browser. If your website visitors do not have the toolbar running, they do not affect the rankings of your sites. The next big problem with Alexa is it is very easy to game.

3) John Chow: http://www.johnchow.com/why-alexa-is-worthless/

The main problem with Alexa is its rankings are based on users who have installed the Alexa toolbar onto their browser. If you do not have the toolbar running, you do not affect the rankings of the sites you visit. The next big problem with Alexa is it is very easy to cheat the system. Just get a few friends to install the toolbar and have them surf your site everyday. It does not take many people to break into the top 100,000.
4) http://www.kangainternet.com.au/exploring-google-page-rank-and-alexa-rank.html

So, you’ve heard a few things about SEO and now you are trying to learn some more about what SEO actually is and what your goals actually are. Well, your main two goals in SEO are to increase your websites position in the search engine results pages(SERP’s) and increase website traffic. Google Pagerank represents how important your website is compared to all other websites and Alexa Rank is how many visitors your website gets in relation to all other websites on the Internet. You are aiming to get a high Google Pagerank (commonly refered to as PR) and a low Alexa Rank. What looking at these two measured elements does is give you some idea of how well, or how badly, your website is doing in comparison to all other websites. Lets explore these two rankings in a little more detail.

Do you think Alexa rank is important?

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Google Analytics Explained, well almost… sort of

As i continue my transition from flash to html, SEO/Web Stats has become a topic of increasing interest, and one that ha the rare ability to at times dumbfound me. Installing Google Analytics on our site, has for the most part just been used to count our visitors and look at our traffic, so over the past week i thought I’d find out what some of the other lovely little percentages and numbers mean….

Unique Visitors
The Unique Visitors figure you have represents the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period(the date range you specify). A Unique Visitor is determined using cookies.

Bounce Rates
In my forum hunting and web searching for a simple and clear definition of bounce rate, I’ve found people throwing formulae around and others telling me to dismiss it all together if the site is not ad based. However, as with anything there is hope and I worked bounce rate to essentially be: when someone enters my site, lands on one page, and then leaves (exits) the site without ever visiting or looking at any of my other pages. Apparently, the general consensus I have found is that a site-wide bounce rate of over 40% is cause for concern. So for the past week, I was concerned, but the changes I am beginning t implement have brought my previous bounce rate of 71% to 38% in the space of a week. Mainly my navigation made it effort’ for people to just have a peruse, so making things easier for the user, they seem to be staying more. Pretty basic logic.

Exit Rates
This fell into place after figuring out bounce rates. Exit rates detail the amount of people who navigate away from your site entirely from a particular page. So for instance, if your home page has an exit rate of say 100%, this would be disastrous, as 100% of people would look at your home page and go away, not good! Although, there are situations where a high exit rate makes sense, lets say a ‘completed transaction page’ or a ‘thankyou for contacting us’ page. This is because the user has used your service and has no further reason to stay.

Visitor Loyalty
Bar a few certain site scenarios, wanting visitors to come back after they’ve visited in the past is a given for the majority of us. This tool is a decent indication of whether your blog is boring or not and how popular it is.

Visitor Recency
This stat looks at the number of days that have passed since a person’s last visit to your site. So you get to see how often people are coming back to read your blog ramblings. The ’0′ field means they have never visited before as there is no stored tracking cookie on that computer. This will probably be the highest number by a good margin.

Depth of Visit
In short the depth of visit report shows how many pages of your site, the user took the time to view. The depth of visit 1 goes to constituting your bounce rate. A high depth of visit, basically means user’s are enjoying whatever it is you have or are doing, as they are taking time to navigate through your pages.

There are flip sides to most of these analytic statistics that will be relevant to your website and what it is your trying to achieve, but as I delve further into Google Analytics, I am beginning to realise what a marvellous tool it is. Until next time…

Comments from others:

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Visit the tool by clicking below:
http://domai.nr

Domainr helps you explore the entire domain name space beyond the ubiquitous—and crowded—.com, .net and .org. Inspired by jish.nu, burri.to and del.icio.us, apologies to Flickr, and a high-five to Dopplr.

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Localisation/translating your website/…

Do what with my website?

First things first, why would you want to translate your website? Half the world speaks English anyway, right? In today’s ‘globalised’ society, clients are increasingly outsourcing commissions abroad in search of the best provider. If potential customers cannot even understand your home page, nine out of ten will click straight past you to someone who has had the forward-thinking to make their webpage more accessible. Even if you’re the best person for the job. Contrary to common belief, tapping into this potential market needn’t be time-consuming or expensive. Plus, doing so will enhance your image to overseas and home clients alike as a modern, international player proactively catering for every need.

The details…

Before anything else, you will need to think carefully about how much of your website you want to translate and the language(s) you will provide. You might just give an idea of what you offer through an alternative home page and possibly a couple of main links. Or you may opt for a version of the entire website. Be practical – having your website in Zulu or Gaelic might be appealing, but it’s unlikely to win you many potential clients. Your energy would probably be better spent adding German or French to inject an online presence in those search engines. A few well-chosen keywords will get you the clicks you need. Then your images can speak for themselves!

Remember to make clients aware of your actual linguistic capabilities, or include provision for communicating when they get in touch. No point wowing them with your perfect Polish website if you can’t then understand their requirements or give them a quote! Similarly, don’t be misleading with your translated page. Nothing will annoy visitors more than finding a wonderfully translated homepage, only to discover that all the links go back to English content pages.

Bring on the translation!

Now that you’ve planned what’s to be translated and how, there are several ways to tackle the translation itself. We’ll outline a couple of the main ones below.

* Do it yourself. If you happen to speak a (relevant – see above) foreign language, this is the simplest way, and gives you the most control over what the translated version says. If you plan on an extensive amount of translation, however, do make sure you have the time to invest in it. Also, only attempt this if you really are fluent in the language concerned, including any industry-specific vocab. Even native speakers make mistakes; anything less and your text is guaranteed to sound unnatural. At worst it will be totally unintelligible.
* Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) tools. These vary a great deal, from commercial software such as STL Trados to online translators such as Google Translate. The latter group is likely to be the one of use to you, and we’ve put a list of some of the better-known apps below. One idea is to try the url translation box in the Google’s tool, for an instant version of your website in almost any language. (Caution: this WILL need revising!)
* Call in the professionals. Getting a professional translator to tackle your webpage saves you the time and hassle of doing it yourself, as well as providing a contact for summarising any foreign-language correspondence you receive. You can contact translation agencies for recommendations. Ask about experience and qualifications to help find the right person for you – a specialisation in your area would also help. Check if they use CAT tools such as Trados or Déjavu – among other things you may be able to negotiate a better rate and a quicker deadline as these can cut out a lot of the more tedious parts of translation. You can cut costs further by simply getting them to redraft an online translation or proofread a later draft.
* Phone a friend. Whether it be proofreading or helping with the initial translation, make use of your native-speaker contacts, especially if they understand your area.

So there you have our brief guide to translating your website. Contact us if you have any questions. Good luck!

Guest Writer: Tamara Bloom

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Hi all.

Today, I came across a great FREE (always nice!) tool that allows you to check your search engine position for an exact keyword or keyword phrase in Google, Yahoo and Live.

You can then go further and a whole host of keywords to a full report which then includes backlinks.

Visit the Tool.

Credit: http://www.exactfactor.com/Seo-tools.aspx

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Copywriting is the use of words to promote a person, business, opinion, or idea. Although the word copy may be applied to any content intended for printing (as in the body of a newspaper article or book), the term copywriter is generally limited to such promotional situations, regardless of media (as advertisements for print, television, radio or other media).

Copywriting Wikipedia

1) Copywriting 101: A 10 Step Discussion

Copywriting is one of the most essential elements of effective online marketing. The art and science of copywriting involves strategically writing words that promote a person, product, business, opinion, or idea, with the ultimate intention of having the reader take some form of action.

2) Copywriting in Web Design

Web copy is too valuable an asset to simply stuff into a finished web design. Learning to analyse and use copy as a design tool helps you make the right design choices and create unified websites tuned to their purpose. There’s more to a website than looking good and being easy to use.

3) 10 Tips for SEO Copywriting

SEO Copywriting is a skill. For most people it’s really something you learn over time by doing it, paying close attention to what your competitors are doing and reading up on how to write copy for websites, blogs, press releases and articles.

4) The Art of Copywriting

Copywriting involves researching the client, in depth and then writing about them. However, depending on the contract or web page, the amount that needs to be written may vary drastically. The content needs to be relevant at all times and should, perhaps most importantly, include keywords. These keywords are given to the SEO Company by their client, and must appear in the text within the website, in order to gain the rankings in the search engines.

5) Copywriting: the edge of..

So my view is that ‘copywriting’ describes, at it’s broadest but yet most useful definition, the business of thinking through, organising and then presenting any information at all required to place a case before the world.

6) Tips To Improve Your Copywriting

To retain a reader’s attention span, sentences should be clear and concise. Copies have to be simple to read and browse. Whenever possible, utilize headings, sub-headings, bullet points, and numbered lists. The golden rule of copywriting is that less is more. Action verbs, as well as speaking in the active voice instead of the passive voice, will move your readers and build their confidence.

7) Why Copywriting is the Key to Successful Online Marketing

Content drives the Internet, and using the right words in the right way will determine not only how well your site converts visitors into sales, but also how well you rank in search engines and how many links you get.

8 ) 5 Simple Ways to Open Your Blog Post With a Bang

Just imagine how disappointed you’d be after crafting a killer headline for your post, only to lose readers with an opening that failed to carry the momentum. A great headline mixed with a lame opening is like inviting someone into your house, only to slam the door in their face as they approach.

9) The benefits of freelance copywriting

Copywriting requires a great number of skills; you must know your audience, what medians are most effective, and you must be able to write something that motivates your reader into buying your product. Many copywriters take time to attend workshops, seminars, and conduct research in order to improve their skills.

10) Persuasive Writing Techniques

Want to convince your readers to do something or agree with your point of view?

OK, that was a silly question. Of course you do.

Persuasion is generally an exercise in creating a win-win situation. You present a case that others find beneficial to agree with. You make them an offer they can’t refuse, but not in the manipulative Godfather sense.

Reccomendations; check out:

http://www.escapingthewordcage.com

http://www.copyblogger.com

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In my quest to learn how to design using CSS to style my web designs in my development of my web skills, I compiled a list of 10 resources and tutorials that I have found invaluable in learning the basics and some intermediate tips and tricks in CSS. Hope you all find them useful in helping you to learn CSS.

1) Introduction to CSS

HTML was originally designed as a simple way of presenting information, with the aesthetics of a web page being far less important than the content (and largely being left up to the web browser). Of course, now that the web has become as popular as it has, the presentation of your content has become almost critical to a site’s success. This, among other things, was why CSS was brought in.

2) Cascading Style Sheets: an Interactive Tutorial

Imagine you’ve just designed a two hundred page web site for a client (or maybe for yourself) but at the last minute your client (or you) decide the font is a little two small or the typeface should be serif instead of sans-serif? You didn’t know how to use cascading style sheets (CSS) so you coded all of the pages with the old-style tag. If you didn’t know CSS, chances are you’d have to replace every occurrence of the old tag with the new tag.

3) HTML+CSS Begineer’s Guide

So, you’re ready to take the plunge and begin to learn how to build your own web pages and sites? Fantastic! We’ve got quite a ride ahead, so I hope you’re feeling adventurous.

4) Let’s Make a CSS Web Page

Make a what, you may be asking? Well a CSS, or Cascading Style Sheet, is a file used to style a single web page — or an entire site — and position its elements. CSS is supported by the vast majority of visual browsers and offers many specific advantages (keep reading). In this tutorial I will begin with a simple Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, XHTML, layout and, using CSS, without hacks, I will position its elements and style it to make it look nice — and once done, it will remain accessible.

5) CSS Tutorial

It is time to take your web designing skills to the next level with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). They are a way to control the look and feel of your HTML documents in an organized and efficient manner.

6) Complete CSS Guide

Welcome to the Complete CSS Guide, a reference to every aspect of cascading style sheets. If you need help learning CSS or if you’re looking for info about selectors, properties and all the other aspects of cascading style sheets, this is the place.

7) Quick CSS Tutorial

A style sheet is made up of style rules that tell a browser how to present a document. There are various ways of linking these style rules to your HTML documents, but the simplest method for starting out is to use HTML’s STYLE element. This element is placed in the document HEAD, and it contains the style rules for the page.

8 ) W3C CSS Tutorial

Save a lot of work with CSS!
In our CSS tutorial you will learn how to use CSS to control the style and layout of multiple Web pages all at once.

9) Create Your First CSS Website!

This short tutorial is meant for people who want to start using CSS and have never written a CSS style sheet before.

10) W3C CSS Validator

Check Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and (X)HTML documents with style sheets

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Great basic to intermediate SEO Tools
Hi all. In my efforts to search engine optimise websites for myself and various clients i’ve compiled a little list of free SEO analysing tools that I use. Hope you find them useful.

1) SEOmoz | SEO Cheat Sheet

This wonderful PDF courtesy of Danny Dover contains every little SEO tactic you can employ, ensuring that you never forget anything!

2) Website Grader

Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

Website Grader is one of the most famous SEO company tools that are available. It gives you score out of 100 and also provides a summary and analysis of many key seo factors such as traffic ranking, inbound links and content.

3) Link Vendor

These SEO Tools found on Linkvendor were built to help you to understand search engine optimization and to adjust your website to different parameters search engines like. Use our tools to find out what competitors did and interpret all data for your advantage.

Link vendor is a personal favourite as it has a whole propriety of SEO related tools to help you understand how your website is doing. From backlink checkers and social bookmarking to search engine and alexa analysis. A personal favourite is the SEO challenge tool, where you pit your website against a competitor… It appears Google is doing a somwhat better job than myself!

4) XML Sitemaps

XML-Sitemaps is another well known internet resource. The importance of sitemaps and their submission to relevant search engines such as google through for instance Google Webmasters is well documented. This free tool is dead easy to use! simply type in your domain name and a sitemap is generated for you in a number of formats.

5) Self SEO

The idea of this website is to combine various SEO tools, internet tools and webmaster tools in one place and help webmasters to build a successfull website. In addition to that, you will find some webmaster articles here with great internet related tips and tricks.

This site much like Link Vendor provides a propriety of tools to help you evaluate your website’s search engine optimisation. It also has a host of free articles to help you get to grasps of the importance of SEO.

6) Link Checker

This is to date the most effective inbound link checking tool I have found. It shows you the web page the link originates from; the PageRank of that webpage; the PageRank of that webpage’s domain homepage; how many other links are on the page; and the anchor text or image used to link to you. This is much more informative than say using ‘link:mydomain.com’ in yahoo or google. From it, you can truly get an idea of the quality of your inbound links; maybe find people to approach as link partners and you can also see who is linking to you consistently etc.

7) SEO Chat Tools

The SEO Tools found in this section were designed to assist you in configuring your website(s) for search engine optimization within the different search engines. Please select one of the SEO Tools from below to begin optimizing your website(s) for top placement within the search engines.

This site much like Link Vendor provides a propriety of tools to help you evaluate your website’s search engine optimisation. It also has a host of free articles to help you get to grasps of the importance of SEO.

8 ) SEOmoz Toolbox

The SEO ToolBox is a collection of FREE SEO tools. In addition to these tools, we highly recommend you check out our full list of advanced SEO tools.

9) SEO Tools (136 SEO Tools)

Some great tools buried in amongst this site that links to any number of SEO related analysing tools, the quality of some however is a little questionable.

10) SEO Quake

Seoquake is a Mozilla Firefox extension aimed primarily at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization and internet promotion of web sites. Seoquake allows to obtain and investigate many important SEO parameters of the internet…

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