Photo of Baha’u'llah

What is unique about this site is that it presents in a very artistic yet search engine friendly way a rich photographic journey through the life of the most current messenger of God, and offers to the viewers a wealth of images of artifacts and writings of Baha’u'llah.

Great job to Brian Kurzius and the whole team, and my deep gratitude for having been allowed to play a small part in this exciting project.

• Pay-per-click marketing
• Email lists compiled by the web site
• Search engine optimization

This is consistent with the results of a client of mine, Studio Lotus, who saw their organic search engine traffic increase 68% from September 2006 to January 2007, based on a successful, well-planned web redesign. A small but very targeted Google AdWords campaign seems to be producing good results for them, and where I see a lot of untapped potential is fully utilizing the contact list accumulated through the web site’s contact form. It is heartening to see that best practices indeed produce good results.

This translates into two important tasks for e-retailers:

• Now is the time to invest in a dual search engine marketing strategy, combining organic search engine optimization, and measured, targeted pay-per-click campaigns
• Along the push to increase search engine traffic, e-commerce web sites should invest in developing a set of key performance indicators to measure the success of their web site operations. Conversion rate should be among the most important metrics for success. Other indicators in the web analytics portfolio of an e-tailer should be shopping card abandonment rate as well as ratios of return to new customers.

A helpful set of ideas on how to prepare your e-commerce site for the holiday season is generously offered by 37signals, usability consultancy.

For more on how WebSage can help you with developing a comprehensive search engine strategy and web analytics methodology, contact us for a free estimate.

Andrew Chak, author of “Submit Now: Designing Persuasive Web Sites”, describes four main categories of users:

• Browsers
• Evaluators
• Transactors
• Customers

Each one of those groups would have different needs and depending on how well through usability and persuasion the site answers those needs, it would bring the users through to the next stage of the user lifecycle evolution.

An optimized website would enjoy the additional benefit of having each particular page targetting the different user groups rank higher in the main search engines. Such a website would enable the users, regadless of their stage in the pursuation evolution, to land directly to the most appropriate page.

The following is a brief, general overview of how optimizing different pages for different user groups would enhance not only the search engine position of the site as a whole, but also would increase its persuasive power:

SEO for “Browsers”

For “browsers” who are scanning the web with no specifically identified need yet, the ideal place to land from a search engine result page, would be a page which helps them better understand their need and eventually prepares them for making a decision to purchase or signup. Having such a browsing user land on the purchase page for a particular product would be premature and would do them no good since they would not know if the product offered is an answer to a need they have not yet completely comprehended.

SEO for “Evaluators”

Those users who are knowledgable enough about their needs and are thus able to compare alternative solutions for satisfying these needs, should land to a page which provides information much more specific than describing a need, and ideally would offer comparison of specific products or services.

SEO for “Transactors”

Those users who have already made the decision to make a purchase and have selected their product — either on a previous visit or at a different comparison shopping site — might prefer to land directly to the “Buy Now” page for the specific product.

SEO for “Customers”

Those who have made a purchase and are your customers already, would want to reach information about how to use the product or how to resolve technical issues they might be having with it. Educating them about how good the product just purchased is would be a waste of time; they’d rather start using the product and benefiting from its qualities. Thus they should land on a page answering those post-purchase questions they might have.

This simplified explanation of the information needs of the different user groups has a major implication to the search engine optimization effort of any organization:

You do not optimize a web site; you optimize multiple individual web pages! Particularly, you do not optimize just the front page as it would be useful to only a small portion of your users. What would be much more practical is to optimize a number of web pages whose content informs the different user groups according to their corresponding stage of the purchasing decision. This way, rather than one door, the web site would have multiple doors — pages optimized for search engine rankings — each of which would be appropriate for different user groups and their particular needs as experienced on the different stages of their purchasing decision evolution.

The survey found that shopping cart abandonment rates decline along with increases in the number of offered payment methods. Shopping cart abandonment for survey respondents offering only one payment method was 40%. The rate dropped to 34% for retailers offering two payment methods, 29% for those with three and 28% for those with four or more.

The most popular payment methods, according to the survey, are the general purpose credit cards like Visa and MasterCard, followed by gift certificates. 53% of the surveyed e-retailers offer only one or two methods of payment.

Offer credit card alternatives

Offering an alternative to credit card payment like PayPal or Bill Me Later improves the chances for successful e-commerce experience for those online shoppers who are not willing yet to share their credit card details with the e-merchant.

• 58% of Web sites are planning a relaunch this year.
• 49% of Web site managers say usability is their top challenge in 2004.

41% of Web sites will be upgrading or deploying a new commerce platform for their site this year.

(Source: Jupiter Research/ERI Executive Survey, 10/03)

If you are the owner or web manager of one of those web sites about to be relaunched, consider yourself lucky because you are at the right point of time to initiate not a mere visual redesign but to improve your web site from a total business objective point of view. Now is the time to ask oneself what is the purpose of the site, how is the site found, how is the site navigated, and how one reaches the site’s action pages, whether a contact form for service request or online purchase or newsletter subscription.

Integrating all aspects of web site optimization

Web usability cannot be separated from search engine optimization nor can search engine optimization be separated from web usability — both are equally important aspects of web site optimization.

If no traffic comes to your newly redesigned, usable site, all the usability investment you have made would be a waste. The opposite is true too — if you receive a lot of search engine traffic but upon landing on the web site, the visitors are confused about the purpose of the site, its navigation and information architecture, the purpose of your search engine marketing efforts would be lost.

The web is now a mature medium and a solid marketing and communications channel for any organization. The time has come to start thinking about and performing web site optimization services in an integrated approach, by complementing (and not separating) the virtues of usability analysis, web analytics, and search engine optimization.

The research, based on a sample of 2 million visitors from 100 countries each day, compiled the following results for the average number of page views per visit during the first week of March:

• 1 page view 9.52%
• 1 – 2 page views 54.60%
• 2 – 3 page views 16.56%
• 3 – 4 page views 8.75%
• 4 – 5 page views 4.43%
• 6 – 7 page views 1.41%
• 7 – 8 page views 0.85%
• 8 – 9 page views 0.68%
• 9 – 10 page views 0.51%
• more than 10 page views 2.69%

What this research does not tell us

This research does not tell us how much time the visitors have spent interracting with the web pages and how much time they’ve spent on browsing the web site navigation in search for information.

More importantly, this research does not mention how deep in the hierarchy of the web site are the pages visited. For example, the visitors who browsed 1-2 pages could have viewed the home page and another page connected from it, or they could have browsed two interconnected pages deep in the information architecture of the site. The difference is significance because it can give us hints into how the visitors arrived at the initial page to start with.

Those arriving at the front page might have landed there by directly typing the URL (web address) or by following a link or by using a search engine.

Those arriving at a inner page would have arrived via a specific link or via a search engine query — fewer people link to a specific inner page than to a home page of a popular site. Inner page visitors are more likely to have found exactly what they were looking for, simply because an inner page would rank for a specific search keyword phrase and not a generic one as home pages tend to be optimized for.

Information architecture helps with user satisfaction

Since nobody on the web (and not only) has enough time to research thoroughly topics or web sites, people tend to scan, grab and go. If they find the information immediately or if the site gives them enough clues that they’ve arrived at the right place, they might stay for longer time and navigate deeper. Of course, it all depends on the nature of the site — informational sites would tend to have longer sessions and transactional sites shorter ones.

Either way, having intuitive navigation would make any web site more user friendly and ultimately successful in converting visitors into buyers.

Web site optimization vs. page optimization

Most web marketers talk about site optimization and in an ideal world, the optimization campaign would approach the web site as a whole entity. In reality, a web site is a set of web pages each one of which can and should be optimized for its own keyword phrases. The interraction of these pages following a common theme can influence the overall success of the site as a whole but separate pages and not sites is what a search engine ranks.

Traffic delivered by search engines is more focused

A well optimized web site has all of its pages ranked separately for the corresponding keyword phrase. A page attracts visitors through a search engine, it provides specific answer to the request for information as detailed in the keyword phrase. Thus the traffic delivered by search engines is more focused than the traffic coming to the home page and followed by browsing through the site navigation. For a web optimized web site, there is less need for the visitors to scan more than one or two pages because they land at the desired page. This saves the visitors time and improves the chances of conversion from visitors to buyers or subscribers or whatever the intended action of the web site might be.

What about those of us who have small web marketing budgets?

The answer is:

• you can still do web analytics with tools as inexpensive as ClickTracks;
• you can still do user testing on a smaller scale for a couple of hundred dollars;
• you can still have your website marketed on the web naturally, through organic search engine optimization, following the best practices suggested by the main search engines themselves.

Not doing anything to optimize your web site — whether your budget is big or not — is the only way to make sure you do not improve it!
The challenge of applying web site optimization best practices to small businesses and non-profit organizations is a topic of great interest to me and I will be publishing more on the subject later on. Stay tuned!