7 Key Questions To Ask For Massive Website Performance

What should you ask and fix when thinking about improving website performance? Start with this post.

What’s the measure by which you gauge the success of your website(s)?

I hope your answer was clear: it’s “website response & interaction”.

If you have a nice looking website, pretty graphics and easy navigation with pretty product pictures and descriptions, you may have only reached 20% of your goals of winning online.

If you have spent 10′s of thousands of dollars on all of it, and that’s all you have – it’s not  a great place to be.

You will need to change up the response and interaction with your website.

The entire process begins with asking important questions.

You can retrofit this into an existing site too.

Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives. -William A Foster

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How To Improve Blog Web Traffic in 10 Minutes a Day

Killer Web Traffic Insights For Blogs

Technology has changed how businesses conduct their activities in order to increase their bottom line.

These days, having current content on a blog can increase web traffic to a website specifically, and overall.

Let’s face it, having a blog and trying to increase the number of visitors can be a very daunting task that takes a while before any hints of success start emerging.

There are number of tips that a business blogger can do in order to increase traffic to their website very quickly, and in some cases – and over time – in a matter of minutes.

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The 5 Things You Must Do At Any Cost

5 Powerful Tips For Your Website Today

In this day and age, it is practically a requirement to optimize your website as much as possible so that it can do well on the internet and serving your clients or patients.

Your website must have content that serves your niche, but it will not do well if you do not prepare it or optimize it for the web and your audience.

We’ll go over 5 things to optimize your website and advice for implementing the tips into your own site.

1) GET CLEAR ON YOUR HTML

Optimizing your HTML should be the first step in optimizing your website overall. You’ve got to use code that will make your website more descriptive and will even help search engines and users find your site more easily. You can cover both of these bases by using META tags. These are simple tags that are placed in between the HEAD tags in your HTML document to list the description of your website and provide relative keywords for your site. Additionally, you should also be using TITLE tags, HEADING tags, and other tools such as CSS to make your site easier to manage and more smooth running. Of couse, don’t forget to describe images and links as well. Make sure that your pages load fast, and that they show up correctly in different browsers. You can use Google Page Speed and BrowserShots for this. Talk to your webmaster if you are new to HTML – but learn more about it at HTML school.

2) LEARN THE BASICS OF SEO (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION)

SEO is another big part of optimizing your website. It simply stands for “search engine optimization” and it is a huge part of getting your site noticed and high on search engine results. Using SEO on your site, and with partner links offsite, you will target certain keywords that have low competition from other web sites but high demand from people who use search engines, and within your market. For example, a keyword like “dentist” is too vague, “santa monica dentist” is better, but “santa monica family dentist”, or “santa monica cosmetic dentist” will improve your chances to be found, if done right. Your web analytics will also help you with figuring out what keyword phrases might work for you. There are other components to SEO, but it is imperative that you use it to optimize your site.

3) LEVERAGE YOUR KNOWLEDGE & CONTENT

Content is a big deal if you wish to optimize your site. Your content must be seen by readers and the actual search engine as valuable and related information for it to perform well at all. Recycled content that can be found on any other site of the same subject normally won’t do well. Remember, you want your site to offer something to the web that it doesn’t already have. Stay focused on your clients, and do some research in your market to find out what they will need. If you can find “gaps” in the information, you can move ahead very quickly. Don’t be like everybody else, and try including video content as well. You have a YouTube account, right?

4) ARCHITECTURE & LAYOUT

Your choice of layout for your website is critical for optimization and user friendliness. This refers to the type of navigation you use, how quickly your readers can find a piece of information that they’re looking for on your website, how information is displayed/presented and so much more. It’s important that your layout works for your site because it will keep readers coming back for more. You can use your existing web analytics to find click patterns, and find out where they navigate to, and where they abort. A bounce-rate study may help you as well. Check out others in your space that are ranking high (both in organic and paid) – and find out what’s working. It’s OK to get ideas, but don’t blatantly copy.

5) WHAT TO DO NEXT – “CALL TO ACTION”

Having a call to action is simply wanting your readers to respond to what you’ve given them. You want them to act. For example, if your site is advertising a product, you might have a link at the top waiting for them at all times that reads, “Buy Now.” This is a call to action. It’s important to have a call to action on your site that is constantly visible. Calls to action are imperative because they are much more persuasive than allowing the reader to make the choice for themselves. A great way to find out what the action is on any page on your website is this: “What is the ‘most-desired-action’ I want my visitor to take on THIS page”?  Then, answer that… and provide it. And, don’t assume the visitor will know. Make it simple.

You may find some of these to be basic, but we see these issues all the time…And, you must address these points.

Where does your current webpage rank? Are you passing the keyword analysis test?

Facebook Shows You 5 Important Ways To Measure Success

Measuring Facebook key to Social Media Success

When you are running ads on Facebook, different options exist for executing campaigns today. That includes the tracking of actionable success metrics.

You are probably familiar with the sponsored (paid) ads. But, you might also consider the sponsored stories, which can be really good for your brand lift.

How do you determine which is better for you business? Analytics and monitoring is key.

No matter what you choose, including the (must-do) free options (the Facebook account itself, events, groups, applications, newsfeeds, etc) – it will be important for your business to reveal what your users do on your Facebook network.

Performance graphs, real-time measurements and in-line ad management are a few of the new things you’ll need to understand.
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Top 10 Amazing Social Media Success Stories You Can Learn From

The social media platform has quickly become known as a significant part of a successful internet marketing strategy. This post presents ten of the most successful social media campaigns, with a brief description of why each one worked. Social media campaigns follow a process. You can learn more about starting a social media marketing campaign here.
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The Importance of Sales Analytics in Forecasting

The saliency of sales analytics in forecasting has not lessened over the past few years – in fact, many recent studies suggest that accurate sales forecasting is more important than ever.

According to research company Aberdeen Group, companies that were consistent users of sales analytics and forecasting tools outperformed companies who did not avail themselves of either of these tools by 1.46 times in the accuracy of their sales forecasts.

How can sales forecasting and analytics help a company?

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Social Media Tools: Listen, Analyze, Engage

Image by Intersection Consulting via Flickr

For those of you not familiar with social media, here’s a brief description: “media that is social”. Funny, but true.

We see so many organizations that begin with social media, and they set up a Twitter or Facebook account and tell us their are doing social media.

When we look a little closer, we can see it’s nothing much at all, and its typically “one-sided”, meaning they only speak about themselves, and nobody is engaging with them.

Maybe the reason is that they didn’t build out a strategic plan with specific goals and targets, as well as not understanding that listening is the second word (after competitive & market research) to learn in social media.

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A Simple Facebook Guide – Advertising Tips – Reporting/Metrics (Part 4 of 4)

Facebook is easy if you know how. This is a short guide (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4) for learning how to start Facebook Advertising.

Facebook Data.

The most well researched ad won’t do you much good if you don’t take advantage of FaceBook’s reporting and metric functionality.

It isn’t enough to post an ad; you must also take a minute to see what is working and what isn’t.

Facebook metrics make it easy to review ad data and info on users who view or click it.

Understand your environment.

Understanding whom an ad appeals to or who clicks the giant go away button can help you craft more effective ads.

To be effective, review profile information, click through rates, impressions, social likes, and even information on those where your ad was cancelled (stopped). Keep in mind that a low CTR is expected. If you are used to seeing 2-4% click through on Google Adwords for example, don’t expect that for Facebook. The key is to continue the cycle explained in each of the Facebook Guide posts we’ve shared with you.

Testing images, titles and body text and running reports to see how you do will be important. Keep in mind, different times of day will have an impact as well. You can add a special URL tracker to see where the biggest impact (clicks/engagement) happens.

Related articles for Facebook Reporting and Metrics

• Facebook Click-Through Rates Are Below Average and Shrinking (observer.com)
• Facebook Ads Get Half the Clicks of Network Banners (clickz.com)
• The Fallacy of Social Media Evaluation (thesocialweb.co.uk)

A Simple Facebook Guide – Advertising Tips – Facebook Setup (Part 3 of 4)

Facebook is easy if you know how. This is a short guide (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4) for learning how to start Facebook Advertising.

After all the thinking and research, it’s finally time to set-up your Facebook ad.

Now the fun really begins.

Use the information developed in steps one and two (links above) as guiding principles as you choose a title, text, a destination URL and a picture for your ad.

Remember!

Your title need to be attention grabbing and less than 25 characters.

Text is even more difficult – 135 characters to reach your goal.

A stunning and representative picture is also critical.

To finish, top off the ad with the destination URL that most represents your company or product!

Find more Facebook Ad setup tips here.

Don’t be afraid to test.

In fact, if you spend too much time analyzing here – you’ll never get out of the starting gate. Testing is key. Run reports daily, and learn what works – and what doesn’t.

When you create ads, make sure you are targeting your audience – in a way that “speaks to them”. Don’t throw sales jargon out there. Be a friend, and use the “friend of friend” feature to have people “Like” your ad as well.

Consider using a Fan Page directly, and test between pages (website and Pages).

Related articles Facebook Setup & Pages

• Facebook Ads Can Now Specify Any Page Landing Tab as a Destination (insidefacebook.com)
• Facebook Rolls Out New Pages Layout (allfacebook.com)
• Facebook Announces New Design and Upgrades to Fan Pages (hubspot.com)

A Simple Facebook Guide – Advertising Tips – Competitive Research (Part 2 of 4)

Facebook is easy if you know how. This is a short guide (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4) for learning how to start Facebook Advertising.

Competitive Research.

Defining goals is only the first step of a successful Facebook ad campaign.

Next, focus on competitive research.  This research plays a role not only in creating targeted ads, but also in creating a feasible budget for ad placement.

Build a competitive analysis by focusing on a couple of factors.

The first is your targeted demographic.

Facebook makes it simple to target almost any group of people you can imagine, so picking the right one is critical.  Next, spend some time researching the language or ‘keywords’ you ad will include.

Competitive research is step two in a winning Facebook campaign. Make sure you understand your audience and target smaller chunks of your demographic – don’t go too broad at first.

Do you know what your competition is doing?

Search for them in Facebook, and check other important social media channels like Twitter, LinkedIn & YouTube. What are they doing there? How are they “inter-linking” social media assets and Facebook. Do they have a Facebook fan page specifically, or just a profile page? How often is content updated? What ads are they running? (if at all)

Related articles on Competitive Facebook Research

• More on Competitive Analysis Using Keyword Opposition to Benefit Score (stuntdubl.com)
• What Are You Doing To Engage Your Facebook Customers? Here Are 5 Tips You Can Do! (socialmediadudes.com)
• Intentional Targeting: Search vs. Facebook (searchenginewatch.com)