As you continue on your quest to imrove the conversion rate of your site and pages, there are some principles that you should keep in mind.

People Read From Left to Right

If your web site is going to be in English or one of the many other languages that are read left to right, then you need to remember that your visitors will typically see something in the left half of the page first, and that they will probably start reading on that half of the page.

This doesn’t mean that they are blind to the right side of the page. Well placed headers and images can draw their attention to important areas of the right side of the page.

What this means is that you should consider placing your most important items on the left half of the page. If you want to increase the likelihood that your visitors will see something, include it where they will start reading.

People Read From Top to Bottom

This point is along the same lines as the last one. People usually see what’s on the top of the page first. Include your most important items in the top half of your page. These two principles are the reason that left or top navigation menus are usually the most effective for helping your visitors to navigate your site.

What is the Golden Triangle?

The golden triangle is the area of the screen that visitors see most. It starts in the top left corner, goes to the top right of the page, and then cuts down to the bottom left. Items in this area are more likely to be seen, as is shown in heat map 1 and heat map 2. As you get further right or further down the page, items are less and less likely to be seen.

You can use this principle for many presentation, writing, and graphical design projects. Even your resume can receive a boost if you place the most important information in the Golden Triangle.

How Do Newspapers Affect the Web?

Newspapers are large, folded sheets of paper. Often, the only page that gets read is the front page, in the area that doesn’t require the reader to unfold or open the newspaper. This area is called “above the fold.” The most important information and headlines have to be include here or people may never see it.

On the web, the area above the fold is the area that visitors see on your page without having to click or scroll. Your most important information generally goes in this area. Attention spans are short, so you have to grab visitors’ attention quickly when they come to your site.

Why Shouldn’t Newspapers Affect the Web?

Back in the early days of the web, people who weren’t familiar with the net didn’t know to scroll down. Now days, about 60% of your audience will scroll down at least a little bit to see what’s further down the page.

This means that, although the area above the fold is still the most important, you still need to pay very close attention to areas below the fold on your web site. Scrolling down a web page is easier than unfolding the newspaper and a lot more people will do it than used to. Don’t let the design of newspapers and books dictate what you do on the web—it’s a different medium with many different rules, and it should be treated as such.

Many people running small, new, or startup businesses are a little tight for cash. It’s hard to make ends meet when your cash flow is still just trickling. One of the most difficult, and still most important, things to do when starting or running a business is to conduct market research. Market research is what helps you take your fledgling company in the right direction.

What Market Research Can I Do?

So you’re left wondering, what kind of market research can you do when you have no budget?

The informal kind.

Don’t worry about conducting some massive survey sent to thousands of people and analyzed with complex statistics. There will come a time for that, maybe. But you need to start simple.

What’s the Point of Market Research?

First, figure out what you want to achieve. Most of the time, you simply need to know what your customers or potential customers think about something. How do you do that? You simply draw from your network of friends, relatives, and friendly customers to hold informal focus groups, or more frequently, interviews.

Informal Focus Groups and Interviews

Here are some steps and ideas for conducting an informal focus group or interview:

1. Make a list of questions.

   Start with a small list of things you need to know—I would suggest keeping it to about 5 questions or so. Use open ended questions to solicit explanations of feelings, ideas, etc. Informal focus groups and interviews don’t have a large enough sample size to conduct rigorous numerical analyses.

2. Determine who to ask.

   If you think of the people you know, you probably know someone in just about every demographic you may want to target.

3. Ask them.

   Call your parents up. Talk to your children. Eat lunch with some buddies. Stop a customer at the cash register. Send a simple e-mail to your customer database. Come up with an excuse to call or get together, but don’t hide your motives. Ask for the simple favor of having a conversation about the topic that concerns you. Then ask your questions. Feel free to change the wording a little bit. Take good notes.

4. Say “Thank You.”

   A verbal thank you is often enough, but be sensitive to occasions when picking up the lunch bill or sending thank-you cards is appropriate.

5. Analyze your findings.

   Take your notes and compare the responses of different people to the same questions. You may see some trends emerging, find some repeated compliments, or clarify some concerns.

Be Constantly Aware

Keep your eyes peeled for any opportunities that you have to gather information—you’d be surprised when and where you may get the data you need. Keep something to take notes on with you all the time so that you don’t miss your golden opportunity.

Stick to It

Remember to do something simple—you won’t do it if it’s too expensive or complex. You may start with a 3×5 card with one question written on it and answers recorded on the card in pencil, but that’s enough to get moving. You’ll get better at holding informal focus groups and interviews as time goes on, too. As you consistently look to gather data, you will learn what you need to know, at least well enough to get your firm pointed in the right direction.

Links are the the foundation of the web. Without them, the web wouldn’t exist, or at least it wouldn’t be nearly as powerful and convenient as it is now. Can you imagine trying to manually keep track of everything cool that you had ever visited? How on earth would you learn about new sites?

This tutorial will explain the most basic parts of creating links. Linking strategies, how links relate to Page Rank, navigation schemes, etc., will be discussed later.

Select The Content of the Link

The first thing to do is to select the content you would like to turn into a link—the words or image that you would like people to click on with their mouse.

For example, in the next paragraph, we have decided that people should click on semantic web in order to get to Ara’s blog post about semantics on the web.

To do this, you need to use anchor tags. These are tags that have two purposes—they are used for making links and making anchors. We are using the link ability of an anchor tag. Anchor tags look like this: <a> and the closing tag, </a>. Simply surround the text or image tag that you want to be a link with the anchor tags. From our earlier example, you get this:

Tell Your Link Where to Go

Now that we have something that your site visitors can click on, we need to include the information that tells the link where to go. We do this by inserting the href, or HTML reference, attribute into the opening anchor tag. An href attribute contains the URL for the page we are linking to. For example, if you wanted to link to The Lime Blog, you would have anchor tags that look like this:

Resulting in:

The Lime Blog

Our earlier example turns out like this:

And appears like this on the page:

I learned some really cool stuff about the semantic web over at Ara Pehlivanian’s blog.

Describe What Your Link Points At

The final step to creating your link is to further describe the content that it points at. This step is optional, but sometimes “semantic web” or whatever the text may be isn’t enough information for people to understand what you’re linking to. This is especially true with navigation links—”services,” as an example, doesn’t tell you much and needs to be spiced up. Include the title attribute in your links so that people have more information about where they’re going (The text will appear when people hover over your link).

Here’s our example with a title attribute included:

And appears like this on the page:

I learned some really cool stuff about the semantic web over at Ara Pehlivanian’s blog.

Now that you have learned how to link, you can go link your pages together and link to other good sites on the web.

There are two parts to any good internet marketing plan: driving traffic to your site and converting that traffic. Many of the most glamorous Internet marketing strategies center on driving traffic, such as Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click advertising, affiliate programs, link exchange programs, and even e-mail campaigns (if not properly conducted). The neglected side of internet marketing is conversions.

The Other Side of the Coin

Internet marketing is like a coin—it has two sides, and you can’t have one without the other. You can get all the traffic in the world, and if your site doesn’t convert, then you are not going to make very much money. If you have a site that will motivate every visitor to purchase but no traffic, then you will be as poor as a church mouse.

So How Do I Increase My Conversion Rate?

There are lots of tactics to increase the conversion rate of your site. One that seems obvious but is often neglected is to include calls to action in your Internet marketing materials—ads, landing pages, web pages, e-mails, etc.

Call to Action? What’s a Call to Action?

You may think that your site’s visitors know exactly what to do and when, but you’d be surprised. It’s not that they’re stupid—they’re usually anything but stupid—they just don’t know your site, your offers, your business, as well as you do.

So give your visitors some clues of what they can do, of what there is for them on your site. When you write your marketing copy or build your web pages, tell them what to do. Call on them to perform an action.

Use action verbs in a imperative (or commanding) tone. Read our free whitepaper. Click here to view products specs. Buy one, get one free. Sign up for our weekly newsletter here. You get the idea.

Appropriate Calls to Action Help Your Visitor

By including appropriate calls to action in your marketing materials, you can help your visitors and customers to understand what to do. Help them find the offering, the service, the product, the information that they need. Don’t worry about the commanding verbs—your visitors will thank you for them later. Those who didn’t follow your calls to action weren’t interested anyway, and you’re not interested in them.

I have recently been studying some materials about business strategy and sustained competitive advantage—about how to gain the “unfair” advantage that will keep your business profitable and ahead of the competition.

Interestingly, most of the areas in which you can gain sustained competitive advantage involve the people, culture, strategies, procedures, and organization of your business—not the technology, product features, or price. That is, the relationships, goals, and hierarchy of your firm make the difference. Strengths and advantages in these areas are valuable, rare, and difficult to imitate.

How Do I Create Sustained Competitive Advantage?

There are many ways to create sustained competitive advantage, and I will discuss many of them in my coming posts. If I were to recommend one thing that you should start doing now, I would recommend that you work on your network of professional contacts—the synergy among the right people is a force that is incredibly powerful and nearly impossible to duplicate.

Ideas of How You Can Improve Your Professional Networking

• Print Some Business Cards

  Business cards may be cliche, but they work. Get some business cards, no matter how small or new your business, organization, or service may be. For smaller businesses or less serious efforts, you can get 250 free business cards from VistaPrint. For anything else, though, you should invest in some real cards with a custom design that fits your business.

  Make sure you hand out your cards to anyone who is interested in the work you are doing, who would be interested in your service, or who would be able to help you with something. Business cards have an incredible staying power—they sit in people’s wallets or planners for months, and then they come out to help unexpectedly.

• Attend Industry Events…

  …even if you don’t have anything you want to sell or buy yet. In fact, especially when you don’t have anything to sell or buy—this will give you the chance to learn more about your industry and the needs and wants of people in it. You will be able to focus on things that would normally escape your attention.

• Join Linked In

  Linked In is an online networking service. By joining and inviting your friends and acquaintances, you can rapidly build a giant network of professional contacts. It’s amazing how many people you are connected to by one or two degrees.

• Keep Your Resume Current

  Don’t do this because you want to get a new job necessarily—it’s simply a good idea to have a current list of your experience and accomplishments. You will be able to share your knowledge, attract new clients or partners, and see where you need improvements better.

Invest in the Human Aspect of Your Business

Remember, people and culture are nearly impossible to duplicate and are the most common sources of sustainable competitive advantage. Invest in the human capital that is, or will become, part of your ventures.

Now that we can create pages using basic html, create text and headers, and format our text, it would probably be a good idea to learn how to use images. Images, after all, are very important in web design—they convey information, improve your site’s appearance, and add a little spice to your page.

Images are included in your HTML using a <img /> tag. Image tags are some of the few HTML tags that only require one tag—there is no closing </img> tag. The “/” at the end of the tag tells your browser that there is no closing tag.

Source Attribute

An image tag has several attributes that go inside of the tag. The first and most important attribute is the source attribute—it tells your browser where to find the image you want to display. Source is abbreviated as “src.” Here’s an example:

Here’s the result:

Alternate Text Attribute

The next most important attribute is the alternate text attribute. This attribute tells the browser what text to display in place of the image in case the image is not available. This text is also for people using screen readers. Alternate text is abbreviated as “alt.”

Here’s what the alternate text looks like for our image when it’s unavailable:

Title Attribute

Another attribute for images (and many other HTML tags—try some and see which tags allow this attribute) is the title attribute. This attribute tells the browser what text to display when you hover over the image.

Size Attributes

Finally, you may have an image that is too large or too small that you need to resize (remember, large images are very large files, and small images will look pixelated if they are stretched too much). Do this with either the height or width attribute (or both, if you want to distort the image). Here are three examples:

Go and experiment with some of your own images!

Oh boy. Here we go.

Google and Sun have partnered up to provide Open Office software over the web. You may as well walk up, pull off your glove, and swat Microsoft in the face. Microsoft’s software sales are its lifeblood, pulling in $11 billion a year, and threatening to take market share from Microsoft’s flagship products is a bold move.

Sources: ABC News and The Courier Mail (Note: the article is no longer posted on The Courier Mail).

Building Up Strength

Google is very smart. It knows what has happened to other rivals of Microsoft. Apple. Novell. WordPerfect. Netscape. Oracle. Every one of them has been pushed around by the bully of the playground. Google isn’t going into a fight like this unprepared. It’s been building up every kind of technology and innovation it can for several years. David has been spending some time in the weight room before he faces Goliath. You’ll notice that most of Google’s innovations are web based. Read more about Google’s preparation here: Google Prepares for Battle.

Arranging the Pieces

Like in a game of chess, Google has been arranging the pieces of this conflict very carefully. I believe it is going to go for broke—shifting applications, data storage and retrieval, everything, to the web. Richard MacManus of ZDNet agrees with me. There will only be standards-based interface tools—browsers, Java, API’s, just barely enough to allow your computer or other device to boot up and access the web where all the data and nameuseful services will be located. Google is going for far more than office apps—it’s going for every application and all data, using a browser and OS independent model to take down Microsoft.

Google’s Master Plan:

1. Google Search: collect, sort, and retrieve all of the world’s information.

2. Google Desktop: currently you can sort and search through what’s on your computer. It’s a handy tool to have, and Google wants it installed on as many machines as possible—hence the distribution partnership with Sun’s Java. Google will eventually use it to help you pull all of your data onto the web.

   You will want your data on the web because you will have Internet devices that will be able to access it from just about anywhere. You also skip out on having to have a hard drive or other large storage media in all your devices. You only need one place to store your data, and Google’s betting it’s on the web.

3. Gmail: with such great searching and sorting functionality, this may simply be the beginning of a personal data storage capability. There’s a reason they offer 2.5 gigs and counting of storage. Gmail may be renamed Gdata.
4. Google Earth: begin collecting and becoming the standard for all geographically based information, which will become important because of Google Wireless.
5. Google Wireless: after a test run in San Francisco, Google will roll out a nation-(and even world-)wide wireless ISP to be the infrastructure for supporting web-based applications, accessing personal data through Gdata (formerly called Gmail), and using the geographical information from Google Earth. Your mobile device(s) (cell phones may simply continue to absorb functionality and reduce the number of devices you need to carry) will access your data, link you to web applications, and provide you with context- and location-specific services, assistance, and advertising.

Wow.

Talk about a tour de force! Google is going to take on Microsoft, and with a plan like this, I believe they have the best chance anyone has ever had of taking down our modern Goliath. Microsoft certainly won’t go down without a fight, and it may have a few tricks up its sleeves, but in the end it won’t really matter too much who wins—the consumer can only benefit from healthy competition. Although I hope that Google wins because they seem to treat people better and compete in a moral manner.

This will be fun to watch!

I read an article on MarketingProfs.com about how SEO (Search Engine Optimization) needs to be an ongoing effort (Ongoing SEO). They cite three main reasons that you want to monitor your site and make Continuous SEO a priority:

1. The Freshness Factor: sites that are updated frequently get ranked better by search engines
2. Increasing Value: you can steer your optimization efforts towards those that are proving to be more profitable
3. New Business Concerns: business grow and change over time. Your goals will change, and your SEO needs to support your new goals

Why Continuous SEO?

Why does it have to be continuous SEO? Why not simply periodic SEO? Can’t we just check up our rankings every week or month to make sure we’re not slipping?

Periodic updates need to be so frequent that they are, for most intents and purposes, continuous. You need to test and retest. You can always do better. Your competitors aren’t simply checking their rankings weekly. Search engine algorithms change. These are all additional reasons that your efforts need to be consistent.

It’s interesting to note that all of the tips from MarketProfs involve the creation of new content, not poring over old stuff.

I know it’s a lot of work. But you can do it, and it’s worth it. Go forth and optimize!

I bet you’re tired of having all your text look the same. You want to add a little pizazz and flair. This tutorial is going to show you a couple of baby steps for making your text exciting.

Strong Text Formatting

If you want to make a bold statement, to make something stand out, to have people pick phrases out of the middle of the page, then the <strong> tag is for you. Here’s how it looks in your code:

And on your page:

Place the text you want to strengthen in between the strong tags.

Emphasized Text Formatting

If you simply want to emphasize text without breaking up the flow of your paragraph completely, use the <em> tag. Code:

And on the page:

Place the text that you want to emphasize in between the em tags.

A Word about Italics

In some situations, like with book titles, you’ll want to use the italics tags, <i> and </i>. In most situations, however, italics in print are used to emphasize text, and so most of the time you should stick to the <em> tags.

Now go back over the text you may have entered into your web pages and spice things up—strengthen certain points and emphasize key phrases!