Reduce Your Bounce Rate In One Second

So, how do you get visitors to spend more time on your site and reduce your bounce rate, without spending more than one second trying to do it?
It’s simple.
First of all get inside the control panel of your website (e.g., WordPress admin dashboard, or the equivalent on the software you are using). Now go to the section where you can tweak your CSS and other design aspects (in WordPress this is under the “Appearance” menu). Now find the line controlling the font size on your site, and increase it. That is it!
There are many case studies around the web where people used A/B testing to find how they could reduce the bounce rate, and increasing the font size works on most situations.
Just consider that the population in most developed countries is getting older and older, and that more and more people need to stare at a computer screen all day long for professional reasons (meaning our eyes are getting tired).
Then combine that with larger screen resolutions (where you have more pixels on the screen, but the actual appearance of the graphics gets smaller) and you get web visitors who would love to find a big large font on your site, so that they can read your awesome content comfortably.
And yes, I did increase the font on Daily Blog Tips a couple of months ago. It used to be 12, now it’s 13, and the bounce rate improved slightly.

Raven SEO Tools – How to Use the Event Manager

 

The following post is part of a series on Raven SEO tools. In this post, we're going to look at the event manager. The event manager is quite simply a way to "mark" a day or series of days for a single website you are tracking or across an entire profile of multiple websites. Under the dashboard tab is a sub-tab labeled "event manager." If you click "add a new event," you will see a screen similar to the one one below. Raven SEO Tools Event manager You can name/title your event anything you want, but I suggest something short and understandable, like "Facebook follower yellow ad" or "Bat mobile infographic." You have a longer field notes section where you can put a lot more information. Then you choose a start and end date for the event (the event can be one day or multiple days). You then select single website or profile (profile makes the event attached to every website in the profile). Once you have entered the event, you will see it listed on the dashboard similar to the screenshot below One of the other nice features is the ability to tag events. Let's say you are trying to figure out which type of engagement brings more customers to your website. You can tag events with tags like Facebook, Twitter, blog post, or Stumblupon campaign and get a better understanding of what's going on and why. Once the event has passed, a colored bar will appear on all the graphs in your account. The colored bar appears on all the graphs such as analytics, Twitter, and Facebook. Raven SEO Tools Even tagging If you hold your mouse over the colored bar, the name will pop up. If you named your events properly, this can help you know what happened and why at a glance. Raven SEO Tools Event Manager Listing You can use the event manager to track all sorts of things like adwords campaigns, Facebook campaigns, Twitter fights, subscription drives, Twitter follower "raids," and so on. Iit's up to you to decide how granular you want to get with your measurements. If you sign up for Raven Tools through my website and become a paid subscriber, I do earn a commission. However, to be honest, I am a paying customer and use Raven Tools on a daily basis. It's one of the first things I check every morning, so I'm comfortable recommending the product. I hope that, through these tutorials, you get more value out using these tools yourself.

 

Internet Marketing Strategies You Must Know

4 Internet Marketing Strategies You Must Know

I was browsing through my RSS reader today and came across an interesting post from my friend Glen Allsopp, titled The Post Your Fellow Bloggers Don’t Want You to Read.
The post basically lists four Internet marketing strategies that few bloggers are aware of. In fact one of them was completely new to me as well, and I have been working in this industry for many years. The idea is simple but pretty clever: to put a customer testimonial on your Paypal checkout page. Here is a quotation from the article:

Strategy Three: The Paypal Checkout Testimonial
One thing I’ve noticed with product launches â€" especially the Cloud Blogging launch â€" is that a lot of people will click on our Buy Now button, but not actually purchase the item. There is a measure for this called the “Cart Abandonment Rate” and our CAR was as high as 90% on some occasions.
I spoke with a few people on this topic, and watched some relevant marketing material, and was told that I should add a step between the sale and the Add to Cart screen. The reason people are more likely to click on an Add to Cart button in the first place is because it doesn’t imply commitment compared to words like Buy Now!.

Therefore, if you’re sending that traffic to an instant payment page, they often back out of the deal. The step, they told me, was a good place to insert product testimonials so further convince people that your offering is good.
Instead of adding an entirely new page, I took advantage of a little known feature in Paypal. The ability to add your own header to the Paypal payment pages. In this header I used a testimonial from one of our customers. Thanks to this, our cart abandonment rate has decreased dramatically.

If want to learn the other three strategies make sure to read the full article.

     

Want A Website with Millions of Monthly Pageviews?

Who doesn’t, right?
While I won’t be giving one, hopefully the tip I am going to share below will put you in the right path for building your own.
The tip is pretty simple: take a look at other websites that already achieved that (i.e., reached millions of monthly page views) and analyzed how they achieved it. Things you could analyze include:

• What niche they are focusing on.
• What kind of design they use.
• What kind of content or service they offer to visitors.
• What methods they use to generate traffic.
• What monetization methods they are using.
• What strategies they are using to convert first time visitors into loyal readers.

At this point you might be thinking: “OK, I’ll do that, but where exactly will i find websites that already reached millions of monthly pageviews?”
One resource I like to use for this purpose is the BuySellAds.com marketplace. You’ll basically be able to browse across hundreds of websites that are selling ads. The most popular websites on the marketplace get anywhere from 1 up to 20 million monthly page views. And that cool thing is that we are talking about real page views, because the BuySellAds traffic tracker is pretty accurate (I tested it myself).
You can also filter your research by topic, keyword and so on. I am sure you’ll get some ideas using this strategy, to give it a try.

 

Google Traffic – Confusing Love and Money

Written by Michael Gray on April 7, 2011

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I recently came across an article that was bemoaning the fact that the travel blogging space has become overrun with low level search intended writing, and the actual feet on the ground, first hand, personal travel experiences are disappearing from the web. IMHO this author has confused love and money, a common complaint in the web publishing world.

The question you need to ask yourself is whether you are in the game for love or money … cause you can’t have both …

To be honest, most of us will agree that the first hand, personal experience type of writing that someone does because they truly enjoy the subject is of a better quality and is what we really want to read and learn from. But it’s also more likely to be long winded, harder to digest, filled with flowery, non-keyword-focused adjectives and stuck on a site with a completely un-navigable site architecture. Search engine optimizers know how to organize and put content into the “language” a search engine can understand. Most travel writers, unless they have played with SEO, throw their hands in the air in frustration and wonder why Google can’t just figure it out.

Let’s take a look at another issue. Recently the Food 52 had an article about how Google’s new recipe algorithm was biased towards large sites that had IT staff who could republish their entire site with recipe meta data so Google could understand it. The writer also made the argument that larger sites with the budgets to do calorie computations would receive an unfair advantage.

…I do know the economics of advertising and production will choose the winner …

If you read further into the article, you’ll notice what’s really lurking under the surface is the author’s personal bias against fast and easy low calories recipes. In the article, she uses an example, an extremely complicated French recipe called a “cassoulet”. Now we’re confusing someone’s love of haute cuisine with the reality that most people simply don’t want to cook on a daily basis. There’s a reason Rachel Ray will sell more 30 minute meal cook books than David Chang’s Momofuku. It’s not that her food tastes better; it’s that her recipes and cooking style are much more accessible to most people than David Chang’s. Some of his recipes take days to prepare–trust me, I’ve tried.
But back to the recipe argument. Iis there some truth to her assertion? Yes. For example, Aaron Chronister, creator of the Bacon Explosion, showed me how he doesn’t rank for a recipe he created.

Bacon Explosion Recipe Search

In this case Google got it wrong, and they are partially to blame because they changed the rules in the middle of the game without realizing that not everyone will be able to update to the new format so quickly. Some people are in the game because they love to cook and, for them, it’s not about the money.
We are at a disruptive time in the publishing world. The barriers to publish are so low they are non existent (see Cognitive Surplus Review  by Clay Shirky). Google’s adsense allows anyone to monetize a website via adsense without needing a sales or accounting team. Large publishers have scaled creation costs so low that content is a commodity just to wrap advertising around . The New York Times is trying to find a balance between setting information free and charging for access and failing miserably at it. I can’t tell you where we are going to end up, but I do know the economics of advertising and production will choose the winner. The question you need to ask yourself is whether you are in the game for love or money … cause you can’t have both.

Why Google's +1 Needs an On Page Component

Last week Google announced a new addition to the search engine results page: the +1 button. While there was a huge amount of press surrounding the launch, after playing with it for a few days, I don’t think it’s going to work unless it has an on page component … soon. Let”s talk about what Google got right. The button is easy to use, unlike sidewiki or the privacy invading Google buzz. They also mimicked the Facebook link button closely enough that the average user will get the concept pretty readily. The “your friends also liked this” functionality also closely mimics Facebook. If you think this wasn’t intentional, you are a bit naive. That said, what Google got wrong was the omission of a button on the landing page. At the time this post was written, there is no button that publishers can put on their website pages. You can only get on the mailing list to be notified when one becomes available. IMHO this is a huge mistake. For the like button to “work” as it currently stands, one of two things have to happen: A user has to do the same or similar searches often and click the +1 button before clicking the SERP listing The user clicks the SERP listing and loves it so much, they go back and click the +1 button IMHO neither of these scenarios seems very likely, and it shows that Google really doesn’t understand how or why customers really use social media. Businesses “think” people “like” them out of a sense of loyalty; while that may be true for some, many are just looking for “sales”, “discounts” or “promo codes”. Let’s be honest–the most likely reason that someone would fan Williams Sonoma on Facebook is to get a discount and to see new recipes. There are hundreds of other little reasons, but those two are the biggest “value adds” to the end user. No one REALLY wants to be friends with a company. If Google really wants people to use the +1 button, they are going to need to make it REALLY easy to use. They are also going to have to create some way for the customer to get something from using the +1 button. Without those two factors, the only reason people will use the +1 button is if a marketer incentivizes it with cash or free samples. The eggheads in the Google ivory tower may think people will work for free to make the world (and the Google index) a better place, but in the real world people will work harder on the things that bring more cash into their own lives, not into someone else’s.

Optimize Your Images For Search Engine Traffic

How to Optimize Your Images For Search Engine Traffic

The following is part of a multiple part series covering image optimization techniques. This article is intended for beginners through intermediate SEO's; if this doesn't pertain to you, you may want to skim as most of this will probably be review material for you. Some of the big questions many people ask are why would they even want to perform image optimization? Doesn't it just help people who want to steal or hotlink images? And is there really any meaningful traffic or links that you can get from image optimization? IMHO the answer is yes. Let's say someone is going on a trip to Italy. They might do image searches for things to do or see in Italy and for famous Italian landmarks like the Leaning Tower of Piza, the Trevi Fountain, or St. Peter's Basilica. Thanks to Google's universal search results, images provide a way to get onto the first page (or, in some cases, the top result) and get a click through, an ad view, or adsense impression. It might even get a lead generation completion. Maybe you run a fish store. If a university professor or government agency needs a picture of a fish and your image result appears, and you allow your images to be reused in exchange for a link, this can be huge way to passively build links slowly over time (true story! It happened for a client I used to have). Now that we've got the why out of the way, let's talk about the "how" of image optimization. Filenames This is one of the most basic elements of image optimization. If you have an image of blue widgets, I would name your image "blue-widgets.jpg" or "blue-widgets.gif". You can use other formats like PNG, but I have gotten better results with "jpg" and "gif" files. You can use other characters like underscore as word delimiters, but I get better results with hyphens. You can run the words together if they are separate in other factors. I have found stemming plays a role (ie widget vs widgets), but you can get around it using other factors. I haven't seen capitalization play a role, but I prefer to use all lower case because I usually use Apache servers and case sensitivity matters. If you are going to have multiple images of the same object-type, I suggest adding a "-1″, "-2″ onto the end. Now, before the hate mail or hate tweets start, it is entirely possible to have an image rank without the keywords being in the file name–IF there are enough other factors in place. However, you should ask yourself why would you give up a chance to give a search engine a signal about what an image is about? If you work on a large ecommerce platform or other large database application, chances are good that your gold diamond earrings will have an image file name like "GDX347294.jpg" that corresponds to the item's SKU or other internal classifier. So, yes, you will have to sacrifice the keyword for business reasons. ALT Text Let's get the basic information out of the way: ALT text was designed for screen readers or visually-impaired people to know what they weren't seeing. Your goal is to use it to satisfy the screen readers while being keyword focused enough for the search engines and without being a keyword stuffing spammer. Here's an example of ALT text variations: Keyword stuffed: discount hotel room paris france ALT text only: Eiffel Tower SEO optimized: Eiffel Tower from Louvre Bons Enfants hotel room Striving to find a balance between pleasing the search engines and text readers can be a juggling act. If you are risky with some of your other SEO techniques, I'd play this on the safe side. Headings and Bold Text If image optimization for a particular image is important, I really like to optimize the image with bold or a heading tag of the term I'm chasing right above the image. I've found this really helps give a strong signal to the engines Oceanus Statue from Trevi Fountain Image Captions Image captions like the one to the right are another way I really like to give the search engines a good nudge in the direction I want them to go. Try to place the search term you are trying to optimize for at the front of the caption. Image size I've found that if you keep your images a reasonable size you generally do better with image optimization. That's not to say really big or really small images won't rank, just that images that are larger than 100×100 and smaller than 1200×1200 work best. Using a thumbnail that links to a larger picture can be helpful. Image Traffic So what can you expect from image traffic? Like all things, it depends on what you are chasing, but I have one image that ranks on the first page for a single word term that brings in hundreds of views for me every month. The page has adsense on it and, over a single year, it brings in several hundred dollars worth of revenue. It's something to think about before you write off image optimization. Images Traffic Data So what are the takeaways from this post: Try to name your images with your keywords if possible, using the hyphen as a delimiter. Shorter names are better than longer. Avoid using more than 4 words if possible. Keep your ALT text keyword focused without being stuffed or spammy. If possible use headings or bold tags above or directly next to the image. Use captions if at all possible and keep the keywords closer to the front of the caption. Keep the images a reasonable size. They should be large enough for people to see but small enough to fit on a screen. If you own the image, encourage people to reuse your image in exchange for a link. Try to find a way to monetize image traffic with CPM advertising, adsense, or affiliate links.