Happy New Year

Check out this Website Credibility report from Stanford University.  The compiled 10 guidelines for building and improving the credibility of a web site. The guidelines were based on three years of research that included over 4,500 people.

Here is a sample:

Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site
You can build web site credibility by providing third-party support (citations, references, source material) for information you present, especially if you link to this evidence. Even if people don’t follow these links, you’ve shown confidence in your material.

Show that there’s a real organization behind your site
Showing that your web site is for a legitimate organization will boost the site’s credibility. The easiest way to do this is by listing a physical address. Other features can also help, such as posting a photo of your offices or listing a membership with the chamber of commerce.

Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide
Do you have experts on your team? Are your contributors or service providers authorities? Be sure to give their credentials. Are you affiliated with a respected organization? Make that clear. Conversely, don’t link to outside sites that are not credible. Your site becomes less credible by association.

Read all to Web Site Credability elements.

The high bounce rate itself is a direct result of the approach a web site owner is using to generate their traffic. Visitors leaving a site is not necessarily a bad thing depending on how, and why they arrived in the first place. It is important to engage a visitor and give them a reason to click another link, but understanding the visitor’s motive for being on a site is also important information.

The ultimate goal is to convert a visitor into a customer, but understanding that not all visitors need to be customers will help a site owner focus their efforts in the right place. That place is to make sure that the web site properly serves the needs of the “loyal customer”. A real customer is someone who likes the site, returns often, and purchases the product or information being sold.

So, to make sure this type of visitor remains loyal, the site needs to be perfectly designed and easily navigated buy a customer. There is nothing worse than having a visitor arrive at a site ready to learn, engage, or buy and then having that visitor leave because the site is not user friendly.

A proper look into the factors of a site’s bounce rate can reveal a gold mine of information. The information should be used to help the owner of the site strengthen their position among the competition. Some of that traffic leaving the site is extremely valuable in branding the site as an authority on a particular subject. If a site is packed full of good information, some visitors will scoop up some knowledge and leave. That is alright too. A site owner has to learn to let go of the tire kickers and use them for the value they provide. That value is an increased awareness of the site, and if built properly, an increased search engine ranking due to the site’s relevance and popularity.

It is really up to the web site owner to make sure they are making the most of information provided to them by their bounce rate. A high bounce rate is not always bad, and a low bounce rate is not always good. When I see a low bounce rate, I’m happy for the success but realize there are other things that need to be done to bring in traffic. A high bounce rate is simply an indication that tweaks need to be made to the design of the site in order engage the visitor. As long as the site is serving the needs of its targeted customers, everything else is just icing on the cake.

Real customers are brought in by the search engines. These people are actively seeking information. If the bounce rate on those visitors is high, serious work needs to be done to better optimize the site and provide more benefit to a visitor. It is this type of visitor that needs to be converted into a customer to insure short term success. Traffic coming in from other sources can be converted but should be looked at as potential customers.

Way too much attention is focused on the behavior of visitors brought in by social networks like digg and stumble upon. These visitors are great because they increase traffic but by their very nature, they are just the there because they are reacting to information they receive as part of their social networks. These visitors are very low value. They didn’t search for a product or service and if those visitors bounce it does not really matter. They get a glimpse of the site, and there is a chance they might click around and become interested. There is also a chance they might bookmark the site and return at a later time.
The important thing to remember here is to learn to let go of these visitors and see them as merely a bonus.

Another trap people are falling into is worrying too much about the traffic created through direct links to other sites. Again, the number of visitors that come in this way is terrific, but those visitors just arrived because they were on a different site. It does not mean that they are in the market for the product or information being provided. The chance to expose the web site to them is awesome. But they can only be thought of as those “potential” customers. It is not fair to say that anything was lost by not converting that traffic into a sale. This traffic is also best looked at as a way to increase the presence of the site and make it more valuable to people using the search engine.

Perhaps the most misdiagnosed information from a bounce rate study is the behavior of those visitors that are already loyal to a site. They come there because they like it. The content and design of the site is geared toward keeping them as customers while new customers are groomed. However, the simple fact is that these people will not purchase something every time they visit. They may return several times without any sort of real conversion but the key is to let them come and go as they please. Do not be discouraged by this type of visitor’s behavior.

So even though there may be a high bounce rate on a site, the origin of the incoming traffic has to be analyzed before any real conclusion can be drawn. There are many reasons why a visitor might come to a site and as long as a site owner is serving the traffic that comes in from the search engines, there is no need to panic. A high bounce rate is an opportunity to look at the information and make changes when appropriate. It is not a call to abandon ship or do anything drastic.

For many clients and business owners looking for ways to get traffic, they quite frankly don’t understand the rules of the “Google Game”. And that’s because there’s no rule book. A great way to find out what the rules are is to look at the actual patent that Google has filed. (Filing date: Dec 31, 2003)

The patent, entitled Information retrieval based on historical data is an interesting document, and well worth a read if you are interested in how Google determines ranking, and the many factors involved.

This document which was submitted in December of 2003, and is as close to the actual rule book for how Google determines page rankings as you can find. If you want to know the rules of how Google is determining who gets number one page rank, have a read. Here are some interesting points from the patent. We have added our own interpretation for a few of the more relevant items:

A method for scoring a document, comprising:

6. determining an amount by which the content of the document changes over time
READ: Google likes Fresh Content

8. scoring the document based, at least in part, on the frequency at which and the amount by which the content of the document changes over time.
READ: Google likes Continual Fresh Content

24. the appearance of one or more links relates to at least one of a date that a new link to the document appears, a rate at which the one or more links appear over time, and a number of the one or more links that appear during a time period, and the disappearance of one or more links relates to at least one of a date that an existing link to the document disappears, a rate at which the one or more links disappear over time, and a number of the one or more links that disappear during a time period.
READ: if you are Buying Links in an effort to gain inclusing into the Google index, and get links from sites with high PR value, when you stop paying for the links, Google can potentially be tracking this information.

40. the domain-related information is related to at least one of an expiration date of the domain, a domain name server record associated with the domain, and a name server associated with the domain.
READ: IF you buy your domain names for 1 year in an effort to test the market, Google might view your domain with less authority than a business that has invested for a domain for 10 years.

Read this patent. We believe reading this document will help you on your path to understand exactly how Google does what it does.

Try these simple steps to seo target marketing now.

1. use the FREE keyword suggestion tool to research your particular niche
2. once the results for the top 100 keyword searches come back, rather than focus on the obvious top keywords, scan down to the middle and look closer at the “Long Tail” keywords, the less obvious keywords.
3. Now, take the road less traveled, and do a Google search for what we can call the “secondary words”
4. Have a look at who gets top placement for these words.  If they are PR8 sites and have 30,000 backlinks, perhaps you should look for a less popular word.  You need the right balance between targeted keyword phrases and a term that is not completely dominated.
5. One major mistake a lot of websites make is to go after the most obvious keywords; DON’T DO THAT!
6. Look for keyword terms that bring back sites in the top position that you think you could do battle with.  Why enter into an arena with the champions, when there are thousands of targeted words that get traffic with less competition.
7. Now that you have identified the right mix of keyword phrases, use them to create a page. Match your title tag, meta tag and theme of the page on this keyword research.  Create a quality page of content and provide uniqe information.
8. If you have a blog, better yet; use the keyword you just identified as the blog post title
9. Try it, and let us know when it works

Why do you need a Search Engine Optimization Firm? 
The answer is simple.  You need an SEO Game Plan.  Search engines have complex sets of rules and algorithms that help determine which sites are shown at the top of search results.  While Yahoo! , Google and MSN keep their formulas for determining search results a secret, how they crawl the web and choose what to display is  NOT a complete mystery.  

The core elements of determining search results are easily identified.  Understanding these elements, and properly implementing best practices of Search Engine Optimization will help you increase your site rankings.  Good SEO helps create a better user experience, putting the right content in front of the right audience.  Those that perform SEO have a competitive advantage over those that don’t.