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Tips_for_SMB_Web_Site_Promotion_and_Optimization
| Tips for SMB Web Site Promotion and Optimization
What is site optimization? Site optimization is a number of
actions aimed at enhancing the efficiency of a Web site
performance. A Web site’s typical functions include business
representation and awareness (PR), sales (B2C), and potential
customer leads (B2B). Consequently, the measure of the site’s
effectiveness corresponds to its visibility, sales volume and
the number of generated leads respectively. Often, site
optimization is understood as promotion in search engines for a
number of keyword phrases. However, simply getting a higher
ranking doesn’t solve a business task as it’s only the first
step on the way to a sale. After a user enters the site from a
search engine link, you should provide him with a quick access
to information sought. Convenient navigation, good content
organization, easy search, and other usability issues play an
important role. The next step is properly placing contact
information. In other words, a Web site should provide several
ways to establish a contact with company’s representatives and
to allow for feedback. A full-fledged site optimization should
include all three components above: 1. Optimization for search
engines 2. Effective content organization and clear navigation
3. Intuitive feedback mechanism Metrics: How to measure the
effect of optimization? Improving content and navigation should
be based on some measurable characteristics (metrics) which
allow to asses effect of the changes on the final result. For
example, if the site’s primary function is generating business
leads, the main metrics would be the number of site visitors who
initiated the contact. Analyzing user navigation patterns helps
to clarify the reasons why some of them leave the site quickly.
It’s clear that only a fraction of the contact forms filled out
on the site will result in sales, that’s why it’s difficult to
assess the payback based on efforts spent on the site
development. However, in most cases these efforts are worth it.
For instance, deploying a system for registration and
classification of the filled out contact forms and its
integration with a corporate CRM system allowed to make
conclusion that the site brings contacts requiring a relatively
low-cost presales investment. Visitor tracking There are two
approaches to tracking site visitors – to use counters or to
analyze web-server logs. The first one is easy to implement,
provides basic statistics and is acceptable for most of the
small sites. The major drawback of this approach is loss of
information. The counter requests can be blocked by a browser or
a corporate proxy-server. Besides, counters can’t log crawlers.
Web-server logs analysis provides more complete and detailed
information – errors statistics, traffic, images requests and
file downloads; cookies contents, crawlers’ activity, etc.
Practice shows that the best results are achieved by using the
combination of both methods. The counter provides general
information in real time while web-server logs analysis tools
deliver the detailed statistics. Analysis and Reporting Tools
One of the popular topics for discussions in SEO forums is the
choice of a logs analysis system. There is no single solution as
every site is unique and its detailed analysis requires very
fine tuning of the tools. However, from time to time new
analysis tools appear that are claimed to be perfect. One of the
most effective and flexible analysis tools is an OLAP cube, as
well as a simple SQL client application to run an arbitrary
query against the logs database. Apart from the option of
creating various kinds of reports, the analysis system should be
able to build and deliver a number of reports generated
automatically on a regular basis (daily, weekly, etc). This
ensures the continuity of the key metrics in the monitoring
process. It is also important to track information on the
position of your site in search engines and those of your
competitors. The analysis of the competitor’s site allows
evaluating the level of their expertise in optimization
techniques and often brings surprising discoveries and new
ideas. Bots Identification Problem One of the problems rarely
mentioned by developers of log-analyzers is identifying a
crawler. Search bots (chiefly Google bot and MSN crawler) can
generate more than half of the overall traffic. So the problem
is overstating the overall statistics. A less obvious, but more
important problem is a significant distortion of the navigation
paths origination from bots’ random walking through the site.
This makes off-the-shelf log-analyzers useless for the
comprehensive analysis of the navigation paths.
Visitor statistics are gathered with the help of a counter and
through the logs analysis. A specially developed application
downloads logs from the server on a daily basis via an
FTP-protocol, saves them locally, imports into an MSSQL database
and runs a post-processing procedure. During the import, the
application extracts characteristics of the user agents; splits
referrers into domains, paths and query strings; detects the
most popular search engines and extract phrases; splits IP
addresses into octets and saves sessions IDs into a separate
field. After that, an SQL server performs a final data
processing procedure to extend the data with client’s geographic
location and times spent on every page, plus identify crawlers.
Geography To obtain geographical information from an IP address,
one can use an existing database or service, priced from $50 to
$600 depending on the level of detail. There are also some free
databases, providing information only on a country level.
Usually, these are reduced versions of complete commercial
databases (for example www.MaxMind.com or www.IP2Location.com).
The geographical information allows to determine which regions
are most interested in your services, so you can make
arrangements with local resellers or establish your local
representative offices. Bots Identification Some crawlers can be
detected on the basis of the user agent information if you keep
the corresponding list. Some bots disguise themselves as popular
browsers (IE, Mozilla) or actually are those browsers (for
example, when IE downloads a site to make it available offline).
The latter case can be resolved using adaptive methods which
analyze the behavior of a remote client. If many pages are
requested from single IP in a very short period of time (for
example 50 pages in one minute) most probably this is a robot.
Apart from that, you can consider several indirect signs, like
an empty referrer field or robots.txt files retrieved. Such a
multi-level crawler identification scheme turned out to be
highly effective in practice. Feedback Mechanism Designing an
effective feedback form is a rather complicated task which
requires a detailed analysis of navigation paths and a lot of
experiments with the interface. The number and arrangement of
the fields, their color scheme, plus presence of various
elements and even the name of the Web form – all affect the
number of submitted forms. For example, a gaudy design, an
abundant number of links to other site sections, and too many
pictures distract the visitor from filling out the form and
increase the number of exits from the page. The forms and fields
which are too small, or a superfluous number of form fields also
reduce the efficiency of the feedback mechanism. To avoid the
distortion of information, such as misprints in e-mails, it’s
useful to perform data validation on the client’s side.
Additional data validation on the server side allows to cut off
a major amount of spam generated by robots. Make sure that the
validation procedure on the server side is not stricter then the
one on the client side, otherwise some forms may be lost. As
more users have been installing Windows XP SP2, more new
problems with pop-ups and cookies have evolved. The first
problem is that pop-up windows are simply blocked by the browser
without notifications. The second problem is that the site that
relies on cookies will not work for users whose browser doesn’t
accept cookies. According to our estimates, the number of
browsers that don’t accept cookie has grown from 2% to 27%
within the first quarter of 2005 and is continues to grow. It is
useful to attach some technical information to each submitted
form. This information includes the visitor’s IP, geographic
location, a site the visitor came from and a detailed path of
his browsing through the site. Analysis and reports Once the
logs are transferred to an SQL server and processed they are
ready for analysis. Separating log analysis from logs processing
gives the analyst more freedom in using the most appropriate
tools and provides a possibility of custom tools development. As
mentioned before, the most flexible and universal tool is an
OLAP cube. OLAP cube can be explored via Excel, a web-interface
or third-party components. The advantages of this approach are
hierarchical views, multidimensional tables, the ability to
execute arbitrary queries, fast data retrieval and a convenient
interface. The screenshot below demonstrates how an OLAP cube
can be used to deduce geographical distribution of traffic
generated by search engines for the last three months. Data
mining took less than two minutes. Apart from analytical reports
that require active participation of an analyst, there is a
number of standard reports that can be generated automatically,
such as daily reports on the number of visitors, traffic
generated from target search engines, number of page loads,
number of initiated contacts, etc. The average and total time
spent on a particular page by a visitor are very useful metrics
demonstrating the interest in a particular part of the site.
Pages which trigger extended periods of visitors’ time and
attract many visitors constitute so-called “zones of interest”
and should be designed with great care. Pages with a smaller
number of visitors but longer periods of time spent on them
often contribute more to the overall time spent on the site than
the pages with a higher number of hits. An important component
of any large site is a search subsystem that allows a visitor to
find information by-passing the main navigation. Actually, the
search subsystem extends the site navigation and therefore must
deliver highly relevant results. One of the most effective
implementations of the search system is queering GoogleAPI
service. When using this approach you have to bear in mind that
your site should be regularly indexed by GoogleBot. Otherwise,
the results will correspond to an outdated content. For a site
with such a search subsystem, one of the most important metrics
is a number of pages retrieved by GoogleBot. Knowing what
visitors search over the site helps to optimize the content
structure and the navigation system by making the most popular
pages easily accessible. Standard reports are easily generated
by running one or several SQL queries. There is a number of
software products that can be used for generating these reports
in a variety of formats (Crystal Reports and MSSQL Reporting
Services, etc.). DataArt uses MS SQL Reporting Services as it
provides an integrated development environment, web-interface
access and a scheduled delivery of reports to specified e-mail
addresses. Employees responsible for running the web site start
their daily duties with reviewing reports for the previous day.
These reports usually include: 1. Total number of visitors
(number of sessions, distinct IP addresses, pages retrieved by
users and crawlers). 2. A list of the most popular pages 3. Full
paths of visitors who searched the site 4. Full paths of
visitors from particular countries that visited pages with web
forms 5. Referrers from search engines and phrases they searched
for Metrics and Organization of Site Optimization Activities One
of the primary functions of the site is generating business
leads. Consequently, the most appropriate metrics is the number
of visitors who initiated a contact. In practice, such approach
can’t be used directly as a significant part of submitted forms
is spam. The problem is solved by marking up the forms as either
useful or spam. The number of reasonable requests is considered
a measure of the site performance. Another measure is the number
of visitors form a particular geographical location directed by
a search engine query based on target key words or phrases. The
correlation between the number of visitors from a target group
and the number of initiated contacts is also a good measure
which provides information for usability improvement. The second
important function of the site is a proper business
presentation, where the site serves as an online “business
card”. The measure of the site’s popularity is the total number
of site visitors. However, you can distinguish narrower groups
by geographical regions. There is an opinion that you don’t need
to take into account “accidental” visitors (those who don’t
become clients). It’s not true, as the total amount of visitors
increases the overall brand recognition. One of the techniques
to attract more site visitors is tweaking content so that it
appeals to a wider audience, and promoting it in search engines
for popular keywords. If the target audience and the keywords
were determined correctly, the site will receive a significant
flow of visitors. Any relevant content is useful – photographs,
whitepapers, images, reference data, clipart, etc. It’s
preferable that the content is original and is created by the
company’s employees or business consultants. Here is a list of
metrics we keep an eye on: 1. Number of initiated contacts 2.
Number and volume of initiated sales 3. Number of visitors on
the pages with Web forms 4. Number of target visitors 5.
Correlation between the number of target visitors and the number
of filled forms 6. Total number of visitors 7. Site placement in
search engine results 8. Number of pages requested by crawlers
of major search engines These metrics are calculated over short
and long-term periods of time to evaluate two kinds of changes:
local, caused by a particular content alteration, and global,
caused by a more profound phenomena. In addition, we track and
analyze positions of competitors’ sites in the most popular
search engines. The effects caused by these changes might be
revealed with a significant time delay. This is especially true
for search engine optimization. Moreover, these effects are
often unpredictable. That’s why even small changes to the site
should be documented.
About the author:
DataArt is a well-established offshore software outsourcing
company serving the needs of Small and Mid-size Businesses
(SMBs) in the U.S. and Europe. Visit us today online at http://www.dataart.com , or
email us at outsourcing@dataart.com. Find out how we can start
to help you. We look forward to hearing from you.
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