SEO Review

Hands up if you’re a Twitterholic. Yes, my hand’s up too. If you love the micro-blogging platform Twitter as much as I do, then keep reading.

I’ve put together a líst of the coolest plug-ins and apps designed for us Twitterholics and scored each out of five on the *must have* scale.

1) TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that notifies you of your friends’ status on Twitter and lets you make posts from your browser status bar. It also allows you to switch between multiple Twitter accounts in one click. This is my #1 must-have, deal-breaker, cannot live without Twitter plug-in.

Must Have Scale (5): • • • • •

2) Retweet This is an application designed for use with the Greasemonkey Firefox plug-in. It allows you to append a retweet button to the end of each Twitter entry to encourage your followers to retweet your posts.

Must Have Scale (3): • • •
3) Classify Twitter Users is a script that allows you to classify Twitter users and decide whether they are worth following based on their friends, followers and post ratios. Another Greasemonkey app, it’s a great tool to help you weed out the Twitter spammers and fan boys from the socially healthy.

You can set the script to use your Twitter user scales (e.g. spammer, social climber, social rock star) or just gather more information about people you are following.

Must Have Scale (4): • • • •

4) TwittAd allows Twitter users to monetize their account by accepting advertising on the background image of their Twitter user profile. You decide the duration and price advertisers pay for exposure and get paíd for every hour you serve the ad
Must Have Scale (2): • •

5) TwitterCounter lets you add a daily updating TwitterCounter to your blog so everybody can see how popular you are by the number of persons following you.

Must Have Scale (3): • • •

6) TweetBeep is just like having Google Alerts for Twitter. It enables you to keep track of conversations that mention you, your products or your company via email. You can even keep track of who’s tweeting your website or blog. It’s a great tool for online reputation management and you don’t even have to be a Twitter user to benefit from it. TweetBeep is another one of my personal *must haves*.

Must Have Scale (4): • • • •

7) Twitter Grader measures the reach and authority of a Twitter user, calculated by the pace of their updates, the completeness of their profile, their number of followers and the network power of those followers.

Twitter Grader displays as a score out of 100 and is consistently updating and adapting as your Twitter account grows. Based on those grades, Twitter Grader lists the Twitter Elite globally and in each country, just like Technorati does for bloggers

Must Have Scale (3): • • •

TwitPic, as the name suggests, is a photo sharing tool for Twitter. When logged in, it allows you to upload photos and post them with comments as a Tweet. It works with a range of Twitter clients such as Twitterific, Twhirl and MobileTwitter and stores all your photos in a single location with updated viewing stats. As far as Twitter image sharing goes, this is king for reliability.

Must Have Scale (5): • • • • •

9) Twuffer is a Twitter buffer. It allows Twitter users to compose a líst of future tweets, and schedule their release. Twuffer is ideal for making hourly, daily or monthly announcements or send post-dated birthday greetings or reminders to people about upcoming events. It’s also perfect if you’re the type of person who wants to give the impression that you don’t ever sleep.

Must Have Scale (3): • • •

10) Twistori I have a real soft spot for this one. One of the developers is Amy Hoy, one of my favorite speakers from Webstock 2008 and a goth geek to boot. Twistori is a social experiment that taps into the Twitter conversations revolving around life’s central activities: Love, Hate, Think, Believe, Feel, Wish. You can click on any of these emotions and witness a live feed of Tweets that use them. It’s voyeuristic and utterly compelling.

Must Have Scale (4): • • • •

11) iTweet is another interface for Twitter. It has built-in auto-refresh, search and hash tags and features full follow, block and notifications features. Users can view and post user bio, location and URLs inline with their tweets. Another cool feature of iTweet is the ability to Retweet a user post with a single click

Must Have Scale (3): • • •

12) Twitturly is a service for tracking what URLs people are talking about as they talk about them on Twitter. Similar to Digg, on Twitturly, people "vote" for a URL. The more votes it gets the better it ranks. If it does well enough, it gets promoted to the home page and as the votes rise it gets displayed higher up the home page. Twitturly differs from Digg in that instead of voting on their site, you vote by participating on Twitter. Each time that you send a link to your followers on Twitter, Twitturly takes a note of it and applies your vote to that URL. It’s a great way to follow the loudest global conversations.

Must Have Scale (4): • • • •

13) Mr Tweet is another big favorite of mine. Similar to LinkedIn , it looks through your extended network and makes suggestions to help you build effective relationships on Twitter. For example, which of your followers should you be following in return? Who are the most influential people you should be following? Who are your followers following?

Must Have Scale (5): • • • • •

14) Twitter Search is Twitter’s own built-in and oft-overlooked search tool. You can use it to search for other Twitter users, keywords, hash tag topics and a range of cool shortcut items.

Must Have Scale (4): • • • •

Non Twitter Specific Tools:

15) FlipTitle is, not surprisingly, a tool that enables you to flip text upside down. It’s great for Twitter because sometimes your tweets can get lost in the conversation. Using FlipTitle makes sure they get noticed.

Must Have Scale (2): • •

16) Bit.ly is a very cool URL shortener that also includes click-thru statistics. Why is it perfect for Twitter? Because the length of the converted URLs is generally much shorter than other URL converters like TinyURL. When you are tweeting, space is premium as your whole post can only consist of 140 characters including spacing.

The other neat thing aspect of Bit.ly is that it keeps a record of clicks that your URLs received and where they originated from. It even provides a share button so you can re-tweet your URLs on Twitter or send them to friends on Facebook, Gmail or another email client.

Must Have Scale (5): • • • • •

So there you have it, 16 cool tools to help you indulge your Twitter addiction.

Happy Tweeting!

About The Author

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College – an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

It was Friday night and I was enjoying a quiet dinner at home, when suddenly CRACK! – part of my tooth broke off! "Damn" I thought, "Now what?"

I immediately went online to see if I could find a dentist that is open on Saturday morning. So I searched and searched. The good news was there were plenty of dentists in my area … the bad news was that I couldn’t find whether they were open on Saturdays. After looking through various websites for about an hour, I narrowed it down to three dentists, who were open on the weekend. But in the end there was no competition as only one of the dentists had a professional looking website!

Don’t get me wrong the website wasn’t flash, but it was clean, easy to navigate and most of all, provided me with the information I was looking for. I phoned the next morning, made an appointment and even got to see a dentist that day!

After that experience, it really hit home … what a difference a professional looking website makes! I am sure most of the dentists in my area are great at what they do, but none of their websites portrayed that. As a result they lost a customer who will spend hundreds, possibly even thousands of dollars on their services.

So if you have a website and are hoping it will bring you lots of visitors who will turn into paying customers, it is EXTREMELY, let me say that again EXTREMELY IMPORTANT that your website.

1. Is Visitor Friendly

What this means is that your customers must be able to find what they are looking for easily and quickly. And that means a great navigational system. Most websites either display their navigation bar on the left or at the top. And since most people are used to this type of navigation, it’s best to stick with it. It also helps to include your navigation bar at the bottom of each page to save your visitors from having to scroll back to the top.

2. Focuses on your customer’s needs

Rather than trying to "sell your business", let your prospects know how your product/service is going to benefit them. Emphasize the benefits and solve problems. Make this the focus of everything you write on every page of your site. Don’t try to sell visitors your products or service, help them.

3. There are no spelling mistakes

Ensure there are no spelling or grammatical errors. Check that all links are working and graphics display correctly.

4. Proves credibility

Include testimonials from your current customers to show your potential clients that you are trustworthy, reliable and that you provide great service and/or products. Make sure the testimonials are real and if possible provide contact details of the person who supplied you with the testimonial. If you don’t have any right now, get them! Simply email your customers and ask for their feedback on your business and service. Most happy customers will gladly provide this.

You could also include before and after photos. Show the problem picture and beside it show the picture of resolution, with an explanation of your product’s benefits.

5. Has Contact details

Place contact details in as many places as possible. Make it easy for your customers to contact you. Create a special "Contact Us" page, include your details in "About Us" page and also at the bottom of each page. Information to include: business name, physical address, mailing address, telephone, fax, email, emergency number, website address and most importantly, don’t forget to include your business hours.

6. Offers a Monëy Back Guarantëe

The longer the guarantee, the more effective it will be. It could be 30 days, 60 days, 1 year or lifetime. Remember you are trying to take the risk out of doing business with you.

7. Provides information that people are looking for

If you don’t provide it, someone else will. Content is still the king. You should include as much information as possible – not only detailed descriptions and prices of your products and services, but also free resources, articles, reports, ebooks relating to your industry, service and products. You can easily source free information on the internet. This will ensure that customers will keep coming back to your website, even if it is just to get information. The more they visit, the more you will stick in their mind as an expert and the next time they are ready to order your products/services, you will be their first choice.

If your website features any of the following, your website definitely needs an EXTREME MAKEOVER or at least a face lift.

1. Flash intros, revolving globes, bevelled line separators, animated mail boxes.

2. Loads of pop up or pop under boxes.

3. Autoplay music. Allow your customer to play music only if they choose.

4. Hit counters of the free variety, which say "you are the 27th visitor".

5. Date and time stamps, unless your website is updated daily or weekly.

6. Busy backgrounds.

Ask yourself – does my website portray the professional image I want my customers to see? Have I provided all the information that my customers may want or need to know? If you answered no to either of these, call your website designer today or you could lose thousands of dollars as your customers head to your competitor’s door.

About The Author
Ivana Katz of Websites 4 Small Business makes it easy for you to get your business on the internet.

Many companies make the mistake of spending money in areas where it’s not necessary. Take, for example, companies pumping marketing dollars into increasing traffic on the website. It’s great to get more traffíc, but that is just the first step. Now you need that traffic to do something.

Website Conversion Defined

The percentage of total visitors who come to the website, follow through after clicking on the company’s desired point of action (POA) and submit information, download a demo, make a purchase, etc. is the definition of website conversion. In an e-commerce application, multiple visitors will add items to their shopping carts, but a smaller percentage will actually make the purchase. The percentage of visitors that complete the transaction signifies the conversion rate for the website. In a lead-generating application, multiple visitors will follow a path that you desire for them to follow (at first), but will not complete the form, download, etc. The percentage that does signifies the conversion rate.

In order to boost the website conversion rate, companies need to determine why potential customers drop out at certain points in the process and eliminate these roadblocks in order to improve sales. Clearly defined POAs, intuitive navigation, and simple checkout processes all make it easier for potential customers to buy, contact, download, or whatever else it is that you want them to do that will lead to a sale.

Point of Action

Basically, the POA on your website is what you want visitors to do initially. Many websites will have more than one POA, so POAs are further broken down into primary, secondary, and even tertiary POAs. A primary POA (usually the most profitable action for a user to take) might be completing a purchase on the site while a secondary POA might be signing up for the site’s email newsletter announcing weekly specials. As a general rule, the marketing department (not the web designers) in consultation with sales should decide what the primary and secondary POAs will be.

Some websites have no clear POA and mainly serve as ‘brochure-ware.’ If a website doesn’t have clear POAs that guide users toward taking specific, valuable actions, those users are of course less likely to become purchasers.

Take Rate

The number (or percentage) of visitors who show interest in your POA (i.e. click on a link to visit the site’s contact form), comprise your take rate. Say a B2B website is highlighting its downloadable demo as its POA; a visitor might click on that link to get to a download page. Whether or not they actually follow through with the download has no bearing on the take rate – the take rate merely demonstrates that there was enough interest for them to take the POA.

On an e-commerce site, for instance, a visitor who adds a product to his shopping basket has taken the first step toward the company’s desired POA, but the potential purchaser may not complete the transaction.

There are many ways to improve the take rate of a website. One of the biggest ways is to simply make it very clear to visitors, on every page of your site, what you want them to do. Whether this is to purchase, to contact, to download, to sign up, or any number of other actions, make it clear and prominent for the visitor. No matter where they are on your site when they decide they are ready to take that POA, your site should make it easy for them to do so.

Website Conversion Rate

The actual website conversion rate is the ratio equal to the number of people who actually convert on the site versus the overall number of visitors to the site for a given period. If, for example, 3 out of every 100 visitors to your B2B site filled out a contact form (and that form was your only POA) your website conversion rate would be 3%.

Obviously, improving your take rate will also improve your conversion rate, since more people will be coming to the form, download page, purchase page, etc. But there are many things you can do to improve the likelihood that people will convert after they have taken the initial POA. Keeping contact forms short and only asking for the minimal information you need is one way. Having a prominent and clear privacy policy or encryption policy can also help. The important thing to recognize is that a large number of people who demonstrate an interest in your products or services by clicking on your POA may not follow through, and it is important to determine why and to eliminate those obstacles.

Putting it Together

There are literally thousands of elements you can change on your website to improve both your take rate and website conversion rate. A/B testing has long been used to determine how changing certain variables affects the conversion and take rates. However, this method is limited to testing one variable at a time if you want to gather the granular metrics from each slight modification. Today, with more sophisticated testing software packages available, multivariate testing, which enables you to test many variables at the same time while still seeing granular results, is becoming more common. Common tests include changing color schemes, tweaking various aspects of navigation, copy, and POAs have all been proven to maximize the take rate, website conversion rate, and subsequently, your revenue and bottom line. Website conversion is all about your visitors – appeal to their needs and desires in a logical, concise way, and you’ll see your rates improve.

About The Author
Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue Search Engine Marketing, which was named the number one organic search engine optimization company in the world in 2006 and 2007 by PromotionWorld. Scott has contributed content to many publications including The Complete Guide to Google Advertising (Atlantic, 2008) and Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DS Waters, and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center.

Whether you are just starting a web design project, looking at revamping an existing site, or just wanting to double check the usability of your current web site you should consider these 7 Basics of Good Web Design.

These basics are aimed at new visitors/customers; your repeat customers will be judging your web site on different values. Just like wearing the appropriate clothes for a job interview, these basics will help you pick out the "look" of your web site so that you make a good first impression.

1. Fast Loading Web Site

Any way you look at it, a fast loading page should be your number 1 concern. The web is all about speed, fast searches, fast purchases, fast information. You can’t have any of that with a slow loading page. Ask yourself this question – have you ever been on Google doing a search for something important and a link you clicked on didn’t open up immediately? What did you do? Patiently wait for the page to open or move onto the next link on the page? My favorite sites open almost immediately.

So, a few suggestions: Make sure that your images are properly optimized. Don’t use very many large images, save those for a different page. Keep any auto-running multimedia to a minimum, provide links to run media instead. Check your code for anything else that could affect your page loading times. Since text loads almost instantly go ahead and use all the text you want, just keep everything else under control.

2. No Meaningless Splash Page

Do you appreciate a fancy animation page that doesn’t tell you anything and you have to wait for before the web site will open? Neither do I. The last thing I want once I find an interesting site is to wait through some animation before getting to the first page. This doesn’t mean that I don’t want multimedia on a site, I do. I just don’t want an animation before the first page that forces me to wait for it to finish before getting onto the site. It’s like having to wait for a salesperson to finish their memorized speech before you can ask them a question. No thanks! I like animation, just in the right place and at the right time. Plus, if I am a returning customer, I will have already seen that animation and don’t need to see it again.

My suggestion is to use a smaller animation contained in your main landing page which also includes your main message and links to the rest of your site. It will make for a faster loading page (smaller file) and your visitors can go ahead with accessing your site without having to wait for the animation to finish.

One final note, don’t ever put your logo as the only content on your landing page with a link that says "Enter Site". This just screams Unprofessional and will drive away potential visitors in droves. The last thing I want to do is to click on another link just to get into the site. This is a total waste of my time. I usually will skip a site if I see this.

3. No Annoying Web Gimmicks

Now that you have your visitor on your site quickly the one thing you don’t want to do is to drive them away just as quickly. So, don’t put anything annoying on that first page. No loud background music that makes them quickly hit the volume control or the back button on their browser. No flashing animations while they are trying to read your content. No popup, flyout, expanding ads that cover your home page. Basically, leave the gimmicks alone until you are sure that your visitor will stay on your site. Most casual visitors will leave your site in just a few seconds, no sense on driving them away more quickly.

Multimedia is great on a web site, just don’t bombard your visitor with it first thing. If you want audio, then put in a nice picture with a link, like a picture of yourself with text saying something like "Let me tell you how to make fifty thousand this month!" If they are interested, they will click on the link and listen to your message; if they are not interested in audio, then you should be using a different pitch anyway.

Also, monitor what advertisers are putting on your site if you sell ad space. I am sure you have seen those ads with the animated dancing figure, cute the first time you see it. But after seeing it 10,000 times with every imaginable character I have added the company to a líst I keep of companies I won’t do business with. So their animation has gone from "look at me" to "you annoy me" in my mind. Ads like these will impact your visitor’s experience. So even if your site is perfectly designed, one misplaced ad can ruin all of your hard work.

4. Have a Clear Message

Too many web sites are a mish-mash of content. This is especially true of blog pages. Certain types of sites lend themselves to stream of consciousness content, but most don’t. Make it easy for your viewer to understand what your web site is about, don’t make them guess. Have a clear topic headline, followed by clear and concise text. This is also where a picture is worth a thousand words, but only if the picture directly pertains to your message.

You want your visitor to quickly understand what your message is. If they like your message, they will take the time to read the rest of your page and look around your web site. If they don’t like your page, then it won’t do you any good having them stay on your site anyway. So, don’t make your visitors guess, let them know what you are about quickly and cleanly and you will have happy visitors. And when thinking about a sales page, a happy customer is a buying customer.

5. Coordinated Design

This one should be self evident, but it is surprising how many sites change their design for every page. You want your visitor to be comfortable in your site and one way to achieve that is by having a coordinated web design. Having a consistent logo, using a consistent color scheme, keeping your navigation in the same place. All of these help to create a coordinated design. This does not mean that you can’t change colors or the "Look" on different segments of your site, but if you do, the changes should not be so drastic that it feels like you have moved on to a different site.

If you select one place for your logo, one place for your navigation, one look for your buttons or other common graphic elements and stick with those then you will be well on your way to a coordinated design. If you change colors for a different section, but keep the same logo location, the same navigation location, the same button shape, then your visitors will not become lost as they move from page to page.

6. Easy Navigation

Once you have grabbed your visitors attention you want them to be able to easily move around the different areas of your web site. This is done with easy to use navigation. There are three standard, accepted locations for navigation elements on a web page: along the top, on the left side, and at the bottom. I will usually put my main navigation either along the top or along the left side. I will then put text based navigation at the bottom of the page, this text based navigation is more for the search engines than anything else, but it also makes it easy for your visitors to move to the next page when they have reached the bottom of the current page.

Most people start reading a page from the top left and then read towards the bottom right. So navigation at the left or top will be seen as soon as someone enters your page. Also navigation at the left or top will not move or change position if the browser window is adjusted in size. The worst thing you can do is to put your main navigation on the right side of the page and have your page set for a large screen size. Let’s say that your page is set for 1024 across with the navigation on the right, and someone views your page at 800 across, they will not see your navigation at all. The left side of your page will show perfectly, but the right side will be hidden outside of their viewing area. Of course by using floating or popup menus you can overcome some of these design limitations and keep your navigation visible at all times.

Unless you know that your audience will enjoy it, don’t use Mystery Navigation. This is where your navigation is hidden within images, or spaced around the web page in some mysterious random order. This can be fun on gaming sites, or social networking sites, but in most cases the navigation should be easy to see and easy to use. If you do want to use Mystery Navigation, I would recommend keeping the text based navigation at the bottom of the page, just in case.

7. Have a "Complete" web site

And finally, no one wants to go to a web site only to find that the site is "Under Construction" and the content they are looking for is not there. These are words that you shouldn’t ever use. If a section of your web site is not ready for prime time yet, then simply don’t show it yet. It is better to have your site look complete and professional, then to have it look like a work in progress that should not be up on the web yet.

You can easily tell your visitors that you will be having more content in the future without having your site look like it is unfinished. Just use phrases like "Content Updated Weekly" or "New Products Added Monthly". Both of these will tell your visitors that it would be worth their time to come back and visit later, but neither one will make your site look unfinished. So no matter how small your web site is, give the impression that you have taken the time to complete the site before putting it up on the internet, this makes for a more professional presentation and a better visitor experience.

In Closing

By following these simple 7 Basics of Good Web Design you will be well on your way to having an easy to use and successful web presence. Just keep in mind what you look for when you first land on a web page after doing a web search in Google or Yahoo, or other search engine. If you want fast loading pages, make sure your pages load fast. If you want to be able to find what you are looking for quickly and easily, then make sure you have easy navigation. Just keep your first time visitor in mind, put yourself in their web shoes and make your web site an enjoyable place to visit and success should follow.

About The Author
George Peirson is a successful Entrepreneur and Internet Trainer. He is the author of over 40 multimedia based tutorial training titles covering such topics as Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver.