Does your website usability influence your SE rankings?

Posted in Online Marketing on May 5th, 2008 by admin / No Comments »

1. Do search engines care about the usability of your web pages? Does it make a difference whether your web pages are easy to navigate or not?

A recent patent application from Yahoo indicates that search engines might take a look at your web page design. The document includes a long list of factors that search engines can consider to determine the usability of a web page.

Why can usability be important to search engines?

The patent application contains a short paragraph that explains why search engines might consider the usability of web pages:

“It can be important to make web pages easy and pleasing to use, which can be particularly important for web pages it is desired to monetize. [...].

If such web pages are not easy and pleasing to use, the money-making potential of those web pages can be jeopardized. One conventional indication of whether a web page is easy and pleasing to use is called ‘clutter’.

Web pages with good usability usually have a higher conversion rate than cluttered web pages. Web pages with good usability often have a higher quality than other web pages and search engines try to return high quality web pages in their search results.

Which factors can search engines analyze to determine the clutter of your pages?

Yahoo’s patent applications provides a list of 51 web page elements that can be analyzed to determine the clutter of a web page:

  • Total number of links
  • Total number of words
  • Total number of images (non-ad images)
  • Image area above the fold (non-ad images)
  • Dimensions of page
  • Page area (total)
  • Page length
  • Total number of tables
  • Maximum table columns (per table)
  • Maximum table rows (per table)
  • Total rows
  • Total columns
  • Total cells
  • Average cell padding (per table)
  • Average cell spacing (per table)
  • Dimensions of fold
  • Fold area
  • Location of center of fold relative to center of page
  • Total number of font sizes used for links
  • Total number of font sizes used for headings
  • Total number of font sizes used for body text
  • Total number of font sizes
  • Presence of “tiny” text
  • Total number of colors (excluding ads)
  • Alignment of page elements
  • Average page luminosity
  • Fixed vs. relative page width
  • Page weight (proxy for load time)
  • Total number of ads
  • Total ad area
  • Area of individual ads
  • Area of largest ad above the fold
  • Largest ad area
  • Total area of ads above the fold
  • Page space allocated to ads
  • Total number of external ads above the fold
  • Total number of external ads below the fold
  • Total number of external ads
  • Total number of internal ads above the fold
  • Total number of internal ads below the fold
  • Total number of internal ads
  • Number of sponsored link ads above the fold
  • Number of sponsored link ads below the fold
  • Total number of sponsored link ads
  • Number of image ads above the fold
  • Number of image ads below the fold
  • Total number of image ads
  • Number of text ads above the fold
  • Number of text ads below the fold
  • Total number of text ads
  • Position of ads on page

According to the patent application, Yahoo might also consider the presence of animated and flashing ads and the average ad luminosity.

What does this mean to your web pages?

Good website usability can greatly improve the conversion rate of your website. If your website gets many visitors but only a few sales then it might be that your web pages are too cluttered and that you have to improve your website design.

Google has a similar patent application with the name “Detecting and rejecting annoying documents” so it seems that good website design becomes more and more important if you want to get high search engine rankings.

The HTML code of your web pages must make a good impression to search engines. If search engines find that your web pages don’t have the right content then these pages cannot get high search engine rankings.

Analyze your web pages with PageOneRankings.com.au FREE SEO Site Audit to find out how search engines see the contents of your web pages and what you can do to improve your pages so that they get top 10 rankings on Google and Yahoo.

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Google Assassin

Posted in Online Marketing on April 14th, 2008 by admin / No Comments »

I don’t normally review new IM products so quickly but this one has saved me about a days work on my adwords campaigns over the last two hours. Now I only purchased it 3 hours ago so the learning curve is not steep. In fact its the opposite. Its downright easy as pie…

A new PPC tool I’ve tested for the last 6 hours is Google Assassin. It has a dashboard called the Affiliates Den which is stacked with heaps of very powerful, easy to use and time saving tools for Pay-Per-Click advertisers (especially Clickbank Affiliates although I don’t really use it for that).

I’ve used this tool on one of my clients Adwords campaigns for Fitness courses this morning and I’ve doubled the CTR already and lowered the click costs by over 40% using some of the tools. This is in about half the time it normally takes me.

The Google Assassin is the ‘brainchild’ of the ‘Day Job Killer’ team, led by Chris McNeeney, who is the best-selling author of the most popular online guide to making money with Pay-Per-Click.

Chris and the team have achieved an impressive record of success with their online guides on selling Clickbank products and have collectively sold almost 20,000 ebooks through Clickbank and establishing a solid reputation for explaining some of the most vital secrets of making money online.

Chris has spent the last 2 years providing affiliates with the very best techniques and information to make money from their PPC campaigns. During this time, it was clear to their team that there were some big problems facing anyone wanting to make money online using PPC advertising. In particular, there was a lack of effective tools to help affiliates choose the right product to promote, undertake proper keyword research, and create/manage winning PPC campaigns that really make money.

This realisation led to several months of intensive research and software design work by the team and their programmers to create the ultimate affiliate online resource. And the result of all that hard work is the powerful array of tools which you will find within the Affiliates Den. These include a “Clickbank Marketplace” which has a search function, making it easy to promote the hottest selling products from the digital retail giant.

Now as I’ve said I’m not using this for ClickBank yet. I’m mainly using it for my own adwords campaigns and also i’m about to launch two completely unrelated eBook products. This tool is well worth it for the price of $67 Per month.

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Visitor Boost

Posted in Online Marketing on April 14th, 2008 by admin / No Comments »

Affiliate marketers that who buy traffic are better off following the time-tested and true practice of Buy Low, Sell High.

If you’re an affiliate marketer, whether you use CPC, CPA, CPM, or CPT advertising to monetize your traffic, you nonetheless face the same challenge: without traffic, there’s nothing to monetize. Well, a service called VIsitor Boost offers to send you not only targeted traffic, but geo-targeted traffic. As far as conversions go, however, the model through which Visitor Boost sends affiliate marketers traffic turns that traffic to garbage. While the traffic will unlikely convert for affiliates who feature CPC or CPA advertising, the conversions that CPM or CPT affiliate marketers will see will be both short-term and likely to compromise their reputation with their advertisers. As Visitor Boost’s about page explains:

We offer over 20 categories so that you can target your traffic and only receive visitors interested in what you have to offer, and if you only want to market to individuals in certain countries, you can target geographically as well.
[...]
Your website is shown in a full-screen popunder window on websites in our publisher network. When someone visits one of our network sites in the category you chose, we send that visitor to your site.

The main weakness of a pop-under is that, as a user, I’m only likely to notice it toward the end of my session. Granted, I may very well choose to pro-long my session once I close my main browser window, but the majority of users only begin closing windows once they have decided to go offline altogether. It therefore seems unlikely that this kind of traffic will convert for either you or your advertisers in any tangible way.

If you’re an affiliate marketer who features CPM advertising on your portal, the traffic that you can buy from Visitor Boost is not only unlikely to convert for your advertisers, it is likely to have your account with that advertiser cancelled. Essentially, users will be likely to only notice toward the end of their session, meaning that you’ll make a quick buck when you page loads, but your advertisers will soon notice that your traffic isn’t only expensive (because of high amount of page views), but in no way associated with an increase in their own traffic or conversions. Consequently, they’ll drop their account with you and move on to the next webmaster.

Similarly, if you rely on CPT advertising, the boost in your traffic may enable to raise the price of ad placements on your site. However, given how the majority of new users only notice your site when their on their way offline, this traffic will only erode the ROI of a banner on your site. Essentially, it will seem as though your unique visitors both are many and spend a lot of time on your site, but given how the user only sees your site when their on their way offline, those banners won’t actually be reaching them.

Finally, if you’re an affiliate marketer that employes CPC or CPA advertising, users who haven’t voluntarily visited your site are unlikely to engage with either your content or your advertising. Although this kind of traffic won’t compromise your reputation with advertisers, it will exhaust not only your bandwidth, but your marketing budget as well.

In sum, Visitor Boost demonstrates the rock-and-a-hard-place between which pop-up advertising sits. While users find pop up advertising intrusive and are, therefore, unlikely to act on it, pop under advertising is likely to go unnoticed until the user is ready to log-off. Consequently, affiliate marketers that are interested in buying traffic are probably better off following the time-tested and true (albeit challenging) practice of Buy Low, Sell High. In other words, whether it’s through CPC, CPA, CPM, or CPT advertising, those hoping to invest in generating targeted traffic should not so simply pay less than what they sell it for.

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