The 5 critical checks for website performance.

I found this article on Business 2 communtity's website talking about the most important things to remember when working with a website.



Here is the article:website performance



the interesting point in this article are that when you have a website you have to remeber to think like the customer. Your internal name for a product may not be the same thing that the general public uses. My company's first aid product site use to refer to every bag on the site as a case because our main business is a carrying case manufacturer. some customers thought that they had to buy all of the bags on the site by the case quantity. other important pieces were things like have someone that is not part of your company look at your site and see if they have any problems finding what they are looking for. When you are used to a site it is easy to find what you are looking for but the navigation might be tricky to work with if you are a first time visitor to the site. this could hurt a potential buisness opportunity if someone cant find the information or product they need.



lastly astudy they mention found that 40% of websites get no traffic at all.

Linking to Products Pages

In a recent article in internet retailer magazine. They are discussing the opportunities that might be possible companies started working for backlinks on there product pages instead of focusing all of the link juice on homepages and catergory pages. set your page apart by getting your actual product to the top of google rather then trying to get your home page up for main keywords.

The question becomes how do you go about doing this do you go out and ask bloggers to link back to your page? At our site we are considering asking every person that places an order via our site to think about writing a blog post about their experience on our site. just something short and sweet and submit to ping-o-matic or one of the other ping sites to circulate it. There are also options like using product review sites to boost the backlinks to your individual product pages and hopefully get customers to comment.

ranking #1 on google

How significant is ranking on googles top page? its one of the most important things your company can get. when you look at how the move from number 10 on the first page to number 1 on the first page you realize how important the investment in search engine optimization really is. goingfrom number 10 on the first page to number one will increase your traffic on that word as much as 1400%.

If you are the number 10 person for a keyword and you get 15 clicks in a month for that term you can expec 210 visits per month if you can get to the top spot. And every number in bewteen you number 1 has the potential to double your traffic for that term. Do this for lots of search terms and your whole business will grow exponentially.

Valuable Web Resource

one of the best sites for tracking your website against others is using alexa.com. alexa is a data mining company that tracks the traffic on the top 25 million internet sites. While there information is not completely accurate but then again it is nearly impossible to track all the traffic on a website unless you have code setup on the site which independant companies dont have. You can see on Alexa how many backlinks lead to your site and also which websites have those backlinks to your site. you can see a full list of your top competitors backlinks as well. If your competitor has high google rankings then it might make sense to go after the same backlinks that they have. If a site will backlink to your competitor there is a good chance they will backlink to you.

Compete.com is another top company in this business.

Bad Neighbor Link Exchange

It was brought to my attention that exchanging links with just any website on the internet is not a very good idea. Google and the other search engines not online look at the number of back links you get to your site but they also look at the quality of those links. The more relevant they are to your site the more valuable they are to google. But there is whats called the bad neighbor that can really hurt you in googles eyes. This is basicly when you link to another site their list of links effects your quality score in googles search engine. if they are buying links or using blackhat tricks your rankings can be hurt by this. so while backlinking thru link exchange looked like it was going to be an effective avenue for increasing our traffic. Thankfully my SEO consultants talked me out of it. Now I just have to go back and clean up the hodgepodge of bad link exchanges my company has entered into over the last 8 years. P.S. Links that lead to pages that nolonger exist is not a good thing either. keep track of your outbound links.

search engine optimization

Since mid november I have been on a very long and drawn out process of hiring an SEO company to make our e-commerce site more search engine friendly after taking a strong look at our site we found that there was alot of things that we had done poorly and that we could increase new leads, grow our revenue and hopefully reduce the amount of money we were throwing at google adwords. over $300,000 a year.

Paid ads were accounting for almost 71 percent of our traffic out of 11,437 visits in the last 30 days.

Since december 2nd I have been writting Meta tag descriptions for all 3 thousand products we sell and along the way i have found 442 parts that descriptions that just didn't do the products any justice. all of that has now changed. for the better and constant improvements will be made in order to reach our goal of building a large presence on the internet.

on a side note hello to all of my readers in pelotas Brazil.