Less than 3 Seconds!

According to research conducted at Missouri University of Science and Technology, it takes under three seconds to form a first impression when someone lands on your website.

“We know first impressions are very important,” says Dr. Hong Sheng, assistant professor of business and information technology at Missouri S&T. “As more people use the Internet to search for information, a user’s first impressions of a website can determine whether that user forms a favorable or unfavorable view of that organization.”

A major factor

(Credit: Image courtesy of Missouri University of Science and Technology)

First impressions are a major factor in whether a person remains on a website long enough to find what they’re looking for or long enough to take an action like buying something or calling a phone  number. A poor first impression drives away potential customers.

Using eye-tracking software and an infrared camera, the researchers monitored college students’ eye movements as they scanned the web pages. They then analyzed the eye-tracking data to determine how long it took for the students to focus on specific sections of a page — such as the menu, logo, images and social media icons — before they moved on to another section.

It took 2.6 seconds for the students to scan and then focus on an item on the web page, where they formed initial impressions. The item they first focused on was fixated on for less than 2 tenths of a second before their eyes moved on to other items on the page.

After rating the sites, analysis showed that students stayed longer on the pages that they scored more highly for their first impression. That’s not surprising, but indicates that first impressions have a strong impact on how long a person is willing to view or read a web page.

The elements on the page that drew students’ focus and displayed the greatest interest were these, in order of attention time:

• The website’s logo.
• Equally important was the main navigation menu, whether horizontally along the top of vertically down the left side of the page.
• The search box, if there was one.
• Social networking links to sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
• The site’s main image, if there was one
• The site’s written content.
• The bottom border or footer of the page.

One thing that wasn’t focused on during this study was banner ads, but that’s a topic for another blog post.

I‘d like to welcome some new clients who’ve joined us recently. We’re looking forward to seeing some great rankings for them.

Position U 4 College is a personalized college admissions coaching service that helps students optimally position themselves for college or graduate school. They can help you get into the college of your choice by providing college essay help and application assistance.They also help students with career coaching.

A. Bret Steig serves clients in West Essex, NJ and surrounding areas for the purchase, sale or lease of commercial or residential property. He is also an experienced property tax appeal lawyer.

Diamond Rock Spring Water provides natural spring water delivery and water dispensers for homes and offices throughout Bergen County, NJ and surrounding areas. They also offer Keurig Single Cup coffee makers and  Green Mountain CoffeeK-Cups.

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If you’d like to join these fine companies as clients of Rank Magic and position yourself for improved visibility when people search for your products or services, please just ask for a free assessment of your website.

Video can be a powerful marketing tool for small and very small businesses. Chances are you’re not doing it yet  — most of our clients aren’t either. But it’s time to give it some serious thought.

Interpersonal Value

Video allows your customers to get to know you and your business, and feel comfortable with you. This can make the critical difference for small local businesses, especially those that involve face to face interaction. In your video, you will seem friendly and approachable (assuming you really are those things) and if your competitor doesn’t convey those impressions, you have a significant advantage right off the bat.

Your video can give the impression of honesty and friendliness  — just the kind of person your customer thinks they would enjoy dealing with. If they’re on your website chances are they’re looking for what you do. That’s the situation before they get to your website, when they’re searching for your products or services. But then your website has to convince them that you’re the one they want to spend their money with. Your website has to close the sale, and a video can be a powerful conversion tool.

A video sets you apart from competitors who don’t use video. It also lets you explain what differentiates you from your competition more easily than normal text content. Your videos present a face customers can recognize and trust. That’s the kind of relationship you want with your customers, but more importantly that’s the kind of relationship your customers want with you.

Visibility Value

Forrester Research Group says “video is 53 times more likely than text pages to appear on the first page of a search engine.” Google and Bing in particular seem to be working hard to integrate multiple kinds of content in their results and video gives you another avenue to show up there.

Your video isn’t restricted to your website either. You can post it on YouTube, Vimeo and other places, all of which adds to your exposure and can drive people to your website.

Explore Your Options

We all know that TV commercials are impossibly expensive for many small and very small businesses. But online videos aren’t like that. Prices may range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, and you may save money by scripting three or four videos and shooting them all at the same time. Some online video marketing companies provide professional scripting, scenery, makeup and direction while others rely on you to write the script and provide the background, and they just come and shoot. The extent of final editing can vary, too. And we’ve seen some effective videos that people recorded themselves with their webcam.

Explore your options, and see what best fits your style and your budget. But do consider using video. It can add a whole new dimension to your marketing.

Blog posts are really just web pages,

so a link to your site from a blog post counts just like any other link. But there are a couple of considerations to bear in mind in terms of how beneficial the blog links will be for you.

• If the link is coded as a “nofollow” link it won’t give you any link juice.
• Other than that, the value of the link is a function of three things:
• The PageRank of the blog post linking to you (higher is better)
• The number of outbound links on that blog post (lower is better)
• Whether the blog post is on your domain or not (being on another domain adds weight to the link)

How about links from your own blog?

If you’re concerned about links from your own blog posts, let’s discuss that last issue a bit. We always recommend that our clients host their blogs on their own websites rather than on another domain. That provides many opportunities for incoming links to their domain (and that’s a subject for another time). But does that mean links from a blog post to pages on your own website count less than if your blog was on another domain? Actually, yes. But don’t worry.

Links to your web pages from blog posts on your own domain may be less powerful than they would be if from another domain, but not enough to make up for the loss of link juice you’d suffer from hosting your blog on another domain. So don’t move your blog off your domain just so the links back are a tad more beneficial. Instead, syndicate your blog.

Syndication

When you write a blog post, you can have it duplicated on blog aggregators, and the links to your web pages from those copies of your post will count as external inbound links. There are lots of these available to you  — as an example, see Business2Community or BlogEngage.

Done right, your blog can help your link popularity at the same time that it funnels potential customers into the marketing content on your website. That’s certainly a winning proposition.

For professional help with maximizing your blogging power, SEO for your website, or building link popularity, contact us at Rank Magic.

We’ve written in the past about how a powerful SEO campaign is not sufficient to boost your sales and profitability. We broached the subject three years ago, but there’s more to say at this point. Too many people think that if they just do a good job of optimizing their site for prominent search visibility, the battle’s won.

Not true.

Years ago many small businesses suffered from the Field of Dreams delusion: “If you build it (a website) they will come (customers)”. It was a rude awakening when they discovered a great website can still be invisible on the web. Clearly, they needed search engine optimization so people searching for what they sold, whether a product or a service, could find them easily.

Alas, driving lots of visitors to your website isn’t enough either. The web site has to close the deal and make the sale. That’s an entirely different process from SEO. It doesn’t help your bottom line if SEO gets you great rankings in the search engines and those rankings drive lots of visitors to your site who don’t become customers. If your visitors can’t find what they want to buy, all the preceding effort to design a website and optimize it is thrown away. If the website is confusing, if it reads awkwardly, if it has spelling or grammatical errors that make people think you don’t pay attention to details, or even if the website doesn’t have an effective progression from entering the site to closing the sale  — any of those problems can render all the other work on the website useless.

A good article by the folks at Level343 says

To be blunt: SEO alone will not sell your product. It doesn’t matter if you have 2 million visitors if no one wants to buy your custom-made banana peel high heels for $300. It can’t make your product look interesting. It can’t make your prices worth paying. It can’t make the shipping costs look attractive, your services needed or your site usable.

As a bottom line to their article, they said it well.

SEO brings traffic; it does not, necessarily, bring sales. Creating content that is buyer-value focused does. Creating calls to action that really mean something (buy now just means spend money) brings sales. SEO brings traffic so the sales are possible.

You don’t have to join the businesses suffering from too much traffic and not enough sales. Adjust your focus to included value-added content!

For professional help in optimizing your website so it brings in motivated customers and convinces them to buy from you, contact us at Rank Magic.

I‘d like to welcome some new clients who’ve joined us recently. We’re looking forward to seeing some great rankings for them.

Corporate Backup Care provides in-home backup childcare and eldercare benefits to employees of participating companies, enabling employees to fulfill their work responsibilities with peace of mind whenever their regular caregiving arrangements aren’t available.

Scott Gleason specializes in helping people buy or sell luxury homes in Westfield, New Jersey, and is a font of information about the town and its environs. He’s resided, invested, raised children and joined in the community life of Westfield for years.

Dr. Donald Angeletti is an endocrinologist who has helped many patients lose weight and keep it off without the typical dietary roller-coaster. He sees patients in New Jersey and Boston, and no offers dietary plans with nutritional support on a nationwide basis.

Bornstein Sons provides expert Air Conditioning, Heating,  Plumbing, Solar and Electrical services for homes and businesses in northern or north central New Jersey. Their success over three generations since 1928 is a testament to the fine work they do.

Dalder Materials Consulting  — With more than 50 years of Engineering experience under his belt; Ed Dalder helps businesses solve their metallurgy, materials and welding engineering problems. He’s also a experienced expert witness in material failure litigation.

Content is the foundation of SEO.

The purpose of an SEO campaign is to drive visitors to your website. But why do you want to do that? So they can see your content, of course.

• Without content, you don’t have a website.
• With lousy content (visually poor, grammatical errors, keyword stuffing, lack of organization) you have a website that chases people  away.
• With ineffective content you have a website that fails to convert visitors into paying customers.
• With effective content your website becomes a powerful sales tool.

But that’s not the only kind of content that’s important. You may not have realized it, but you have off-site content, too. That’s content in other places that helps promote your brand and direct potential customers to your website. What kind of content is that specifically? How about this:

• Articles and white papers posted on other sites.
• Online press releases.
• An email newsletter. (Sign up for ours!)
• Blog posts you write that are syndicated at one or more other blogs.
• Twitter mentions.
• Mentions at other social media like Facebook, Google+, Delicious, Digg, FriendFeed, StumbleUpon, MerchantCircle, LinkedIn and others.
• Mentions and links from other websites related to yours.

Is your content good enough for effective SEO?

How good is the copy on your site? You have to start there because everything else drives people to your on-site copy. Is it unique? Does it provide value by providing non-obvious information and answering questions? Is it interesting to read? Is it literate? Does it funnel visitors toward a buying decision? If not, have you considered hiring a professional copywriter?

Do you have the necessary off-site copy? This is one of the most forgotten factors in SEO. You need a strong presence in as many off-site places as possible to build your link popularity and to drive more visitors to your website.

Once you’ve considered all that, you may decide you need professional help with your SEO. If so, talk to us.

The Good News

Google started to improve it’s ability to index Flash content a couple of years ago. Now it can see content within Flash files so it can index that content. And it can follow links within Flash content as well. So Google can now tell what lies within an all-flash website.

The Bad News

This will still not allow all-Flash websites to compete well with HTML web pages. Why? For one thing, Flash is too slow loading, especially for smart phones, tablets and dial-up users. This is especially disadvantageous considering Google’s emphasis on page download speed as an important ranking factor.

With a Flash website there’s still  a lack of unique URLs which means no one can link to an internal page in an all-Flash site. Instead everyone has to go through your home page and follow any necessary navigation to get to the content they’re interested in. That conflicts with Google’s current emphasis on user experience as a ranking factor. You also lose many rankings factors associated with individual page titles, link anchor text, site maps and more.

So, What to Do?

• Use Flash, but only as individual flash elements on your pages.
• Don’t embed navigation to other flash content within your Flash content.
• Construct your site with individual HTML pages.
• Be sure to take advantage of all the HTML ranking factors available to your HTML pages.

Have questions? Need professional advice? Ask us about Flash and your website’s SEO.

Copywriting is a big deal on the web.

The words on your web pages and blog posts are very powerful. They convince people to buy from you. And they convince search engines that your material is worthy to display prominently in search results.

Bad writing compromises all of that “convincing”. Bad writing is very un-convincing. In fact, bad writing is likely to convince people of the wrong things: that you’re not fully literate, that you don’t pay attention to detail, that you’re not very smart, or that you’re not very professional.

So good writing is critical: proper spelling and grammar, effective focus and purpose, good organization in your copy.

But good writing, while essential, isn’t sufficient. You need effective writing.

What’s the difference?

Effective writing grabs the reader’s attention and holds it. Effective writing addresses the reader’s concerns and fears about doing business with you. Effective writing walks the reader right up to the point of sale.

Many of us can (often with a great deal of effort) churn out some good, coherent writing. But making that writing effective so it contributes to your bottom line is a skill of a whole different level. If you’re not sure you’re up to the challenge  — or if you’re quite certain you’re not up to the challenge  — you need a professional copywriter.

If that’s the case, you could do worse than starting with our list of strategic partners.

When the challenging economy strikes your business, you may need to revisit your marketing and ramp up your efforts to gain new customers. SEO has about the best ROI of any marketing strategy, but it can’t work miracles … especially not instantly.

SEO needs time to percolate in order to produce results. Here’s why:

On-Page Factors

You can’t just spend some money and find your self perfectly optimized. Keyword research needs to be done so you can choose the important keyword phrases to optimize for. On-page SEO needs to happen next. That involves sometimes extensive copywriting, website architecture and navigation changes, page download speed improvements, writing of page title and description tags, implementation of proper internal linking, and more.

Off-Page Factors – Link Popularity

Those on-page improvements to your website aren’t enough. You need to ensure competitive link popularity, and that means an ongoing link building program has to happen. Any scheme to get you hundreds of inbound links in a hurry is likely to hurt you more than help. You need an ongoing link building program that brings in new links on a steady basis, month after month. That helps your rankings to grow, but it’s a slow process.

Off-Page Factors – Social Media Exposure

You need to generate some buzz as a result of information posted at places like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and so forth. Real-time links from social media are getting increased attention by the search engines.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Your rankings and traffic will typically increase slowly but steadily as your link popularity matures and your on-page optimization takes hold.

At Rank Magic, we include a year of link building on a steady monthly basis as part of a typical SEO project. Depending on the competitiveness of a client’s market niche they may require more intensive link building or a more protracted link building process of an additional year or more.

Beyond that, you need to be prepared to monitor your links, rankings and traffic on an ongoing basis. Changes in the search engine world, changes in your competitive landscape, changes in the focus of your business, and website changes and redesign all have the potential to take a toll on your rankings, and you need to spot that quickly so corrective action can be taken promptly.

When employing SEO it’s important to approach it with the understanding that it’s not sprint, but a marathon. If you expect to win the prize of a rapid increase in customers within a couple of weeks or months you will be disappointed.

Need help? Ask for our free Overview & Pricing Guide.