Ah, relationships. Good relationships are strong, meaningful bonds that act to hold people or objects together.  Like the furniture maker’s forgotten “dovetail” joint that once held a strong piece of furniture together and is now replaced with weak staples between faux wood fiberboard, relationships seem to be the forgotten glue that once held the business world together. Oh relationships, where have you gone?

Actually, relationships are alive and well, out there, calling your name with opportunities awaiting just beyond that first handshake. And why do we love relationships? Relationships lead to links online! Some of the best links that a business can acquire to their website are those developed through real-life relationships.

The best advice to grab these links is to get out from behind that keyboard and monitor (don’t worry, you can take your iPhone or BlackBerry with you) and go meet some real PEOPLE.

By meeting people and developing real relationships with them, you have the opportunity to garner quality links to your website. If you’re networking in the right places, these links are often targeted and of relative high value for SEO and for traffic purposes.

What do we mean by “real-life” relationships? These are relationships with people that you’ve spoken to on the telephone or have met in person. These are actual people you’ve developed a rapport with at some point at an event or in online social networking.

How does one go about garnering links from real life relationships?

First, you need to initiate or develop the relationship:

• Start by attending industry conferences and social events. Those who you meet at industry conferences, if you have a similar philosophy, will allow you to link to them and visa versa. The great thing about industry conferences is that you meet targeted prospects for link opportunities. Sometimes there are dot-org (.org) website owners who run trade or industry sites and are willing to link to you.  We all love .orgs, don’t we, for many of them are trustworthy and non-commercial in nature.

• If you’re not able to afford major industry conferences, it’s helpful to look for local networking groups and informal gatherings within your industry. It doesn’t have to be a huge once-annual event to attract a strong, focused group of attendees.

• Within industry magazines, find vendors who are offering related products but aren’t direct competitors.  Approach them and let them know that they have an opportunity with you.

• Within industry trade journals, find other businesses and organizations that you can call on to work up a relationship. Offer up lunch in your neighborhood and then discuss with them your online opportunities.

• Look to your local Chamber of Commerce, get involved and become active as a volunteer / member. Make sure to get some linking going from the Chamber website.

• Use online social networking sites like Meetup.com, LinkedIn.com and even Twitter.com to network with users who have like-minded interests.  The search features in these sites are solid and can lead you to some of the most valuable relationships anywhere.
  • Visit targeted users’ websites from their profiles to see if they could be a good linking candidate.
  • Find local MeetUp groups with people who are interested in like-minded topics or even topics that are slightly related.  For example, if you’re in the art-supply business, find a MeetUp of artists such as photographers, painters and/or sculptors.  Attend the MeetUp, be friendly and good things will happen.
• Twitter can be a great resource for finding links because the search is efficient, targeted, pretty much real time, and the initial pitch only has to be 140 characters in a direct message!

Once you’ve established a relationship, simply brief the target linker on the potential of the relationship.  If you think it’s a good linking partner based on audiences (and not solely on SEO weighting), chances are this is a very easy pitch and beneficial to both parties. Engage and see if there can be a meaningful way to share information between sites and help each other out in whatever form would work for both parties.

Granted, in a fair amount of cases you may end up with reciprocal relationships, but a targeted and natural-looking reciprocal link may be better than no link at all, both for SEO purposes and for actual traffic over time!  In many cases too there are simple, overlooked opportunities to garner one-way links directly back to your site and content.

Linking is a cumulative effort. Don’t expect to get hundreds of links overnight from this method. This is an organic, methodical process and not one which will bounce you to page #1 for all of your target or most competitive keywords in a day, or even a week. BUT, if you start out and say to yourself, “I’m going to garner quality, meaningful links over the course of time through hard work” - and set your goals to do so – it will happen. If you take the opportunity to ask for a link from most encounters and relationships you develop in your industry, good things will happen.

Relying on real-world networking, going out and pressing the flesh and meeting people in your industry (both at events and in online social networking websites) allows you to start on this path of natural linking success.  You’ll find that your business “dovetails” with some of the best places on the Internet!

I read an interesting article that discussed the importance of targeting and bounce rates and it got me to thinking about the clients that I have had, past and present and the buckets of money I have seen thrown away. So, I decided to put a list together of 10 ways you or your client may be wasting money they could be paying you:

1. Stop sending paid traffic to your home!
   1. Your homepage is rarely the page your potential customers are looking for. If I am searching for �buy sony flatscreen 1080p� PLEASE send me to a page with sony flat screen tv�s on it!
   2. Check your homepage�s bounce rate. It is 60% than you should only be sending people searching for �sitename.com� to that page otherwise, you are throwing at least 60% of your money away. Why do I say at least? Because if you are sending all your paid traffic to your homepage than you probably haven�t optimized your paid search ads and are just looking for a high click through rate.
2. Stop duplicating terms in your paid search accounts
   1. It never ceases to amaze me when clients are using the same keyword in multiple ad groups with the same geo-targeting and timing. Don�t do this
3. Have goals for your website
   1. Set goals for your website. �I want to make money.� Isn�t a sufficient goal. Come up with trackable metrics to get you there so you can optimize your website to eventually make you some more money.
   2. Publishing sites – # of page views, repeat visitors, high CPM.
   3. Ecommerce � lifetime value
   4. Lead-gen sites are a monster in and of themselves. If you generate leads so that they become sales then focusing on the lead only is going to inhibit you from making money. Remember, unless you are selling leads, they don� t make you any money until they become a sale.
4. Don�t cut the long-tail
   1. If you aren�t tracking performance over-time, you are probably missing all of your long-tail terms. Don�t cut terms that are attracting people in the educational phase of the sales-cycle. If you market to them differently you can increase your conversion rate over time. Don�t cut them just because these phrases take a little longer to convert - MARKET TO THEM DIFFERENTLY. These are long sales cycle leads
5. Use negative keywords in your paid search campaigns
   1. This may sound basic, but if you aren�t using negative keywords than you are paying for traffic that will NEVER make you a dollar, pound or euro. If you have paid-search clients or use paid search and using mostly broad match than you really need to spend some time investigating exactly what terms are being clicked on.
6. Learn what terms lead to conversion and optimize your site accordingly
   1. Welcome to the beauty of the internet and web analytics. You can actually tell how people get to your site, what they do there and if they are making you money. It�s brilliant. So why are you optimizing your site based on what you think will work well?
7. Stop making creative decisions based on what your boss thinks is a good idea.
   1. See point 6. We have the ability to test and optimize, which means we can run multiple ad creatives (banner and search) and see what drives the greatest revenue rather than based on the CxO�s affinity to the color blue. Back your decisions with data
8. Test, test, test and SPLIT TEST!
   1. See point 7. Products like Google website optimizer and Omniture�s Test and Target (formerly Offermatica) can optimize your landing pages based on conversions. There is no excuse for not testing your landing pages and assuming that your designers first try is always correct. In all likelihood it is not optimal and assuming it is will make an ass out you but not me because I�m split testing
9. Track how changes to your website affect your bottom line
   1. If designers, programmers, your kids or whomever are making website changes that affect your business� especially your homepage � you should be recording that this is being done and how this is affecting organic placement and conversions. If there is no tracking there is no accountability.
10. Know what your users are clicking on
    1. Heatmaps and click analysis tools, like Crazy Egg are great at letting you know what your users are clicking on and responding to. Using this information to optimize page layout should help you to make the most of the traffic that you have

Originally published on SEO Chicks

If you have a high bounce rate on your website, you’re not alone. Analyzing the underlying factors which lead to a high bounce rate can be the difference between hitting your conversion target or consistently losing customers. A high bounce rate should be considered as 80% upwards.

To accurately measure the bounce rate metric, you need a pretty sizable amount of visitors. If your blog or website only gets around 50 visitors and you have a high bounce rate, I would suggest waiting until you get your traffic up to at least 100 – 150 visitors p/day before you start measuring. It’s much harder to spot patterns and trends with a smaller traffic amount. Anywhere less than between 100 – 150, and consistency becomes an issue.

The issues for a high bounce rate can be segmented into three different areas:

• Site Design / IA
• Content
• Technical Issues

Poor Site Design:

The Problem:

The aesthetics of a site is the user’s first impression of your company. You want to give them a reason to return. A visit to Web Sites that Suck will give you all the details on what not to do. If your site makes it on there, it needs changing — and quick.

A user should be encouraged to stay on your site. This means that if I hear music playing as soon as your website opens, you’ve just given me a reason to leave. It’s the user’s choice to decide whether he or she wants to listen to music while browsing your site. Never assume that you know what your user wants to do.

The Solution:

Hire a designer who understands the concepts of modern web design, which will give your company credibility. So, out are flashing gifs, Comic Sans font, and a table-based design. In are images that compliment the content, semantically structured copy, and readable web fonts.

Never autoplay video or music. Make sure the choice is available, however, in case that’s the user’s preference. Oh, and those annoying flashing banner ads need to go.

Poor Information Architecture:

The Problem:

A navigation that doesn’t aid or funnel the user into information is a wasted process. The user needs to be aware of where he is, how to get where he wants to go, where he has been, and to see it all on a consistent basis. Amazon does a great job of this. When looking at a product page, you can see which products you’ve looked at previously and which products you might like.

The presentation of your content can be a significant barrier to the user’s finding what he wants — so much so that the user may just quit trying and go to a competitor’s site. You may have the larger selection of items, but if the user becomes frustrated trying to find whatever he is looking for, you’ve just lost a potential sale. In today’s world of Social Media, that one negative experience could potentially be shared with the user’s friends, which in turn could cause you to lose future revenue.

The Solution:

A good navigation is based on simplicity – overly complex will only create confusion for your users. Think intuitively. There’s a reason that the vast majority of navigation on websites is predominantly the same – because they work. Don’t try to think outside the box when designing your navigation.

Without doubt, if you own or run an e-commerce site, displaying Top 5 or Top 10 lists of items in certain categories can provide an alternate form of navigation. They may not be related to the item(s) on that page, but you’ve just provided multiple options in case the user has been unable to find what he wants.

Content Unrelated to User’s Search Query:

The Problem:

If you check your analytics thoroughly, you will quite often find users who have found your site through the most unusual terms, like Mexican Donkey Show Pictures. Digging through your analytics is a must if you’re truly to discover the user’s intent. Obviously, there are only so many niches where Mexican Donkey Show Pictures would be an appropriate search. However, if you look hard enough, you will begin to see a pattern.

The Solution:

A web user can be split into two different categories — those who are just browsing and those who are searching. For the most part, the user who is performing a search query knows what he is looking for. The casual browsing user is searching without as much intent.

Contextually, an intentional searcher is much more open and along the purchase path than a casual browser. You need to find patterns and consistencies, then create funnels where the intentional searchers are concerned. Find out what page the user is landing on and work from there. However, don’t ignore the casual browsers. They can be persuaded by list items such as Top Sellers, Highest Rated, and also discounted items.

Content Unrelated to Inbound Link:

The Problem:

A user clicks on a link that lands the user on your website. However, the link the user clicked on is unrelated to your website. This leads to a frustrated user experience.

The Solution:

If the link is an organic link and you have no control over it, a good step to rectify the situation is to email the webmaster and suggest another page to which the website could link.

An alternative would be to display internal links on the landing page(s) with something like ‘perhaps you were looking for X, Y, or Z ?’. If you promote your site using Digg, Reddit, or StumbleUpon, another technique would be to suggest to the user something else he might like which is related to the page he landed on — for instance, a sentence similar to ‘If you like what’s on this page, you may also like these articles’. This encourages the user to further explore your site.

Technical Issues:

The Problem:

A user lands on your site and is struck by slow loading times, 404’s, and non-working links. As a result, the user has a bad experience and leaves the site. This is not an uncommon scenario, and it’s something the majority of us have experienced.

The Solution:

A valuable piece of software that should be part of any website owner’s tools is Integrity – Mac only (Windows users should use Xenu’s Link Sleuth). You will need to input your URL; the software will follow all of your internal links to find your pages and will check the server response code for all internal and external links found.

Google’s own Webmaster Tools can also be used to check how the search bots are crawling your site and will notify you of any spidering problems.

Remember, it’s entirely possible that the user found everything he needed without having to go any deeper on your web site. If you’re vigilant and check your stats often, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get that bounce rate down to within normal range.

Market Motive faculty Bryan Eisenberg has a great list of 69 really killer tools for making your website better. Since I’m a big tool fan myself, we’re planning a future Market Motive panel to discuss our favorite tools for website. It should be truly awesome – if for some reason you don’t know Bryan – you’ve been living under a rock, and are missing out on one of the true top level experts on conversion optimization. This guy literally wrote the book on the subject (in fact, several of them). Check out Bryan’s awesome list of tools to make your website better, and keep an eye out for our upcoming webcast on MM on all our favorite tools in the web marketing arsenal.

If you have a high bounce rate on your website, you’re not alone. Analyzing the underlying factors which lead to a high bounce rate can be the difference between hitting your conversion target or consistently losing customers. A high bounce rate should be considered as 80% upwards.

To accurately measure the bounce rate metric, you need a pretty sizable amount of visitors. If your blog or website only gets around 50 visitors and you have a high bounce rate, I would suggest waiting until you get your traffic up to at least 100 – 150 visitors p/day before you start measuring. It’s much harder to spot patterns and trends with a smaller traffic amount. Anywhere less than between 100 – 150, and consistency becomes an issue.

The issues for a high bounce rate can be segmented into three different areas:

• Site Design / IA
• Content
• Technical Issues

Poor Site Design:

The Problem:

The aesthetics of a site is the user’s first impression of your company. You want to give them a reason to return. A visit to Web Sites that Suck will give you all the details on what not to do. If your site makes it on there, it needs changing — and quick.

A user should be encouraged to stay on your site. This means that if I hear music playing as soon as your website opens, you’ve just given me a reason to leave. It’s the user’s choice to decide whether he or she wants to listen to music while browsing your site. Never assume that you know what your user wants to do.

The Solution:

Hire a designer who understands the concepts of modern web design, which will give your company credibility. So, out are flashing gifs, Comic Sans font, and a table-based design. In are images that compliment the content, semantically structured copy, and readable web fonts.

Never autoplay video or music. Make sure the choice is available, however, in case that’s the user’s preference. Oh, and those annoying flashing banner ads need to go.

Poor Information Architecture:

The Problem:

A navigation that doesn’t aid or funnel the user into information is a wasted process. The user needs to be aware of where he is, how to get where he wants to go, where he has been, and to see it all on a consistent basis. Amazon does a great job of this. When looking at a product page, you can see which products you’ve looked at previously and which products you might like.

The presentation of your content can be a significant barrier to the user’s finding what he wants — so much so that the user may just quit trying and go to a competitor’s site. You may have the larger selection of items, but if the user becomes frustrated trying to find whatever he is looking for, you’ve just lost a potential sale. In today’s world of Social Media, that one negative experience could potentially be shared with the user’s friends, which in turn could cause you to lose future revenue.

The Solution:

A good navigation is based on simplicity – overly complex will only create confusion for your users. Think intuitively. There’s a reason that the vast majority of navigation on websites is predominantly the same – because they work. Don’t try to think outside the box when designing your navigation.

Without doubt, if you own or run an e-commerce site, displaying Top 5 or Top 10 lists of items in certain categories can provide an alternate form of navigation. They may not be related to the item(s) on that page, but you’ve just provided multiple options in case the user has been unable to find what he wants.

Content Unrelated to User’s Search Query:

The Problem:

If you check your analytics thoroughly, you will quite often find users who have found your site through the most unusual terms, like Mexican Donkey Show Pictures. Digging through your analytics is a must if you’re truly to discover the user’s intent. Obviously, there are only so many niches where Mexican Donkey Show Pictures would be an appropriate search. However, if you look hard enough, you will begin to see a pattern.

The Solution:

A web user can be split into two different categories — those who are just browsing and those who are searching. For the most part, the user who is performing a search query knows what he is looking for. The casual browsing user is searching without as much intent.

Contextually, an intentional searcher is much more open and along the purchase path than a casual browser. You need to find patterns and consistencies, then create funnels where the intentional searchers are concerned. Find out what page the user is landing on and work from there. However, don’t ignore the casual browsers. They can be persuaded by list items such as Top Sellers, Highest Rated, and also discounted items.

Content Unrelated to Inbound Link:

The Problem:

A user clicks on a link that lands the user on your website. However, the link the user clicked on is unrelated to your website. This leads to a frustrated user experience.

The Solution:

If the link is an organic link and you have no control over it, a good step to rectify the situation is to email the webmaster and suggest another page to which the website could link.

An alternative would be to display internal links on the landing page(s) with something like ‘perhaps you were looking for X, Y, or Z ?’. If you promote your site using Digg, Reddit, or StumbleUpon, another technique would be to suggest to the user something else he might like which is related to the page he landed on — for instance, a sentence similar to ‘If you like what’s on this page, you may also like these articles’. This encourages the user to further explore your site.

Technical Issues:

The Problem:

A user lands on your site and is struck by slow loading times, 404’s, and non-working links. As a result, the user has a bad experience and leaves the site. This is not an uncommon scenario, and it’s something the majority of us have experienced.

The Solution:

A valuable piece of software that should be part of any website owner’s tools is Integrity – Mac only (Windows users should use Xenu’s Link Sleuth). You will need to input your URL; the software will follow all of your internal links to find your pages and will check the server response code for all internal and external links found.

Google’s own Webmaster Tools can also be used to check how the search bots are crawling your site and will notify you of any spidering problems.

Remember, it’s entirely possible that the user found everything he needed without having to go any deeper on your web site. If you’re vigilant and check your stats often, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get that bounce rate down to within normal range.