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Understanding the Web User Experience

As Web sites developed in the last decade, they seemed to become larger and larger, unwieldy and finally unappealing to new users (against the original intent of development to help the customer). Companies assumed this is what the visitor wanted. More information meant prospects could find what they wanted and needed. But these large amounts of information were presented in an awkward, cumbersome manner and visitors had a negative response. Who hasn’t been frustrated trying to find something simple on a Web site?

The trend in web development today is to understand and develop to the “user experience”. It is a somewhat new concept, especially for company leaders, on how visitors actually view and use a company’s Web site. But the concept is quite simple: Consider what your users are experiencing every step of the way as they discover the information on your site. Don’t make execution of this concept complex. Break it down into “content paths” within your site to increase the return on your company’s investment.

The Key Layers

Before you manage a user experience, identify the key layers where you can adjust your Web site. These key layers are:

• Presentation Layer (the graphics and images of your site)
• Real Estate Layer (the common placement of functional areas of your site)
• And Organizational Layer (the organizational schematic of your site).

Each layer is driven by your business goals. If any one of these layers is not considered while developing areas of your site, or the site as a whole, the visitor may find that using your site is not a pleasant experience.

Are the pages and content of your site easy to find? Managing the key layers while you review your organization’s Web site (from a new user viewpoint) allows you to see first-hand if your content is well organized. As a user navigates from the functional portions of your Web site, the common areas should be reviewed with the goal to aid the visitor to find useful information.

Understanding Your User

Understanding the user (the Web site visitor) directs key layer development. Create user segments based on demographic criteria of the prospects: Gender, age, education level, marital status, income and familiarity with technology for example. Once your user “personas” are developed, the site can be adjusted to reflect the paths the personas would take.

Creating good persona depends on traditional marketing research, including talking to individuals within the organization, such as the sales team, customer service reps and anyone who has a lot of client interaction. Ask questions such as:

• Who are we trying to persuade to use our site?
• What information does that user need to make a decision?
• What terms or phrases engage them and motivates them to make a decision?

The answers to these questions provides the semantics for compelling copy, vision for the design of engaging graphics and persuasive pages that convert visitors from user to customer.

When you persuade the visitors to your site to take the next step by creating a positive user experience they are more likely to establish a relationship with your organization. This relationship can be as simple as signing up for a newsletter, a contest or completing an online ecommerce transaction. When this happens you have created conversion, maximized sales potential and eventually realized the return on your Web site investment. All this through the manipulation of electrons, the most malleable medium of all–your company’s Web site.

Fast forward to 2006: search engines, the Internet and modern Web sites are sophisticated and complex. No longer can you have your husband’s nephew’s daughter’s friend make a Web site for your company—at least not if you want to appear on page one of Google.

Web site experts agree that while the Web world continues to shift and change, core strategies of how to make your Web site search engine friendly are steadfast: keyword-rich text, content-driven architecture and strong link development. The first two are no secret: use words in Web site copy that people key into search engines and map your Web site based on content of your offering. It’s the last tenant that’s a new idea in the world of site development—the links.

Who’s linked to your Web site?
The concept of linking to other Web pages and sites is core to the understanding of the Internet and search engines. Web editors link to internal documents and supportive content of pages. Then we navigate by clicking on the links they create.

Google, AltaVista and other major search engine companies have created sophisticated algorithms that read and review your Web site to decide how high of a placement you deserve. One of the keys to the algorithm is finding out who is linked to your Web site and reviewing to whom you’ve linked your site. The more credible the linkee and linkor, the more credible you read to the search engine.

Quality sites with rich, supportive, themed content enhance “page rank” (the measurement of how Google and other major search engines rank content). Conversely sites with a lack of content, linking pools and link-spamming sites negatively affect its rank. A Web site manager must be vigilant to take advantage of good link resources, while removing poorly ranked links that may have dire effect on content ranking.

How dire can that effect be? Take for example a client that recently requested a link report. The client was truly surprised to see the number of companies that had linked to his Web site. He had never heard of most of the companies and wasn’t aware of how many had linked to his corporate URL. The report showed the page rank value at a very low range—also another surprise. Subsequently, our task was to clean up that inventory of links and get that site on the “straight and narrow.” The client now appears at top positions in major search engines, in no small part due to the removal of negative rated links and the addition of more good content.

What are your Web links?
While it’s important to know which sites have linked to your site, it’s also important for you to link to the right Web sites. These off-site links are valuable to the Web site visitor. They enhance content. They establish credibility and define said site as a resource-rich set of documents.

Search engines are guided by the links that you establish on your site’s pages. Search engines will “read” the content of the sites you have linked to. Search engines have evolved (almost to the point) where they assess a value to those pages, and then attribute a value to your Web site’s internal pages based on that link.

The internal pages of your site are understood in the same fashion. Engines match the word content entered into a search and look for content deeper inside a site. If a Web searcher seeks, “A-grade widgets Indianapolis,” then the widget company should include “A-grade widgets” and “Indianapolis” in the Web site copy of subsequent pages of the site. Engines match the content you provide on any given page to the content deeper inside your site.

A multiple-page theme of information regarding your organization’s services, goals or simply the amount of product you have on your virtual shelves aid in communicating to the search engines that your site is a deep resource of information pertaining to the site’s key concepts.

Are you Cyber-Driftwood?
If you created a Web site in the old days using one of those aforementioned family members, you might be floating in cyberspace like driftwood trying to make it up on the beach. Developing a content-driven link structure might just be the wave that sends you ashore.

This means taking the time to contact (mail, e-mail and telephone) the companies that you don’t want linked and request that they remove the link. The next step is to contact companies that you want to stay linked and say thanks. There are always companies that will increase your search engine scores and those you want to link with. Contact them and arrange the link.

Finding the best links in your genre takes time, but be persistent and select the best. The value of those links will present itself to you quickly as you see the position that your site has on the Search engines quickly change. Make sure that you solicit only quality content sites, but also make sure they are known to the Search engines. Getting links to sites that the Search engines can’t find is an exercise in futility, at least for your search engine audience, the people that want to find you.

It’s certainly not as easy as the good old days, but quality that drives results always takes time.

Measuring the behavior of web site visitors, or web analytics, refers to the use of data collected from a web site to determine which pages or areas of the web site work toward the business goals and which need improvement. There are many tools and web sites that offer tracking capabilities, and there are inherent limitations (and some inaccuracies) across the board with these tools.

Defining the terms
To begin, there must be a clarification of terms that are used to describe what is to be measured. For years, the term “hit” has been misused or misinterpreted when describing web site use. Commonly thought of as “someone coming to a web site,” a hit is only a request of a file from a server. It may be an image, a file download, etc. Anything that is being requested is tracked as an individual hit. Here’s the kicker: a web page is a hit, but so is everything that page needs to build its design – graphics, embedded content, files that it needs to reference. One page with 20 graphics will be tracked as 21 hits! This has led to a huge level of overinflated reports of web site popularity.

A “visit” is a more accurate description of a web page being viewed. A visit is an accounting of a web page being accessed, not how many file requests were made. To define even further, a visit can be construed as either a unique visitor (never requested the web page before) or repeat visitor.

What results from that visit also needs clarification. A bounce rate is the percentage of visits over a period of time in which someone has requested a page (either directly or from a page found in search engine results) and then exited that page without going anywhere else on the site. This is an essential piece of data. If a page has a high bounce rate, it may tell us that the page in question does not have enough worthwhile content or visual access to other pages of the web site. Individual pages can provide different bounce rates, which can be measured and improved upon to lead to the ultimate goal of conversion.

A web site conversion occurs when a business goal has been reached. This can mean a product has been purchased or an online form submitted, but this concept has even more depth. Conversions can be as abstract as a “conversion funnel,” by which pages of content regarding a particular issue are tracked, giving an understanding of how well content is being accessed on a web site. Documentation of the conversion is essential, but optimization of that conversion is the true goal. Enhancing the path to conversion with (in the case of an online sale) testing of particular offers, improving the visual elements of a “conversion path” and minimizing perceived “pain points” along the path are among the methods of improving this factor.

Measuring the data
Web site data can be gathered through two major methods – logfile analysis or page tagging. Web servers track every request asked of them from the Internet. Logfile analysis software is necessary to interpret all this information and present a picture of use of the web site in question. Much more data is provided than may be useful, and there are possible inaccuracies in traffic resulting from the “caching” of a page on a browser, in which no interactivity with the server is recorded. Logfiles contain information on failed requests as well.

Page tagging consists of embedding a piece of code on each page of the web site, and those tracked pages will be reported to the analysis software when a browser requests the page. If certain scripting is turned off on the user’s browser, the code will fail to fire and the user session will not be tracked. Page tagging only records an event if the page is successfully viewed and only where the code is available. This requires large sites to have that code in place on every viewable page.

Consequently, with understood limitations on both methods of collecting data, Internet marketing companies will typically use both to gain a level of accuracy within tolerance. Relying on only one method is acceptable, but may provide less accurate data.

In summary, improvement of business goals first comes from knowledge of activity, but does not stop there. Creating optimal user paths through a site, understanding the steps to a conversion and what impacts the user from page to page can now be understood to a much higher degree. Conversion is the key – and the tools and technology to accomplish this are improving.

Author: Erin Sparks is the search engine optimization and marketing specialist and president of Site Strategics, which works with client companies that strive for better marketing through strategic integration of web site technology. Learn more at www.sitestrategics.com

We are premiering on WXNT1430 on February 4th, 8am with Edge of the Web Radio!

We are covering issues that are important to business owners with web sites.  Focusing on strategies that all companies need to succeed online, we’re airing every other week.  We are also reviewing sites on air – giving tips on ranking improvements, conversion optimization and lead generation.

Tune in February 4th, 8am on WXNT 1430.  We’ll also have out Podcasts online soon – if you miss us (it is pretty early).

The following information describes several inbound link traits that determine their effectiveness at securing desired website conversions.

Links from Authority Sites

An authority site possesses the influence and power to boost the rankings of other sites by providing links to these sites from one or more of its web pages. Authority sites are defined by a number of characteristics including high page rank (PR), focused content that is frequently updated, hundreds or even thousands of informative web pages and plenty of outgoing and incoming links to other related industry sites. Links coming from authoritative sites in your industry can provide the marketing boost that directly leads to conversions on your website. Google and other search engines place an added value on backlinks originating from authority sites. This in turn tends to push your site up higher in Google’s rankings for particular relevant keyword phrases being searched. As a result, your site’s increased targeted traffic translates into real on-site conversions. Examples of authority sites include established online publications, trade associations, government sites and respected information portals in your particular industry.

High Page Rank Links

Any site with a high Google PageRank has probably invested quite a bit of link building and SEO work over an extended period of time. Although PageRank is by no means the only factor that establishes how Google values a web page, it remains an important factor. According to a recent Matt Cutts video, “it [Page Rank] is one of the more important of the 200 signals that we have”. Since high PageRank sites tend to carry some additional weight and authority with Google, inbound links coming from these sites can only enhance your site’s chances to achieve increased traffic and conversion results.

Contextually Relevant Links

Links that come from websites with similar or related subject matter carry a level of value that non-related links cannot produce. For instance, if your website discusses the best methods of sealing your outdoor deck and you obtain inbound links from health food sites, these links may not be considered as contextually relevant and may not produce the long-term conversion results you seek. These links may look unnatural to the search engine algorithms and inhibit the success of your marketing and conversion goals. On the other hand, an automotive website that that obtains authoritative and contextually relevant links from racing publications, auto repair sites, or auto brand sites sets itself up well for receiving the type of link juice that can lead ultimately to targeted traffic results and more conversions. In addition, these industry established websites possess a loyal traffic following. When your website receives a link from one of these industry sites, the resulting traffic to your site will have a higher conversion rate due to the endorsement provided by the link.

Optimized Anchor Text Links

When building links to help promote the ranking of a web page, it is important that the anchor link text used includes the keywords that are specifically relevant to that page. Using non-relevant link text such as “click here” or “read more” will provide no SEO value or ranking power to the page. A web page about “oil changes” may utilize relevant link text such as “change my oil” or “cheap oil change” to enhance the authority of the web page and increase the probability of new site conversions.

Paid Links

While all the above link characteristics refer to organic linking methods, paid text links present another way of attempting to ultimately bring about conversions on a website. However, not all paid text links produce equivalent SEO and conversion results. When seeking paid text links to maximize conversion possibilities look for links that come from relevant sites with domain authority. Also, only acquire a few links at the most from any one page to keep the appearance of natural link acquisition in the eyes of Google. If paid text links are purchased in mass or from unrelated content sites, Google and other search engines may view them as an inauthentic way of website promotion. Search engine algorithms tend to penalize sites that host paid text links to the exclusion of naturally built, organic links coming from sites that freely share their authority with you. On the other hand, a patiently constructed network of organic links will tend to remain in place, appear natural and provide your site with gradually increasing authority.

In your search for inbound links to promote your websites, be mindful of the ultimate goal – conversions. Simply achieving SEO results from your backlinks is not sufficient within itself. You need dependable conversion data that indicates the links you are going to acquire will result in the kind of targeted traffic that that translates into actual website conversions.

Read more: Inbound Link Evaluation and Achieving Conversions | Erin Sparks: Indianapolis Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing http://www.erinsparks.com/inbound-link-evaluation-achieving-conversions/#ixzz1kWtj9ak7