Incorporating Sales Materials Into Your Web Design

For many people, particularly internet marketers, websites are a vehicle to sell some type of product or service. While there are many people who only want to provide their visitors with information that will enlighten them and improve their reader’s lives, there are also those who primary purpose is to make money. In order to be successful, marketers must incorporate sales material into their web design correctly and seamlessly.

It is important for webmasters to avoid coming across as merely sales pages that are after internet users’ money. While people log on the internet to make purchases, their mindset isn’t “to spend money” but to “find a product, service or information that will help make their lives easier or better”. It is important for internet marketers to realize this. Consequently website owners should their web pages in such a way that their offer meets a legitimate need or desire for their target market. Visitors who feel like they are getting important and valuable information from a particular website will be more willing to make a purchase if they do not feel like someone is simply after their wallets.

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Duplicate Content & Google’s New Rel-ement

Identical content is a problem for websites. Sometimes you will have it even if you don’t intend to. Unless the the website is static, there is a chance that a Google bot will find another way to get to a page and will label it as “identical content”.

A useful tool like site search can sometimes be a contender that will turn a page into identical content nightmare. When a link from the homepage or s sidebar links to a page is usually looks like this:

<a href=”page.php”>Anchor Text</a>

When a search results page links to that same page, because of referrer tracking, the link might look like something like this:

<a href=”page.php?ref=search”>Anchor Text</a>

If coming from a categories page the link might contain the category name variable in it, like this:

<a href=”page.php?cat=category-name”>Anchor Text</a>

If the website keeps track of session and needs to pass that via URL that will make another version of the same link:

<a href=”page.php?ses=0123″>Anchor Text</a>

Now Google bot is confused… 4 different versions of the same page… how will it choose which one to label as original and which are duplicate content?

On Thursday, Feb. 12th, Google released a new “rel-ement” that we can use in the link tags. It is rel=canonical. We would need to add this element to the link where we use the URL that we want to be labeled “original”. So our new link will look like this:

<a href=”page.php” rel=”canonical”>Anchor Text</a>

You can read more about this on the Official Google blog.

25 Popular 404 Error Pages

As I was browsing around collecting the screen shots for this post I was surprised to see how many popular websites have neglected to optimize their 404 error pages.

While there are not very many people that get lost on the net and end up on a page that does not exist, there are still ones that do. What happens when they arrive to one of these pages? The visitor will either hit the back button to return to where they came from or they will hit their browser’s home page button, either way they end up leaving your website.

There are ways to improve the bounce rate if a site simply by optimizing the error pages. Instead of saying “Oops… Page does not exist.” you can say “Oops, the page you were trying to reach is not here but please take a look at other information that might interest you” and have a category or article list below. Instead of leaving right away, your visitor will have something to look and click on instead of just an error page.

 Here is the list of 26 of some of the popular websites’ error pages.

WhiteHouse.gov
We’ll start with the WhiteHouse.gov. It has a nice, clean error page with information on how to procede.

Amazon.com
This one is pretty basic and with the amount of business, visitors and items they sell, I think they could have done a lot better. It would also probably raise their sales.

Ask.com
Same for Ask.com, this page could have been more. They could have a few recommended categories or even ads or something to click on.

BlueFly.com
I can see that they put a little more effort into this one. At least there is a suggestion to go to the homepage.

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Mini CMS For Those Small Website Jobs

CushyCMS is a mini CMS solution for the clients that have a simple website and want an easy way to edit content on the site. Installing WordPress or even Joomla makes no sense for a small simple site and building a CMS from scratch is also too much effort for a small site. This CushyCMS lets you setup and edit almost any part of a website with very little effort. Check out the video on the website for a quick tour.

You can also read more about it on Vandelay Design Blog where they posted a nice Cushy CMS Tutorial.

Go to CushyCMS.com

Seven Suggestions For The Use Of Video On Your Website

In another one of our articles we discussed the importance of Using Social Media to Increase Traffic on Your Website. One of the items that we briefly discussed was using video clips to promote your website, services, or products. With the explosive popularity of sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, Google Video, and Yahoo Video, it’s time to embrace video and make it work on behalf of your company and your website!

Online video marketing surged in 2007 and is projected to grow even larger. Marketing Vox, a leading online marketing news site anticipates that around $2.9 billion will be spent on online video advertising by 2010. With online video becoming such a major marketing player, it’s an important advertising genre to consider embracing.

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