Why did you create the page?

First we need to look at why you created a new page. To capture new organic search traffic? Introduce a new product line? Answer a question your customer service people are getting sick of hearing? Provide more information to someone earlier or later into the buying cycle? Encourage other sites to link to your page?

Landing page

Let’s assume you wrote a new landing page. This is a page you can expect visitors to land upon from an organic search, a link in an email campaign, a social media link, or an ad. Success could be measured in any of these ways:

• Number of conversions (sales, signups, contributions, etc.) made by visitors to that page. All good analytics programs will show this, although you have to tell it what you mean by a conversion.
• Bounce rate for page. If this number is higher than for other landing pages, investigate the reason. Did the page match the promise of the ad? Are the keywords leading to the page appropriate to the searcher’s context? Are the links I have on the page engaging enough to lead the reader further into the site?
  (My personal blog gets traffic for the word caruncle which I use in reference to the rooster’s comb, but I know that visitors could be coming to learn about urethral caruncles, the red portion of the corner of the eye, or even the fleshy structure attached to the seed. I expect a high bounce rate for organic search referrals to that page.)
• Number of new or returning visitors to the page. If you’ve written a page to pull in new traffic and to reach people early in the buying cycle or education phase, then you want high numbers of new visitors. If you created a page directed at current customers/clients/readers, or to people later in the buying cycle, then you want to see a higher number of returning visitors viewing the page.
• Search engine optimization. Let’s look at a few analytics reports. These are all from Google Analytics. Google Analtyics has two reports you want to look at to see if you are successfully making it to the first page of search results and if your landing page is attracting hits. (Remember that your search ranking is also influence by the searcher’s geography, past history, and social network.)
• Let’s look first at the Queries report where we’ll see if your site is doing well for various keywords. This report will be most helpful if your new page introduces a new keyword to your site.

This site isn’t showing up well for the keywords “cowboy boots,” but is doing better for “black and white cowboy boots.” This is a longer tail keyword which tend to perform better since they have less competition. Even though its average position is 15, it isn’t attracting any visitors. The click-through rate (CTR) is zero. That probably means that the page title and meta description for the landing page should be rewritten in an attempt to get those searchers to click on my site’s search result listing.

In the landing page report we see that the page is doing a little better than we would have assumed by just looking at the query report. It is getting some traffic. It’s showing up deep within Google search results with an average position of 180. More investigation will show that the page is getting traffic from other long tail keywords like “girls in cowboy boots and shorts.” To attract more traffic I’d want to introduce or repeat those keywords into the page title, headings, image descriptions, and the general text. But only it they were relevant to my goals for the page.

A better custom report can be created like this one below. It looks at your pages and tells you if you made money or met your goals with the page. In this example, my real goal was to get my friends to encourage my boot purchases, but the goal completions reflected here are visitors who came to a page and then visited at least two more pages (my site-wide goal).

 Not a landing page

Not all pages are landing pages. Perhaps you created a new page showing your certifications/awards/testimonials, a page for employee bios and photos, an axillary research report, an explanation about shipping charges, or a new 404 error page. Your goals for the page might not be more traffic. It might be to support your customer service staff by providing a resource they can direct callers to, for example. It might be a legal page like your privacy notice. It might even be a page to satisfy a CEO’s vanity.

Exclude the page from search. For these types of pages you want to check to see that they are not getting search traffic. Be sure that pages like your privacy statement have been excluded in your robots.txt file so the search engines don’t index the page. You might not want to exclude the page from your own site’s search, however, if it has one. Other pages might warrant remaining available for global searches.

Pageviews. You still want to look at your statistics for these pages. For the employee bio page, you might discover that one of your employee’s name is getting search traffic. Maybe that person has a social media following you didn’t know about. For the privacy page, a spike in visits might mean that there’s something negative in the media about your company/organization or about privacy concerns in general that you should know about.

Conversions. It’s important to know which of your web pages are the power hitters and which are critical. A page without much search traffic can still be an important page in moving your visitor along to taking an action you want them to take.

Look at the stats like these on right. You’ll discover if your new page shows up in the path of those visitors who turn into conversions. Maybe that new page about shipping will give more visitors the confidence to make a purchase.

In the example below, we see that a fairly old blog post lead directly to a request for a price quote. It’s time to review that post and learn from it how to make newer ones perform that well. Or update it and repost it social media sites.

Make sure your pages are performing. One of the great things about the Web is that you can quickly learn if you have a failure. You can keep testing a page until it performs at its highest level.

Let me also advocate for giving writers and editors access to search logs and website analytics. They need to know what keywords are converting and which pages are most successful.

Don’t panic, but get ready to spend a bit of time probing for the cause.

Possible causes

A broken page. Make sure the page still loads. Make sure it can be viewed on an iPad or other viewing tool that more and more of your intended visitors might be using. Are you requiring visitors to download something, like another application, that they just aren’t interested in doing?

Irrelevant, unexpected, or insulting content. Did you re-write the content? Add a new graphic to the page? You may have made vast improvements to a page but changed the look enough that your frequent visitors assume they’ve gone to the wrong site. Or you may have added content most viewers find distracting from their goal and so they leave your site.

I suspect that Abercrombie’s push-up bikini top for tween girls controversy caused traffic and bounce rate spike for their site. People weren’t going to the site to shop, but to see what the controversy was about.

Try rewriting the page or reorganizing the content. Try shortening it. Try a different visual. See what keywords are being used by searchers to discover that page and punch up related content. Look at what pages most visitors saw before the page in question and let that guide your edits.

Misdirected searchers. Look at your traffic sources by keywords. Do you see an unusual spike?

That might mean that you added a great timely news page, but it could also mean that people are being misdirected to that page. Look through your keywords sorted by bounce rate. Is there an unfamiliar keyword listed or did your intern’s name, which appears on a single page, suddenly show up with tons of visitors? Run your own search for the poorly performing keyword. You may discover that someone with the same name as your intern just got named to the Olympic Team or a news story surfaced about someone finding a rat tail in a sandwich that has a name similar to one of your products. Weird stuff like this happens. People come to your page searching for one thing and find something else and leave. That’s an appropriate action and no cause for worry. The bounce rate for that page should go back to normal in time.

If your ad copy promises something not evident on your landing page, visitors will feel mislead and misdirected and leave. So if you promise free shipping in your ad, you don’t want a big button or paragraph about comparing shipping charges on your landing page. An ad for mountain bikes should lead to a page listing road, racing, BMX, and mountain bikes mixed together.

Misdirecting external link. Check to see where the traffic to your high bounce rate page is coming from. Did a few bloggers just add a link to your site as a gag? Or, on a positive note, perhaps people are linking to your graphic as an excellent example of information design and the readers just want to see that graphic.

Is your bounce rate consistently low?

If you have a blog, recipe, or news site, that might not be a problem. Readers could be coming to your site daily, reading your latest post, and then moving on. Take a look at time on site and returning visitor numbers. These might make you feel better about that bounce rate.

Usability problems. Watch someone else use your site and have them talk aloud as they do so. Or better yet, have someone else do this and tell you what he heard and saw. If visitors can’t immediately determine what your site or page is about and what they can expect to accomplish there, they are likely to leave. If the site is cluttered and confusing and full of competing calls to action, a visitor might be overwhelmed and leave.

Navigation problems. If a visitor comes to your site and can’t figure out how to get around it, she is likely to leave.

Content problem. Your content can have too verbose, too short, too complex, too simplistic, or too confusing to read. It can also read as a dead-end. If your page exists to tell people how to properly remove an obstruction from a snow blower, you can expect a high bounce rate. You hope that they go out and get back to clearing their driveway before they come back and explore more of your site. But if you page exists to inform people of how easy your snow blower is to use, you want them to move to the next step of looking at size options or pricing. If that page has a high bounce rate, then your copy might be the problem.

Misdirected searches. If your site’s content is about something with a commonly used or commonly misspelled term, then you might see a higher bounce rate. Let’s say you sell confections in all sorts of shapes, including a horse bridle. Someone searching for “bridle confection” might find you when they wanted treats for their wedding instead. Writing good titles and meta descriptions for the page should help considerably. Let people know what the page is really about and eliminate that confusion.

Design problem. I have left sites just because they did not look professional. You don’t want your site to immediately cause a lost of trust because the design doesn’t match the tone of your brand and your message.

The good news is that a high bounce rate is a problem that can be solved.

You want to make sure your page is indexed correctly, shows in the search results, and will entice a real person to click. That means you need as much information in that URLs as possible. Page URLs provide information to both human readers and search engine indexing programs.

A few content management systems, shopping carts, and blogging tools will create URLs friendly to only the computer. Don’t settle for a URL you can’t remember after seeing it. If a friend sent me a link to www.yourcompany.com/dir4/page53a3?data9902.htm I would not click on it. I’d suspect a phishing scam. To give humans and search engines a better clue to what is on a page, make the URL keyword rich and informative. I’m much more likely to click on a link to www.fuzziercats.com/funny/calico-and-polar-bear.htm and the search engines are more likely to list it and rank it appropriately.

Here are three examples from a search for “green cowboy boots” shown in the reverse order that they appeared on a search results page. All have pretty good titles, but the last has the far better URL.

From the URL above I can assume I’d be buying form NRSWorld, which I’ve never heard of, and then I’d get to some page related to TWIST, whatever that is.

You’ll notice that my search terms are shown in bold font in both the page’s title and URL below. That bold text draws the eye and provides another confirmation to the reader that this is a page highly likely to meet my interests.

The URL is very long in the example below, but it tells me all I need to know. And it uses hyphens, not underscores, to separate words. This makes it easier for me to read and for search engines to locate the keywords. It also uses only lowercase letters, making it less likely for me to make an error if I copy down the URL and then retype it.

The only problem I see with Shepler’s URL is that it does not encourage me to copy and paste it into an email. It’s just too long for that even though it’s very informative. Once I get to the page I find that I can share it on Facebook or Twitter, but unfortunately it doesn’t provide me with a email option. You’ll have to balance these user needs with your own.

If you feel like you’re stuck with unreadable URLs, refer your webmaster to URL Structure at Google’s Webmaster Central for information on how to rewrite your dynamic URLs to static ones.

Your domain name

Why doesn’t my domain name say anything about what I do? I took the chance on using my name as the keyword instead of SEO or Web content. That’s because I have a highly recognizable name and I was getting in-person referrals by name. I knew people would remember my name and it’s unique enough that I have no competition for it. This not how I’d recommend most people choose their domain name.

Choosing a name that reflects your brand and includes a keyword can work well. I could have chosen Bullwinkle SEO, for example.

Just be sure to make it easy to read out loud and easy to spell. I never heard the word etsy before a friend started selling her glasswork on the site, but I could repeat and remember the word. Avoid hyphens. Make it memorable. That matters more than having a keyword in the domain name. Google indicates that it is now giving less weight to domain name keywords. Other search engines will probably follow suit. So choose a name for your audience, not the search engines.

Should you purchase a domain that won’t expire for several years? Google’s Webmaster Central response to that question indicates that it really doesn’t much matter.

Is it too late to change my URLs?

Look at your analytics and see if you have traffic to the pages with URLs you want to change. No traffic; no problem. If you do have traffic, you don’t want to lose it.

Create 301 redirects for any page with traffic that you make a change to. This will keep people from following a link and getting an error page and they are not hard to create. It will also prevent directories from automatically removing your page from a listing because it’s broken. It’s important to note, however, that Google does not move all your page’s rank from the old page to the new one when you use a 301 redirect. You need to balance the possible loss of a small bit of rank with the probability of more clicks by users and more accurate indexing of the page. If your URLs are a jumble of numbers and letters, I recommend making the change.

Contact the owners of the sites that link to the page you’re changing and let them know you’ve created a more memorable URL for the page. Ask them to update their link to your site. Hopefully this will give that site owner a chance to review your site again and add more links. It’s a chance to suggest the words they use to link to your site (Important SEO Hint: ask for a keyword-rich link like “quality bee supplies in Ohio” rather than just “www.KneesBees.com.”) It’s another chance to market your site.

Title: I tend to write this last. It’s the hardest piece for me to write.

Meta description: I write this first and then edit it later. It’s like writing a good thesis statement for your academic paper.

Keywords: The meta keyword content no longer provides useful SEO in terms of being used by search engines; it does help me to improve my SEO when I know what words I’m optimizing for on the page.

Call(s) to action: It’s too easy to forget that every page we write can and should include its own call to action. So even if I want to be very low-key, I still need to know what it is.

Page purpose: After writing everything above this should be obvious, but sometimes it helps to write it in terms of the intended audience or strategic goal. I find it very helpful to include if there are going to be multiple content reviewers.

Outline: I write this and then I don’t look at it again, typically. I either write it as a topical outline, or I list statements or concepts I want to be sure to include. I frequently delete this before I send my client the new page.

Review date: I find that if I don’t decide this right away, I forget to review it at the appropriate time. Or the person responsible for reviewing it doesn’t get it on his or her list.

I sometimes also include the following if appropriate for the website or blog.

Related links. This could be from the same site or other credible sites.

Category tags. I find it really easy to forget this step for my own blogs.

Suggested Twitter or other social media content to support the new page. If I don’t post the page myself, then this would also include a note regarding the shortened link to be used for the page. Everyone in the company should be using the same one.

Why should I track backlinks?

You want to know which sites are sending you traffic and why.

Not all backlinks are rated equal. They aren’t even all necessarily good. Are people linking to you with respect or with derision? A directory site full of paid listings is not going to bring you the same type of traffic as a link from a satisfied customer’s Tweet. And neither are as valuable as a link from an authoritative site with positive reviews of your product.

You might find that you’re getting so much free traffic from another site that it’s worth creating a landing page just for those visitors. For example, if you know you’re getting links from a professional association’s site list of recommended resources, you could create a page welcoming them and even providing them with a special offer. (You just need to be sure you give the association the new link you want them to use or route the traffic through server variables.)

These inbound links are crucial as you work on search engine optimization. The search engines like some links better than others, too. A link from a “link farm” or an article that exists just to provide links may provide limited traffic (or get you banned from a search engine index.) It will never pay off as well as a link from a site such as a recognized expert’s curated listing of links or from a popular site with few competing outbound links. It’s important to be popular with a respectable crowd.

They can lose traffic

You could be losing visitors because of outdated links. Maybe you changed the URL for a page because you got a new CMS, moved from .htm to .php pages, or redesigned your site. You need to watch your current backlinks so you’ll know who to inform of any changes in the future. A broken link to your site might be the fault of someone else, but you’ll still suffer the consequences. You might get a visits from motivated people, but they’ll come frustrated that they had to go in search of the correct link themselves.

Links place your site in context

People can link to your site because they are offering it to their readers as an example of how things should be done or because your product is a perfect complement to theirs. They also could be linking to your site as a poor example, or as part of a joke. Your product could appear in a top ten list of useless kitchen items. Your name could appear as a link with the words “this leader” or “this joker.” A lazy web page author might list your heavy-duty containers  on a page with canning jars and storage containers because you sell containers—even though they aren’t meant for food.

You want to know this information if you’re concerned with your brand image and reputation.

Search engines can get as confused as readers if the words used as part of the link to your site are inappropriate. If you’re selling childrens’ toys, you don’t want the link to your site to be “dangerous toys” or “as dangerous as this” because the word dangerous then gets associated with your brand name in people’s minds and in search engine indexes.

Backlinks are an excuse to begin or continue a conversation.

Locating a new link to your site means you can now send a message to the author of that link and thank him or her. You can inform them of something new on your site and ask for their feedback on it. You can request that they correct, update or remove an unflattering link.You can ask them what you could do to make them happier with your product or service. Perhaps the linking organization has an event you could sponsor for additional PR and links.

It might be a success metric for your site

For a few blogs or sites created to influence the public or an industry, earning links from governmental or educational sites, or a pundit’s blog might be one measurement of your influence and reach. These links might be as important or more important than the number of visitors to your site who complete a contact form. This might be true if it’s more important for your message and your work to be cited than to be read in it’s entirety.

How to find your backlinks

It used to be easy to track links to your site. All you needed to do was go to one of the major search engines and type “link: www.yoursite.com” and you got a pretty complete list. No more. Now you have to dig.

Pay for it

Link Insight provides reports not only on pages linking to yours, but also pages linking to your competitors. The tool helps identify high quality linking opportunities. It has reports for just about any link-related purpose you could come up with.

Clicky is another option at less cost.

Clicky

Use a free tool

Free analytic tools will only show you links from sites providing you with traffic. They cannot identify broken links to your site or missed linking opportunities.

Yahoo Site Explorer doesn’t provide you with much information, but it does show inbound links.

Yahoo Site Explorer

Google Webmaster also provides just the links, but it’s easier to view them by page rather than just seeing all the links to your domain.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Analytics provides you with better insight into the worth of your backlinks.

For more information see How to get the hot links and Ten web stats you should be tracking.

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What makes a website usable, how users think

Don’t Make Me Think, by Steve Krug.
This is almost always my first recommendation. It’s quick to read, it’s easily digested, and drives home the fact that even you are not a careful, thorough, and patient reader/consumer online. It’s hard to believe the author hates to write.

A wealth of insight can be found by following A List Apart and I’ve always enjoyed watching and listening to Jared Spool at User Interface Engineering.

Writing for the Web, content strategy

Yes, it’s different. We’ve probably all heard that and how content is king. Ginny Redish provides excellent example of how its different and how you can make your words work in Letting Go of the Words. It’s a great resource for any writer.

Can’t get enough? Want a little more from the strategic angle? The read Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson. If you want only ten minutes of good advice, read her article “The Discipline of Content Strategy.”

Once it comes out, go give this one a try: Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business. I’m hoping it’s easier to read than its title, but just as thorough.

Want to follow a blog instead? Then try subscribing to Gerry McGovern’s “New Thinking” newsletter and blog.

How a redesign happens, what to expect

Website redesigns always seem to take more time and a lot more work than many people expect. It’s sort of like remodeling your bathroom, living room, and kitchen at the same time. Read Web ReDesign 2.0 by Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler, or at least give it a very good scan, if you want to feel more knowledgeable and in control of the process even as you trust other professionals to do all the technical and heavy work.

All sorts of useful stuff to watch

UIE Bookclub looks promising. You can watch the first episode with Kristina Halvorson. So before, during, or after you’ve read her book, you can watch the interview and call-in show.

I’ve always found Google Webmaster Central Channel and Google Business Channel on YouTube to have quality and bite-sized videos. It’s not always just about the search engine (although you better know how to work with Google if you’re doing an online marketing); it covers a few general online marketing tactics, too.

If you’re looking for a little humor, try HubSpot’s YouTube channel. They’ve been trying a few comics on their website and some silly, but informative, videos here with the introduction of Captain Inbound.

Your additions?

These are books, blogs, and video resources that came to the top of my mind this morning. Tomorrow I might decide to add a few more. What have I missed?

I find it rather charming to see an economist at a white board again. (I used to work for the Federal Reserve Bank.) No CGI here.

Learn why you could be bidding $4 for a keyword, but paying only $2.

Keywords

The same set of keywords you identified for use on your site can also be used in your social media. Consider even more tightly targeted and long-tail keywords, too. Make it easy for someone searching social content to locate you and your products, or services. Or make sure your institution is associated with appropriate issue-related keywords.

The Mayo Clinic does a great job of this.

Remember to consider the keywords you use as links when commenting in a forum, posting an answer, or commenting on a blog. You want to support your other SEO efforts so when you refer to one of your own web pages or blog posts, be sure to use relevant keywords.

Branding

Should you publish from a single brand or from each of your brands?

In the Twitter post example above you’ll see that Mayo Clinic didn’t post from a separate education or audio production account. The tweet came from the larger entity of the institution. They don’t dilute their exceptionally strong brand by having multiple publishers. They do avoid littering their Twitter feed with job openings, however, by posting those from @mayoclinicjobs. And if you’re interested only in audio content, they make it easy to search for it with the hash tag: mayoradio.

If you are a company with a higher potential for bad press or with strong individual product brands, I’d recommend that you have separate accounts for each brand name. Let’s take Pfizer as an example. Their drug names are probably stronger keywords then the company name. The individual brands attract different types of readers.  Someone interested issues around dementia might know and subscribe to an Aricept feed, without knowing it was a Pfizer brand. If an issue regarding Halcion or similar drug hit the media, Pfizer could respond via the specific account channel instead of reminding all their other readers about an issue they’d rather didn’t capture their attention. Another example would be Ford’s separate channels for Ford trucks and the Mustang.

Look at your brand strategy (0r create one) and let that guide your decision on how to publish. Or begin with a single account and if you’re finding that you’re alienating readers by publishing content they don’t care about, then create a new account.

Support your other media

You’ll notice that Mayo Clinic used a new media tweet to support a report going out in the old media of radio. New blog posts, quotes from an interview with your CEO, special offers at your brick-and-mortar location, slides from a training presentation, and news releases are all good examples of content that can be re-purposed for social media.

Let your audience lead

Maybe your audience doesn’t want to interact with you on Facebook. Perhaps they clamor for assistance you could best provide via video, so you focus your resources toward YouTube. Perhaps many are hanging out in another location like Gather, Google Buzz, or a forum established back in 1998. Services like socialmention.com or Google Alerts can be helpful in identifying locations where your keywords are currently appearing and generating some conversation. Don’t rely on those services. Do some deeper digging on a regular schedule. For example, check forums through Google’s discussion option to catch up on audience viewpoints and issues that interest them.

Use social monitoring tools to discover conversations expressing dissatisfaction with your competitors. You might not want to jump into the conversation to shout about how you do something better, but you could respond privately to the people with complaints and make them an offer. Provide them what they want and perhaps they’ll become a spokesman for you. Or simply use postings like this to gather competitive data you can use to improve your business.

Are you checking your log files to see how many mobile users you have? They might appreciate communications via Twitter.

If you’re having trouble choosing where you should focus your social attention, ask your sales and service staff for their opinions. They often have insights on how  and where people are currently finding information about you and your products. They’ll also be able to give you goods ideas for content to share.

Remember that educational content is better than promotional content.

If you really want to control the conversation by keeping it on your own site you’re probably going to fail unless you provide enough incentives to keep people visiting, reading, and posting. If you have user generated content like product reviews, make sure the search engines can index that content.

Editorial guidelines still apply

Even if you’re posting something to Facebook you want the status update to look professional. Consider the tone you use for other media. You might choose to be more relaxed or use more humor in your social media posts, but that doesn’t remove the need to follow style and editorial guidelines.

It’s a good idea to have someone periodically review postings and inform everyone who publishes from your organization about what’s been working and what hasn’t. Having measurable goals is critical to success.