WSpider.com

Is Your Website Working For You?

Having a website that doesn’t work is not bad in and of itself—after all, what could it possibly hurt—but having a website that doesn’t work is also definitely costing something. Cost of lost opportunity for example. Is your website working for you?

It kind of comes down to asking a few pertinent questions about performance and metrics when it comes to your site. For example:

• Is your visitor traffic count where you would like it to be?
• Are your visitors targeted and relevant—ready to convert?
• How does your site’s bounce rate compare to what you would actually like it to be?
• Is your site profitable?
• If not, how far is it from reaching the financial goals you’d like it to achieve?
• Are you brining in lots of relevant free SEO traffic?
• Do you use SEM (search engine marketing) tactics like PPC (Pay-Per-Click) for additional improved ROI?
• Does the site load quickly and correctly on all major software/hardware platforms?
• What about mobile—is your website mobile friendly?
• If selling by e-commerce, are you satisfied with the ease of using your shopping cart software?
• What about your e-com visitors—are they getting through the shopping cart and finalizing their sales like they should?
• Is your content excellent and not just simply adequate?
• How about graphic design—are you modern and up to date in appearance (at least when compared to your top online competitors)?
• Overall, are you satisfied with the way your site is working for your needs?

Remember, your website should not be a distraction or an inconvenience. It should be a finely tuned machine that works 24/7 on your behalf to help you achieve your goals and ambitions. It should work for you, not the other way around.

Of course, there are hundreds more questions you could ask yourself about site performance and whether or not your website is performing up to par. There are literally hundreds of thousands of resources out there to learn and assist with improving your site’s SEO and other performance influencing factors.

The bottom line is that you’ve simply got to take some action and not just stand by idly. Use the resources available to improve your site and make it perform they way it should have been performing all the while. Make your site work for you.

If this is all too familiar, it’s time to take action and make your site reach its fullest potential as soon as possible. Please contact us here at WSpider if you’d like some practical advice or could just use an idea or two. We’ll be happy to pass along our professional thoughts on how you can make your website work like never before.

Need Some Small Business SEO Attention?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a topic that many business owners and managers could care less about. Crude, sure, but let’s face it—who really has time to learn about more web/tech jargon and actually has the ability to decipher a clear and beneficial take away from wading through all of the “geek speak?”

Okay, well, all sarcasm aside, SEO is incredibly important to your business for one simple reason—it can dramatically improve your online profit stream.

Increasing visitors counts that don’t cost you a thing on a per-visit basis (like the PPC pay-per-click advertising that so many depend on)…this is something we can all appreciate for sure. And this also happens to be exactly what SEO is.

The largest businesses all over the world have been depending on their teams of in-house optimizers for at least a decade. It’s simply about time the small and medium businesses next door begin to compete. Why should the titans of business dominate the search engines and snag all of the traffic—much of which could be yours?

Well, they shouldn’t. But by doing nothing at all, smaller businesses and entrepreneurs don’t give them very much competition in the search engines. To compete with an entire global team of high-paid in-house search optimization experts sounds daunting though. The good news?

It doesn’t have to be. Sure the major players—the ones that seem to show up at the top of all of the search listings for broad ranges of topics—they tend to benefit from their expert (and expensive) optimization staff. They also benefit from their sheer size and depth of trust with online searchers and search engines alike.

Still, the small guy can put up an incredibly solid showing when it comes to SEO. It’s kind of the equalizing factor that lets the average Joe compete with the major corporation across the world somewhere. It’s real, it really works, and you can do it just as well as they can!

What’s the strategy to play on the same field as the major players? Needless to say, it would be difficult to put on an entire staff of SEO experts like they do. But thanks to the power of cost-effective outsourcing—to an SEO/SEM professional like San Jose-based WSpider—there’s minimal cost.

No downside, just the opportunity to participate in a healthy ROI thanks to bringing in some of that very relevant, very free traffic that exists on the search engines. Don’t let the large companies continue to dominate without putting up a fair fight!

Make The Contact…Get The Click

Getting visitors to your site—hopefully pre-qualified visitors that are eager to learn more about your message—is just the first part of the battle. Here at WSpider, we can help you with SEO…we’re pros at it after all!

Once They Land

Just as important as getting qualified visitors to your site is keeping them there long enough to hear what you have to say. This is what your website’s bounce rate analytic typically measures and helps you improve. What impacts your bounce rate? Well, it’s things like:

• Slow page load times.
• Cluttered, busy sites.
• Bad first visitor impressions.
• Too much text, not enough whitespace.
• Irrelevant or inaccurate information.
• And so on.

The first point of contact with your site determines if a visitor will stay or go. If they bounce, they’re gone for good!

Once You’ve Earned Their Attention

Congrats! You’ve kept a visitor around long enough that they begin to interact with your web page. This is half the battle for sure. So now what?

Well, the next step should be to “pre-sell,” or in other words, to convince them that you are there to truly help them (and that you know what you are talking about). Sometimes the hard sell is the best approach, but those that will benefit from this probably already know everything about it. Focus on building trust with the visitor at this stage.

As they begin to learn from your site and grow to understand who you are and why you’re legit, it’s time to begin asking for the next click. Click deeper into the site perhaps.

But ultimately, what will be the make it or break it moment is whether or not your call to actions are strong, and if the visitor has the convenient ability and drive to make the next action. This is where you ask them to call you—for example, call WSpider’s experts today to learn more about how you can drive conversions (please see our number above).

Ask for the call, explain how you can help, and give them your digits.

Also extremely helpful and effective in this department is the online contact form. Allow your visitors pave the path to becoming customers by offering painless contact options right where they expect to see them. Don’t expect them to do all of the work—make it super easy for them to get in touch.

Making the right impressions, earning trust, and ultimately encouraging your visitors to take the next step is exactly what you must do to be successful online.

Keeping Your Site Ahead Of The Game

Admittedly, it takes a lot of work and effort to get a website up to the levels of traffic it deserves to receive. SEO is a significant factor. Keeping the site personable and in touch with customers and visitors is just as significant.

The thing is, it’s not always easy to stay ahead of the game—once you’re in the search positioning that you want to be in (a process in and of itself), the next main objective is to maintain that search favorability and expand upon it when and where possible.

Challenging? Yes. Impossible? No.

You can keep the edge you’ve worked so hard to achieve. While there will always be another site out there that’s vying for the attention of your visitors, the best part about this kind of competition is that it’s out in the open. This is one of those rare opportunities where you can actually see what your competition is up to and analyze their tactics and strategies—after all, they make it all public on the web!

So the first piece of advice here when it comes to keeping your site ahead of the game is definitely to watch out for your online competition. And newcomers as well. What are they doing with their websites—are they updating, overhauling, re-facing, and most importantly…what are they doing with their content?

Your content is really one of the top keys to keeping up-to-date and ahead of the curve with the search engines. If you let your content become stagnant, out-of-date, or simply outdone and by the competitors, this is one of the first places the slip from the top can start to take place.

Thus, the next piece of advice here is to blog daily; add new helpful customer friendly information to your site on a frequent basis. Keep building your content always. It helps significantly to have a plan or content blueprint in place as you go. This will serve as your map towards continuing content growth in a strategy-forward manner.

And then there’s the appearance-factor. Even today’s latest optimized graphical web design is going to appear tired or dated in a matter of a couple of years or so. With the competitive marketplace out there, this is just the way it works out.

In this area, you’ve got to keep on focusing on how you’ll be relevant in appearance—in the eyes of your visitors. If they don’t like what they see, they’ll go elsewhere. Eventually, the search engines and other online traffic sources will catch on and go elsewhere as well. Image is everything!

Need a plan for building and maintaining your online edge? Please contact the experts at WSpider if you’d like to go over a few ideas at any time—we’re here to help you succeed online no matter what it takes!

Real Answers To Important SEO Questions

Why does SEO have to be so complicated?  Well, most of it is because of continuing mis-information that is spread around online by not-always-reputable companies aiming to grab a piece of the market’s pie.  More often than not, these fly-by-night operations are here today, gone tomorrow.  But while they exist, they have a remarkable way of creating noticeable static and confusion about SEO.

Today, let’s look at a couple of things that can be confusing and set the truth straight…

Question One:  Can I do SEO myself?

The answer to this one is indeed yes.  SEO, like anything, can be learned and developed to proficiency by pretty much anyone.  Whether or not it’s worth your time to learn and invest your full attention to getting the process down is totally a matter of choice.  Many busy professionals and entrepreneurs simply find it more practical and effective to outsource the task to pros that can handle it super efficiently (with a positive ROI, of course).

Question Two:  What about that email I received that said they can get me number one search results?

There’s more to the story.  First, never trust spammers.  Secondly, anyone can get you number one results for an obscure term or two.  Simply by having your page live with that obscure term, it will most likely achieve those exact same top results on its own, completely automatically.

The next part of the story is the fact that most legit SEO providers will never guarantee they can get you number one results.  For example, here at WSpider, we know that this is completely impossible to guarantee something that is out of our control—the search engines can rank your site however they want, and there is no third party that can change their mind.

Question Three:  So what about the promise of the results you expect or your money back?

This is completely up to the SEO company.  If they want to offer your money back if you’re not satisfied, that’s up to them.  Again, please remember that it is just not possible to actually guarantee specific search results for real search terms—if they guarantee them, you should find out how they plan to back up their claims.  And also, be sure to check them out to make sure they’re good for their promises.  Most of the time, this will be impossible.

It’s almost always better to work with legit SEO pros that are realistic about results and timeframes of achieving those results.  Look for testimonials and references too—these will certainly help divide the pros from those just out for a quick buck.

5 Easy Tips For Improving Your Site’s Trust Factor

When you are selling a product or selling a service online, one thing stands above all others when it comes to keeping your visitors confident about what you do and encouraging them to become more than visitors—loyal customers.  It’s not really an uphill battle.

Most folks are pretty savvy with using the web for purchases and otherwise these days.  Really, what it comes down to is simply keeping them from finding a reason not to trust you and what you’re selling on your site.  That said, here are 5 easy tips for improving your site’s trust factor with your visitors:

One:  Use your about page wisely.

Tell your story or that of the business you’re promoting.  There are many e-commerce sites out there that are especially anonymous.  They don’t have an about page or legit contact info.  Your site that does tell visitors a thing or two about you will inevitably do better side-by-side.

Two:  Use complete contact page details.

A simply contact form is never enough.  To deserve to be trusted, a minimum, you’ll want to have your phone, email, and a physical mailing address of some type.  If you can provide names or breakdowns by department, that might be a good idea too.

Three:  Add your contact information to every page.

In addition to your contact page, you should really also think about adding at least a phone number and online contact option (form or email) on the footer or in the header of each page of your site.  Don’t make it difficult for visitors to contact you or to know that they can if they want to.

Four:  Add helpful testimonials and references to the site.

Have customers that rave about what you do?  By all means, add their testimonials to your site if you have permission (and if not, ask for it first).  Be sure to be legit in this area, as there are new consumer protection laws that apply here to ensure that your testimonials are accurate and real.

Five:  Use social media to your benefit.

Social media is a great trust building factor.  By linking to your major social profiles from your website, visitors can see these profiles and see that you’ve been interacting with the world for quite some time.  Fly by night sites don’t usually go to the trouble of publicly interacting with their customers and other social contacts.  Simply by doing so, you’re improving your trust factor!

Still need a few more tips about making a safe and secure website environment for your customers’ benefit?  Please just ask us here at WSpider.  Located in the tech center of the world, San Jose, CA, we’re up to speed on online commerce security and trust building strategies—we can answer your questions!

Saturday Morning Web Marketing Questions – Online Businesses

Building a profitable online business is a goal that is easy to appreciate. And the good news is that millions of folks out there are doing exactly that, in one form or another. Although it does take some work and a degree of investment in your online strategy, it can definitely be done! So today, let’s take a look at a few questions pertaining to online businesses…

Question #1: Should I use affiliate programs or other types of advertising on my website?

This is a good question—and mostly it comes down to personal preference. While affiliate programs and other forms of selling advertising on your website can indeed bring in some revenue, you’ve got to determine if it will ultimately enhance or detract from the message of your site. For example, if your site represents your offline business, chances are, your visitors would probably find on-site advertising from third parties to be very distracting. For some online-online business models, though, it can be a perfect complement to what you’re aiming to accomplish through your website.

Question #2: Is using a traditional e-commerce shopping cart system the only good way to build a profitable internet business?

It’s one way—but really, e-commerce is more of an offline business than an online one. For example, most of the time, product sourcing and order fulfillment is the main part of the business. The online website system is just the transactional part of the deal—additional marketing efforts will be required too. So while it is one online business model, it’s definitely not the only one either. There are affiliate programs, directly selling advertising, using online auctions, promoting your service, and hundreds of additional great ways to earn income through your online presence.

Question #3: What about marketing…can I just build a website and expect it to work?

This seems to be a common misconception about going online. Your website is only as valuable as you make it to be. Just by putting up a basic site alone, the chances of gaining any appreciable traffic levels are slim to none. For a site that really works, you’ve got to focus on continued development, search optimization (SEO), and other traffic-driving, conversion-producing online marketing strategies. If you’d like to learn more about what it takes to create a website that really delivers on your expectations, please give us a call here at WSpider…we’ll be happy to discuss the particulars of developing a high-performance traffic strategy with you.

What Is The Advantage Of Just Going Live ASAP With Your Website?

Thinking about getting a new website launched, but unsure about the budget and everything that’s involved with getting to the final launch date in reasonable time?

Well, as you’re probably aware of already, a full scale new website can end up costing quite a bit of money. In most cases, it’s a significant investment that will ultimately produce significant results though. After all, that’s why you’re taking your business online anyway, right?

Results matter. And better planned and implemented websites will deliver the better results you’re expecting. But there is a happy short term medium for those that really aren’t ready to make a large scale investment just quite yet.

In fact, there is a significant benefit in just getting a clean starter site live rather than just doing nothing at all.

First of all, domains and sites that have existed online for awhile will start earning at least some degree of credibility with the search engines. Established sites typically do better in the search engines than new ones—as a matter of fact, search engines even use the age of the domain as one of the factors their algorithm measures when ranking a site.

Or even more plainly important here is the fact that it takes some time for your site to even be recognized by the search engines in the first place. So even if you can’t go full scale with the complete site that you ultimately want to have online, in the meantime, you can launch a very basic starter site to at least cut back on the waiting period (often referred to as the “sandbox”) that seems to be imposed on brand new sites to the web.

Another notable advantage is that you’ll be able to earn some incoming links to your basic site just through the course of everyday being online. These incoming links that are so important to your website’s SEO have a nice little way of growing and snowballing over time—so the sooner you can begin in this department, the better!

So clearly, for these reasons alone (and there are others too), it’s to your advantage to at least get a basic site launched as soon as you can. Granted, you’re probably not going to experience the fantastic results you’d like to see with just a plain starter site—but you will be building towards a goal of launching your full scale site at a date in the near future, so this is okay. In the meantime, by going live now, you’ll only be improving your results of your future website investment.

Need some assistance planning and implementing your new website? WSpider can definitely help you—we can even help you create an affordable plan to build and launch your website in strategic stages. Just give one of our expert reps a ring and they’ll be happy to go over your web development and web marketing ideas and plans with you at any time!

SEO Providers: Freelancers, Professionals, Or Spam Artists?

If you happen to be like millions of others around the world, you probably receive at least one or two offers in your email inbox each week (if your spam filter doesn’t get to them first). These dubious offers—promises to “increase your traffic” a hundred times over and other similar ones—well, they sound pretty good. But they can’t be trusted; after all, they’re just spam!

Freelancer Or Spam Artist?

Again, many of these offers you’ll receive look legit enough. They come complete from a real email address, with a realistic name, a real phone number, and all of the other necessary credentials to look respectable. Sure, they’re real people on the other end of the line—but unlike most reputable freelancers in the SEO business, these folks have chosen to use dubious tactics (sending mass emails and spam) to thousands and thousands of people in the hopes that one or two follow up and fall into the trap.

So, it’s not that freelancers in general cannot be trusted or anything like that. In fact, there are some really incredible freelancers out there. But in this particular instance, when you receive emails that just sound too good to be true—and you just receive them unsolicited, out of the blue—well, the chances are very probable that they’re just after one thing and one thing only…your money.

Professionals Don’t Send Spam Emails

You might get an occasional solicitation from a professional SEO or web development expert—usually the legit ones will even offer some helpful advice or compliments. But pros never send you an email that simply reads, “We can increase your traffic by getting you a number one Google listing.”

And yes, we receive that exact spam email pretty much every day (it uses a different name each time). It’s just that one line. Suspicious enough yet? Should be. And here’s the kicker—it’s sent to us via the contact form of a site that already has top search engine rankings for all of its relevant keyword terms.

So, enough is enough—let’s put an end to this spam SEO client fishing once and for all. Just delete them if they even begin to look less than truthful.

WSpider Communications

Here at WSpider, when we send you any kind of email, it will be clearly identified as coming from us. And as part of our policy, we simply won’t send spam—ever. So if you’re receiving these SEO “guru” messages that we’ve talked about throughout this post, please steer clear of these fly by night SEO services.

The 5 Major Types Of Websites

For all of the millions and millions of websites out there, it is kind of surprising that really only about 5 major types of sites cover all of the bases. The more you look at it, the more it becomes clear…these 5 types of websites are definitely predominate on the web:

1. The Brochure Site.

This is the simple type of website that so many small business and organizations choose to start out with in their foray into going online. The concept has been around pretty much since the early days of the web as we know it (mid 1990’s), and is still mostly effective when done correctly.

Typically about 5 pages or so, the brochure site usually includes a welcome/overview page, and About page, a Contact page, and a couple of other basic pages. It’s not going to draw in huge traffic counts, due mostly to its lack of extensive content, but it is a good place to start.

2. The SEO’d Super Site.

This type of site is usually quite extensive when it comes to the amount of well-optimized content it contains. The objective is to provide plenty of great SEO-friendly content to both the visitors and the search engines to draw in large visitor counts. Of course, this site also needs to be build around a central core—like an e-commerce feature or to drive visitors towards a specific call to action.

3. The Web 2.0 Social Site.

While web 2.0 has been around for quite some time now—and isn’t exactly the new kid on the block any longer—it’s still a focus of many new sites. The underlying theme of the web 2.0 site is generally visitor participation and social interaction. Some businesses have found unique and effective ways to leverage this visitor interaction to use these web 2.0 features to create sales and leads.

4. The E-Commerce Site.

E-Commerce is more or less standard-issue these days. This type of site involves a shopping cart system that enables visitors to browse and purchase goods (and services) online. And while this is the core of an e-commerce site, it’s also really important to understand that this alone really doesn’t attract very much traffic in and of itself. Combining e-commerce functionality with other site concepts or types of websites is becoming increasingly mandatory for respectable results.

5. The Basic Blog Site.

Here, we’re talking about a site that contains a traditional blog, with posts in standard blog-style chronological order…newest at the top. There might be a couple of extra About or Contact type pages located within a blog website, but the main feature is the blog posts themselves. Having become the reliable standby for personal websites these days, the blog also works fairly well for small businesses and other organizations too. Many find it most effective to combine a blog feature within another type of site as well.

The secret to success on the web is figuring out which of these types of websites is best for you—and then giving it the attention and nurturing that it needs to become a true success. Here at WSpider though, we’ve definitely found that it’s a customized hybrid combination of more than one of these site types that usually turns out to be the best solution.