Take a look when you first walk in to Wal-Mart or any other big store. Even if you’ve never been in that particular store before, it takes no more than a second to orient yourself.

How people locate what they want in a brick-and-mortar store
Signs above the aisles direct you toward the departments you want. Signs above the shelves tell you what to expect in each row.

Each sign is concise and clear. You won’t find any long product lists or fine detail on them. Everything is digestible at a glance.

So what can you learn from this brick-and-mortar shopping trip? Make your navigation similar to what you saw in the store.

Remember how you found your way around there? You looked for the big sign with the department name. Then you looked at the smaller signs that listed what was in each row.

How to apply brick-and-mortar navigation principles to your website
You can do the same thing with your website navigation. First, identify the links that lead to your main sections of your website. Place them in your navigation bar in a way that really makes them stand out so your visitors’ eyes will naturally be drawn to them.

Then identify the key links that lead to any subsections of those sections. Place them in your navigation under their parent sections. Make them less noticeable than your main section links so it is clear that they are subservient to your main section links.

What you want visitors to do is to scan the main section headings in your navigation and find the one that suits them best. Then you want them to the scan the subheadings to narrow their search. If you do this right, it should take your visitors two seconds to find a link to click as they move toward what they want.

But can’t my site visitors find their way on their own?
Why is it important to break things down like this? By organizing their search into easy-to-scan blocks, you build their confidence that they will find what they want quickly and easily. They could wade through a long list of links, but you might lose them before they find what they want.

Going back to the Wal-Mart analogy, the Wal-Mart greeter could hand customers a long list of all the racks and what was on them as they came in. They could count on the customers to read the list to locate what they wanted and do away with all the signs. But how many customers would get discouraged and give up before they found what they wanted?

Keep your navigation simple and easy to scan. Put it where visitors expect it to be. Don’t try to be clever. Don’t draw distinctions that match your in-house terminology but that could be confusing to visitors.

Think of your website as if it were a brick-and-mortar store. What would you do to help customers find what they want if they had to walk through a physical store? Then arrange your navigation so their eyes and their mouse can bring them to their destination with as much ease and confidence as they would if their feet were doing the walking.

Ecommerce Facts
Online spending in 2007 increased at a rate of anywhere from 18% to 21% compared against the same quarter in 2006. (http://www.census.gov/mrts/www/data/html/07Q4.html)

Fears of recession are not affecting most online marketers. A February 2008 survey showed that 43% of marketers surveyed plan to increase their online marketing budgets for 2008. 37% plan to maintain them at 2007 levels. Even in time of cutbacks, marketers are finding their customers more and more online. (http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006267&src=dp1_home)

When pressed by Wall Street to explain how his bank was preparing for the double whammy of recession and the subprime mortgage crisis, the CEO of Bankrate, Inc., outlined how his company’s strategy for search engine optimization was helping his business weather the storm. (http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3629390)

How do you know if your website is worth what you’re investing in it? How do you know if a promotional campaign will pay for itself? There are five calculations you can make to have these numbers at your fingertips.

The following list shows you what they are, where to find the data for them, how to calculate them, and how to use them once you have them.

Visitor Conversion Ratio
What it is
The percentage of visitors to your site who complete whatever action you want them to take (for example, buy your product, sign up for your newsletter).

What data you need
• Number of Sales (from your shopping cart or account records)
• Number of Visitors (from your Web referrer logs)

How to calculate
Number of sales ÷ Number of visitors X 100 = Visitor Conversion Ratio

How to use your Visitor Conversion Ratio
Most sites convert at a rate of below 1%, but sites that are well optimized for conversion can enjoy conversion rates of 10% or more. Track you conversion rate as you make changes to your site and work keep increasing it.

Cost/Visitor (CPV) Ratio
What it is
How much it costs you to obtain a visitor. Include all costs of running your website.

What data you need
• Web Marketing Costs (from your accounting information)
• Number of Visitors (from your Web referrer logs)

How to calculate
Web Marketing Costs ÷ Number of Visitors = Cost/Visitor

How to use your Cost/Visitor Ratio
Get an accurate picture of how much it actually costs to bring each visitor to your site. Then work to bring your Cost/Visitor down by cutting expenses that are not successful in producing sales.

Revenue/Visitor Ratio
What it is
Revenue/Visitor is the flip side of Cost/Visitor. It gives you a picture of what each visitor to your site is worth to you.

What you need
• Sales Revenue (from your accounting information about sales that are related to your website)
• Number of Visitors (from your Web referrer log)

How to calculate
Sales revenue ÷ Number of visitors = Revenue/Visitor

How to use your Revenue/Visitor Ratio
Compare your Cost/Visitor to your Revenue/Visitor to determine if you’re spending too much for your visitors. If you have a healthy gap between the two, you can afford to be more aggressive in obtaining visitors. If they’re close, work on raising your Visitor Conversion Rate to make better use of the traffic coming into your site, and work to lower your Cost/Visitor by eliminating spending that is not leading to sales.

Cost/Customer (CPC) Ratio
What it is
How much it costs you to obtain each paying customer. Include all costs of running your website.

What data you need
• Web Marketing Costs (from your accounting records)
• Number of Customers (from your shopping cart or your accounting records)

How to calculate
Web Marketing Costs ÷ Number of Customers = Cost/Customer

How to use your Cost/Customer Ratio
Use it to get an accurate picture of how much it actually costs to bring each paying customer to your site. Work to bring your Cost/Customer down by cutting expenses that are not successful in producing sales.

Revenue/Customer Ratio
What it is
Revenue/Customer is the flip side of Cost/Customer. It gives you a picture of what each paying customer on your site is worth to you.

Where to find it
• Web Sales Revenue (from your accounting records)
• Number of Customers (from your shopping cart or your accounting records)

How to calculate
Web Sales Revenue ÷ Number of Customers = Revenue/Customer

How to use your Revenue/Customer Ratio
Compare your Cost/Customer to your Revenue/Customer to determine if you’re spending too much for your paying customers. If you have a gap between them, you can afford to be more aggressive in obtaining visitors. If they’re close, work on raising your Visitor Conversion Rate to make better use of the traffic coming into your site, and work on lowering your Cost/Visitor by eliminating spending that is not leading to sales.

Ecommerce Facts
A list of online marketing statistics includes eye-opening facts about the growth of the mobile Web, as well as consumers’ growing reliance on the Web to research purchases. (http://www.virtualmarketingblog.com/index.php/20080224/7-statistics-relevant-to-internet-marketing/)

As consumer spending tightens, consumers are turning to the Internet increasingly because of the ability it gives to quickly compare prices and get the best deals. (http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006285&src=article_head_sitesearch)

Although often ignored by marketers, a new survey showed that consumers who are 62 and over are far more active online than previously thought – and show no less willingness to buy online than younger, more “tech-savvy” Internet users. (http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3629395)

If your car runs sluggishly, what do you do? You take it to a mechanic to pinpoint the problem. For most people, a car is too complicated to diagnose by themselves.

For most people, a sluggish website comes across in the same way – too complicated to fix the problem yourself. If your web business gets visitors, though, only to misfire on converting them to sales, there’s a six-second test you can do on your site that will help you diagnose a number of potential problems.

Open your page and glance at it. Let your eyes scan across the very top of your screen. Then scan down the center to the bottom of the screen. Don’t scroll down. You want to see only what your visitor sees the instant your site appears. Then ask yourself the following three questions, based solely on that six-second scan.

• Does your title grab them emotionally?
• Do they quickly grasp what you can do for them?
• Do they clearly understand what to do next?

Does your title grab them emotionally?
Does it clearly identify the problem that brought them to you? Or is it a generic label that vaguely describes your business?

You want your title to show them that you know exactly who they are and exactly what they need. Ask yourself what they’re looking for. Really put yourself in their mindset.

Think of it from their perspective (as a problem that they’re trying to solve) instead of from yours (as a product or service that you’re trying to sell). What words or phrases would they use to describe their problem? Use those words to introduce them to your solution.

For example, this article is titled “How a Six-Second Scan Can Boost Your Sales.” Would it have caught your attention as much if it had read, “Improving Your Website?”

The phrase “Boost Your Sales” caught your attention because it addressed a key problem for you. Combining that phrase with an unfamiliar concept like a “Six-Second Scan” piqued your curiosity. And the phrase “Six Second Scan” suggests a solution that is fast and easy.

Forget any misplaced ideas of what is “supposed” to be professional looking. You get no points for cool, detached formality. The only way you get people’s attention by connecting with them.

Do they quickly grasp what you can do for them?
The second thing to check is whether your page is easily to skim. Does your eye jump naturally to key points on the page? Do headings, bolded text, and graphics give you an instant “feel” for what you’ll find on that page even before you read it?

People don’t want to “work” at reading online. Big blocks of text lead them to hit their Back button and find something more friendly to their eyes. Give them an instant overview of the content and they’ll pick out and read the details they need.

Do they quickly understand what to do next?
The third thing you want to check is whether they’ll grasp THE key point of the page: the action they need to take next.

Many sites waste prime space, front and center, on a rambling introduction. Meanwhile, all the visitor wants to know is, “Can I find what I’m looking for here?”

Make sure your visitors can see, quickly and clearly, what they need to do next to solve the problem that brought them to you. Don’t count on them scrolling down to find this vital information. Put it right in front of them the instant they see your page.

Final thoughts
Granted, it takes longer than six seconds to read these guidelines. The scan itself, though, should be nearly instantaneous. If these elements are not instantly evident on your page, you need to fix them so that they are.

Your visitors will unconsciously make this exact same scan the instant they arrive. Make sure they see clearly and easily how you solve the problem that brought them there.

When we were building lots of blogs for other people we discovered that the search engines seemed to particularly relish content on the static pages.
We would add content to static pages that defined the style and theme of the site and once the pages were indexed they’d often be among the best ranked pages on the sites we made.

There is a problem though - our basic promotion strategy was to syndicate the rss feeds from these sites to a network of rss directories and aggregators and, as you probably already know, WordPress does not include pages within the feeds it produces. This meant that the first pages to be indexed were rarely the best quality content for which we wanted the sites to be known.

The normal way round this is to make a short post that links to the page but this can be quite time consuming.

Today I came across a plugin that helps a lot. This plugin, when activated, adds pages to one’s rss feeds. Rss Includes Pages is by Marios Alexandrou and works on Wordpress versions from 2.5 onward.
Here is a link to Marios’ blog where there are user comments on the plugin.

One important point, if you want to use the plugin to publicise pages on a new site but do not want to continue having pages in your feeds then you simply deactivate the plugin and pages will no longer be shown. No muss, no fuss!

Today I came upon a very useful blog post describing several tools (almost all free) designed to help social marketers and optimizers to gain an insight into what real people are doing, are interested in and are writing about.

These tools will help internet marketers, search engine marketers and social marketers to do research, find niches and to some testing of their ideas almsot all for free. The cool thing is that Marty, the author takes care to explain the utility of the tools and provides links, for those less clear about the concepts, to learn from.

The site is very useful and well worth a read with a cup of coffee or two.

I looked at www.alexa.com this morning, just as I normally do. I like to see what the Indians who comprise half my traffic have been up to overnight.

Those guys do well by me but their Adsense clicks don’t raise much money. I do much better when the US wakes up.

Anyway, today Alexa has a shiny new interface.

They have added a couple of very cool features - they are now measuring Bounce Rate and time on site.
After looking at my competition and seeing that I have a lower Bounce Rate than the market leader and my time on site is surprisingly good compared to my peers I thought I’d pop a post up here to tell the world, or at least this small part of it.

Bounce Rate is the percentage of one’s site visitors who, after entering a site, hit the back button rather than exploring further into the site. Ad networks prefer sites with a relatively low Bounce Rate as they prefer to have eyeballs exposed to as many ads as possible and because a low bounce rate can be seen as an indication that the site is offering readers that which they seek.

Time on site is a related concept and is exactly what it suggests but refers to the total time on the site, not jsut on a single page. In general the longer a user stays on site the better.

As an overall quality measure I am sure that ad networks and others use a combined measure that accounts for bounce rate and time on site; after all, somebody who hits a page and stays for five minutes before hitting the back button probably got benefit from the visit and probably more than the person who hits five pages in a minute before leaving to go somewhere else, yes?

It is speculated that search engines as well as ad networks are interested in these metrics and this new introduction from Alexa pretty much confirms it, after all, why would they bother sharing these metrics if they had no meaning or value?

Time to start making those pages more ’sticky’ and encouraging readers to move from one page to the next.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/