Let’s start this post with a minor clarification.  The relevance attribute or “rel” tag basically defines the relationship between the current document and a linked document.  For example, say I have two html pages, cookies.html and milk.html.  I decide to link the cookies.html page to the milk.html page, hence fulfilling the current document and linked document requirement.  When linking the cookies page to the milk page the code on the cookies page will traditionally look something like this in standard html:

<a href=/milk.html>Milk</a>

Milk is the word that displays to the web user.  Just as “href” is an attribute the same is true for the “rel” attribute.  Href tells “Milk” where to go when the user clicks on the link and Rel describes the relationship between milk and cookies, which we can all agree is pretty darn good.  With a “rel” tag, the same link may look like this:

<a rel=”friend” href=/milk.html>Milk</a>

This makes the assumption that Cookies and Milk are friends.  Why include a “rel” tag?  For one, it’s great for classifying content and styling links.  Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! will refer to rel tags to get more information about a link for search engine optimization or SEO.  Browsers support rel tags but do not use the attribute in any way.

Below is a list of different relevance tag values and what they do.  Each can impact SEO in its own way.

Almost twenty additional rel tag options exist, but the rel tags listed above will make the biggest impact on search engine optimization or SEO.

If you have more questions about relevance tags or search engine optimization, visit us at www.thenetimpact.com.

“Currently, Google Analytics does a great job analyzing past performance. Today we’re very excited to bring real time data to Google Analytics with the launch of Google Analytics Real-Time: a set of new reports that show what’s happening on your site as it happens,” says  John Jersin.  Google Analytics Blog

Let’s take a deeper look into the Real-Time tool.

Right Now

Right Now allows users to see the number of active visitors on site.  If there is more than one active user at a time, you can click on any of the active visitors to follow them.  At any time you can click out of following only that one visitor and view all visitors.  Right now also gives the user a closer look at who is a new visitor and who is a returning one.

Top Referrals

Top Referrals gives the user the opportunity to see where the visitor was browsing before they got to your page. Real-Time also enables user to click on the specific link to see the actual site.

Page Views

Real-Time allows the users to see the average time per minute and per second each visitor is on each page of the website.  This tool is a way to indicate whether a specific page has the information a visitor is looking for.  For example, if a visitor is on a page for a few seconds the page might not have appropriate content for that visitor but if the visitor is on a page for a few minutes then that would indicate it had the correct information they were looking to find.

Top Active Pages

Top active pages enables users to see what pages the active visitor is looking at, allowing the Real-Time user to follow the path they take throughout the website.  This can come in handy if the user wants to navigate the visitor to specific pages on the website.

Top Locations

Top Locations is an easy way to see where the visitors of the website are geographically located.

Google is not the first company to offer such data.  Woopra, Chartbeat and numerous other tools offer Real-Time but Google allows you to use it for free.

Real-Time is able to track the immediate impact to site traffic, making this great for social media.  For example, if a user posts a picture on their website and then tweets about it, Google Analytics Real-Time is able to track when traffic from the tweet stops driving visitors. The new version of Google Analytics was turned on for only a small number of people before to test it out in September of 2011. According to the Google Analytics blog, the full version of Google Analytics will be full force sometime January 2012.

Google Analytics provides tracking for anyone with a web presence, whether the user is an executive, marketing professional, content or a web developer.   It’s important for any person who has a website and wants it to succeed in the crazy world of the internet.  Google Analytics is a way to take control of your website and turn page views into profits.

Interested in Google Analytics? Contact The Net Impact.

Information architecture is not something that you can do quickly. This post recaps Omni Marketing’s presentation from Shari Thurow.

Information architecture and SEO
Challenge:
First, consider organization and labeling. It must be easy to use and your information must be easier to find.  If people cannot find what they want to find, they will leave your website and you will lose customers. Only an average of 12% of web visitors will return to a website that was unhelpful before.

Solutions:
Wireframes helps reduce lost customers, reduce development costs, increase crawlability, increase indexation, increase rankings and build brand value.  Tech teams often don’t think like your customer.  A technique to try is to take a website screenshot and remove design and content and individually quiz people about what page they are viewing.

Content MUST contain words and phrases that people type into search engines. Reduce  number of ”WTF” moments.

You do not want the technical model of your tech team. Accommodate navigational, informational, and question search types.

Understanding information architecture
Challenge:
Return to the idea of organization and labeling think about categorization, hierarchical taxonomy. Avoid practices like siloing and page rank sculpting.

Solution:
To have successful blogs and social media networks, use categorization. If you have different types of visitors or industries, versioning pages to include relevant keywords in the content is important.  Give multimedia a separate area in addition to their native locations. To test, make sure you’re observing the user target that you want to reach.  Pages should be unique, distinguishable and well-labeled. Think in terms of navigation labels over keywords.  Yup, SEO and information architecture are related.

For blogs, titles and headings SHOULD contain keywords. Use embedded text links to other previously written blogs and…categorize, categorize, categorize. This helps your articles and posts maintain traffic as they age.

A few resources:
Taxonomy Warehouse provides taxonomy structures by industry.
Use a tilde ”~” search to find keyword synonyms.

Check out The Huffington Post for a great author page structure.

Navigation Labels:
Only children and programmers “minesweep”, don’t require users to search for links. Make them obvious.

Spell out abbreviations.

Give people choices, but not too many. Drop downs give too many choices, one button makes people feel they’re being forced into a sales funnel.

Review Tips for Getting Valuable User Generated Content
Challenge:
How do you get good website, product and service reviews?

Solution:
Monitor and reward good reviews.

That’s it! Great presentation!

Daily Analysis. On August 9th, we took a look at Twitter’s trending topics for Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, South Africa, Australia and the Worldwide buzz. Put simply, this simple 5-minute check gives us insight into topics affecting the globe and topics localized to specific countries.

Take a look at the table below to see this breakdown of global and localized national trending topics. Notice that the London Riots have become a major area of concern for the entire world, occupying a large portion of the trending twitter topics, not just worldwide, but in specific countries too. And according to a recent Mashable article, Twitter users not only shared footage of riots on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, but now social media is a key mechanism for the organization of riot cleanup.

The United States’ State Department recognizes 195 independent countries worldwide. Although, many think of Twitter as highly global (and it is in respect to other companies), Twitter trends represent trended tweets from only 31 of the world’s 195 countries. Major countries not represented by Twitter Trends include Russia, China, and more surprisingly, South Korea.

1. Your brand is not a logo, advertising, your mission statement, etc. Your brand is a gut feeling (as articulated by Robert Brunner, Ammunition Group). Or you could say, a brand is the intangible sum of your assets (Tom Schmittdiel, PSG Marketing).

2. It is important to identify every touchpoint of your brand and then deliver on the brand promise that you’ve made AT EACH touchpoint.

3. You cannot tell people what to believe about your brand, but you can be consistent with your branding efforts. Words create a challenge you must live up to, actions give you the opportunity deliver on that challenge.

4. Communicate your brand consistently online through your navigation, social media, search engine optimization (SEO) and beyond.

5. For EVERYTHING you do, ask yourself, “Does this follow the brand that I’ve created?” If this brand were a person, would it do that? Here? In this way?

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At The Net Impact, we conducted a short study pitting the SEO efforts of our local St. Louis non-profits against national powerhouse non-profits.  In other words, we graded their websites using HubSpot’s Website Grader tool. 

HOW WE DID IT

Through a Google search, we selected 10 recognizable St. Louis based non-profits for our St. Louis SEO sample.  Then we selected the top ten non-profits from a 2005 Forbes list of the Top 200 national charities (we verified that all 20 organizations in our sample still exist and have websites).

Using HubSpot’s Website Grader tool, we analyzed all 20 non-profit URLs.  Then we averaged all the statistics to compare St. Louis SEO to national SEO.  Here are the results:

WHAT WE MEASURED

Average Website Grade.  This is a HubSpot scale from 0 to 100 (100 being the best).  Hundreds of thousands of websites make the top 5% (scoring 95-100). An average score of 77.1 means there is a huge opportunity for St. Louis non-profits to improve their overall SEO efforts.

Average Indexed Pages.  This metric is the average number of pages that Google indexes from each website.  Google indexed as many 37,000 pages for the top indexing St. Louis non-profit in our sample and as low as 58 pages for the lowest indexing St. Louis non-profit in our sample.  Interestingly enough Google indexed only 32,000 pages for the top indexing national non-profit.  And the average page index of 5,742.2 pages nationally versus 4,552.1 pages here in St. Louis, is fairly comparable. 

Average Linking Domains.  Perhaps the largest gap in performance is the number of inbound links to St. Louis non-profit websites versus the average number of inbound links to national non-profit websites.  St. Louis SEO fell short with an average of 1,063 inbound links compared to the national average of 15,256.2 inbound links.

Best Traffic Rank.  Traffic rank is a statistic that defines a website’s overall rank in terms of site visitors compared to all indexed websites.  The top ranked website of our entire 20 website sample hailed from St. Louis as the 1,422^nd most visited website (which is actually pretty darn good).  The top national traffic rank was 8,547 (hint: it was the Red Cross). 

% Sites With Blogs.  Only 4 websites in our sample contained blogs that Google recognizes.  One non-profit in our St. Louis SEO sample had a recognized blog.  Three national non-profits hosted a recognized blog.  So on this metric, everybody gets a big fat…Eh….

MozRank.  Yet another linking measure.  The Moz Rank weights inbound links not only by quantity but by the popularity of the referring website.  For example, one referred link from CNN.com might be worth as much as many referred links from a small blog. 

Overall, St. Louis SEO is growing among local non-profits, but we can do better and we’re well on our way to competing with huge national non-profits.  If your non-profit is looking for an SEO solution or any other type of interactive marketing solution, check us out at http://www.thenetimpact.com/.

When it comes to soccer, the goal of the game sounds pretty simple– you need to put the ball in the back of the net. When this happens it is usually the goal scorer who gets the most credit, but what about the defense who got the play rolling? In reality, there is far more to a soccer team’s scoring strategy than the person who gets the ball into the back of the net; in fact, a system has been devised to track the contribution of each individual player. Created by Paul Tomkins, this system creates a value of how each player contributes to the team over a number of games.

“When turning soccer into numbers, there will always be problems. And when it comes to assists, this is especially true. How can you reward someone who rolls the ball eight inches from an indirect free-kick as highly as someone who beats seven men and puts the ball in the striker’s path in the six-yard box?”

Those in the Internet marketing industry can relate Tomkins’ soccer player contribution strategy to their website conversion attribution. When it comes to website conversion, each keyword searched, link from Twitter or direct visit, which ultimately results in a conversion, is in most cases a hit from a repeat visitor or from a visitor who is familiar with your brand name. Each step of your search engine marketing strategy can be seen as an assist that kicked that conversion goal to your website, and that is why a web analytics strategy should be in place for all of your online marketing efforts. All marketing campaigns should be custom fit to your business objectives and consistently monitored, analyzed and adjusted to optimize revenue.

Looking at every step of your marketing strategy, rather than just the end result, will tell you which components of your overall efforts are effective and which ones could use some extra attention.

Keyword Research= Defensive Build Up: Who got the ball rolling in the first place? In the case of a soccer game, it may start with a key pass by the goalkeeper. When online, perhaps it was a particular keyword search at the early stage of the searching process. After this happens there is still a huge amount of work to do in order to grab that conversion, but you need to start somewhere!

Linking= Midfield Pass : In soccer, midfielders are the link between the defense and attack and must possess excellent passing skills. Just as it is difficult for forwards to have good shots on goal with having the ball being strategically set-up by the midfield, it is difficult for websites to ascend in search engines without substantial use of a linking program. Search engines consider quality linking to be one of the main criterions for website ranking on keyword searches.

Social Media Efforts= Assist: If Liverpool scored a goal last season, there’s a good chance Xabi Alonso (player known for his high number of assist) was involved at some point during that move. This may not have a huge importance to the overall outcome, but if involved more often than not, then he is clearly having a positive impact on the team. This could relate to an email marketing campaign, social media campaign, a guest blog post on an industry related blog or an optimized press release. If you take these small efforts away, you may start to see a noticeable drop in conversions.

Website Conversion = Goal: You found a visitor who is interested enough in your well-designed and user-friendly website to complete a sale, give you a call or whatever your conversion goal may be. This is the same as giving a player a free shot with just the keeper to beat. You won’t always get a 100 percent conversion rate – but in both cases there is a very good chance it will end up with a goal.

So in which stage does the most importance lie? In tracking the performance at all stages you can really get a strong idea about how every aspect of an online marketing campaign (or soccer team) is performing. With this valuable feedback from web analytics, you can make an informative and successful decision – whether that decision is to change up your keywords, improve your email marketing efforts or to trade your center midfielder – based on the actual facts and figures.

Just like a winning soccer strategy, successful Internet marketing happens only with careful planning, timely execution, persistent monitoring and ongoing improvement of the results you achieve.  With each online solution completely customized to fit the specific needs of your individual company, The Net Impact combines web design, development, marketing and consulting to complete your online strategy. Based on your individual objectives, we develop a campaign plan that is designed from the ground up to not only drive your targeted audience to your site, but to score a conversion goal.

Let’s  say you have just launched a new website.  Your marketing team loves the web design.  Your IT team is thrilled with the security and efficiency and the C class folks are all lining up to salute.  It’s perfect right?  Maybe, maybe not.  What about taking that quantum leap and testing your site with your intended audience, your customers?  Or, as The Net Impact recently determined for the City of Wentzville MO, why not test the site from the perspective of your citizens?

When it comes to a municipality website, the usability of the site by its citizens is a necessary condition for performance.  If the  website is difficult to navigate, people leave. If a landing page fails to clearly state what the municipality offers and what users can do on that page, people leave. If users do not like the access to pertinent informationof the website, they leave. If a website’s information is hard to find or doesn’t answer their questions, the visitors will be left hanging or will  soon be clicking away to a differetn website. Notice a pattern here?

So how do you determine if your website is user-friendly? User testing allows you to roleplay how citizens will navigate your site. At the same time, you record their comments and responses to their efforts to navigate and move through the site in order to accomplish a designed task.  Sound complicated?  It’s really not.   

For an excellent example of  usability testing review the  recent case study conducted by The Net Impact for the City of Wentzville’s website.  After The Net Impact  launched the  The City of Wentzville’s new website, the city worked with our Web marketing team to conduct a series of usability tests to gauge how user-friendly the website’s navigation and overall experience was for visitors and to get a better idea of ideal traffic flow for visitor satisfaction. We created a series of scenarios and tasks for testers to complete on the City of Wentzville’s website.  These tasks were specifically designed to take testers through the navigation pathways of the site and to recreate the experience of a typical visitor to the website.  An impartial  third party service was enlisted to select a broad sample of testers.  A random sampling of testers, with diverse backgrounds including gender, age,  income level, and computer skill level, was determined.  This group best represented the  profiles of actual visitors to the site. As testers performed each task, their mouse movements, clicks and live feedback were all recorded.

Once the user tests were complete, our team of Internet marketing specialist analyzed videos and tester feedback to generate a recommendation report and next steps in order to improve the user experience. From the results we concluded that overall the testers were impressed by the amount of information provided.  Several commented that they wished their own city provided this information and thought this site set the bar high for other municipalities.  However, there were still ample comments from  testers reflecting confusion and difficulty in  finding information .

The Net Impact’s recommendations included consolidating menus, eliminating redundant information and making links to highly requested information more obvious. Some of the tester’s comments also regarded  web design.  The majority of the testers found the site aesthetically pleasing.  Many liked the colors and the rotating photos, but wanted to see more pictures of the city. In addition to suggesting Wentzville add more images to display the character of the  city, The Net Impact suggested different options for the city to make other tools, such as their community calendar easier to find and more simple for visitors to use. – Read more TNI  Case Studies

In conclusion, based on the invaluable feedback from the user testing, our team continues to work with the City of Wentzville to revise aspects of their website to in order to continue to increase effectiveness and functionality. 

Bottom line: User testing is an important aspect of any Internet marketing campaign. The Net Impact employs usability testing as part of our analytics methodology in order to construct  complete online marketing strategies. Remember as well that website testing is an ongoing process, but when managed properly it will drive your efforts and help visitorsrealize a greater satisfaction with your municipal website. Contact The Net Impact today to learn how we can help you find the most effective way to make your website visitors take action.

 The presentation focused on:

-Understanding your Google Analytics Dashboard

-Navigating the Google Analytics report suite

-Defining the metrics that matter most

-Setting up goals to track conversion

The engaging conversation highlighted all of the advantages, latest features and benefits of Google Analytics. One of the topics covered was tracking social media traffic. Erica emphasized the importantance of tracking social media sites on the campaign level to effectively gather and analyze social media analytics.With Google Analytics, you can thoroughly analyze results using the various filters and components Google Analytics offers.  For example, tracking social networking sites will show you social media traffic sources in relation to your overall site traffic. This will in turn give you a good idea of which social media tools are working most effectively for your brand.

Web Account Manager, Erica Sharinghausen leading the discussion on understanding your Google Analytics Dashboard

What is a good bounce rate for my website?” …. “How do I track my Facebook Advertising? … ”What metrics should I pay the most attention to?”

These were just a few of the questions answered “at The Net Impact’s Introduction to Google Analytics seminar, which was geared to introduce business professionals to the basics of web analytics. Erica shared valuable insights on how to utilize Google Analytics to optimize online marketing, improve website performance and increase conversions.  Attendees left with a better understanding of how Google Analytics works and what tools and reports would best serve their individual business.

The Most Important lessons learned from the presentation

- Adjust spending on paid keywords that have high bounce rates

- Identify your problem – unpaid keywords with high bounce rates

- Identify landing pages that need to be more relevant or need stronger calls to action

-Setting up goals to track online success

The Net Impact Team would like to thank everyone who participated in the Introduction to Google Analytic Seminar and we are  looking forward to having many more interesting informational sessions to come!

Check out these great photos and videos from Wednesday night’s seminar!

In the last decade, tracking website analytics has rapidly evolved from simply data crunching to a very powerful decision making platform. Web analytics is an important tool for Internet marketers and web designers alike to make choices about how to improve traffic flow, design calls to action, update search engine optimization and enhance the overall strategy of a website.

Paying close attention to visitor behavior on a website through analytics, is very similar to paying attention to the consumer behavior for a store, brand or product.  Think of it this way… a store manager arranges their shop with the most marketable items in places that grab the shopper’s attention and are easily accessible and highly visible. Just as the store manager is looking to make the shopper’s experience more satisfying by arranging their store based on the habits of his consumers, so that it is easy and enjoyable to navigate through, a website creator should take into account what information is most sought after on their website and the habits and pathways visitors are taking to get there.

Without web analytics it is next to impossible to measure and analyze website visitor behavior. Analyzing visitor behavior allows you to determine activity as it affects profit, sales and areas (pages) of interest. Page views, navigation, entry and exit pages, time spent, languages, geographic locations, visits, and keywords used in searches are a few of the features that are able to be determined using web analytics. By simply tracking items that are most often viewed you can learn what items or products on your site, receive the most attention. In this way you can adapt your offerings to attract more traffic and while doing so monitor what sparks and keeps visitor’s attention.

The Net Impact team places special emphasis on the importance of clickstream tracking, or the following of a visitor’s clickstream as they move throughout a website, down to every microscopic detail. This analysis offered by Google under the name Event Tracking Tool,  allows you to track every movement your visitor makes as a unique event. Analyzing every small movement, or micro-conversion, your visitor makes provides you with useful feedback used to make changes to your website to improve your visitor’s experience, which will in turn enhance the overall value of your website. Every micro-conversion a visitor makes is important because, no matter how small the movement is, it is still conversion, you are still getting the visitor to do what you want them to dig deeper and deeper into your website.

An excellent example of this is The Net Impact’s findings with the website www.vangoghgallery.com. VanGoghGallery.com is an online collection of Van Gogh’s works. The website received thousands of visitors each day. The Net Impact helped Van Gogh gallery setup Event Tracking Methods to gain greater insight into the navigation patterns of its main landing pages.  Through event tracking, Van Gogh Gallery was able to determine that the large image links on the page received 98.5% of the click-throughs compared 1.5%  for the side navigation links, going to the same page. This was helpful for determining the elements necessary on each page to get visitors to take the next step.

In conclusion, if you ever wondered how to analyze website user behavior, determine which search terms they come from, which pages are most visited, which pages are of least interest  and how to maximize your ROI, look into implementing  a Web Analytics solution. Analytics will help you conduct a behavioral analysis of your website visitors, and with that information you can make the required changes to your website that will improve your overall conversation rate and make your visitor’s website experience one that is enjoyable.

To find out how The Net Impact can help you with your Google Analytics needs, contact us today for a free assessment and consultation!