Fire Your SEO

Next month I'm teaching a seminar on search engine marketing at the Chamber of Commerce and how small businesses can take advantage of many free tools (including Blogger) to help boost their search engine ranking.

Many SEOs make search engine marketing seem technical, difficult, and ever-changing. It's really not so. It takes time, and some knowhow, but anyone can do at least part of it. You might not be able to optimize your code, but you can effect your ranking.

If you are interested in this Denver search engine marketing seminar, you can sign up here.

There Really Is a Social Network for Everyone

Today, while getting my daily dose of online gossip, I saw an ad for a dating site for pot smokers. Yes, www.potpartner.com. I'm impressed that pot smokers actually motivated to get this site up with no less than 5 grammatical mistakes on the homepage and just a few broken links.

Yeah mannnn- websites are cool… huh huh.

Here are Grayson's suggestions for other dating sites:

OCDate.com
Tagline: Never get tired of the same old thing?

LatterDate.com (for Mormons)
Tagline: Find the loves of your life.

ShortDate.com (for midgets)
Tagline: See eye-to-eye.

BlindDate.com
Tagline: :. .. . ::: .

UrbanDate.com
Tagline: Yo baby needs her a daddy.

HillyBillyDate.com
Tagline: Find you a woman.

That last one would have to be dial-up, though.

I will never...

Wear a dress over pants

Eat a tempeh burger

Get my nails done

Wear Crocs

Drink Zima


At work, I will never cease to be amazed by the number of Denver SEO companies who don't know what they are doing.

I'm really good at:

Losing my keys
Getting food on my shirt
Breaking glasses when I wash them
Dropping my cell phone
Forgetting to get gas
Being late for appointments

It's a wonder how I manage my job at Fusionbox, a Denver web design company.

What are you good at?

Usability Nightmares

Incredible how many of the sites that are most popular and that we use everyday are usability nightmares. Here are the top sites that I wish our Denver web design firm, Fusionbox, could get a hold of and redo:

MySpace - seriously horrible ColdFusion crapfest
Amazon - could they make it any harder to actually buy something?
eBay - you'd think with their millions of dollars, they'd redesign.
Zappos - I'm a shoe addict, but I shudder every time I go to Zappos. The design is just so, so 1994.
Zaadz - I love Zaadz. But how about some bigger font for those aging hippies?

Who is on your list?

Denver Web Design

Working for a Denver Web Design company is so rewarding. I get the chance to share my knowledge with marketing people in all kinds of industries, from Construction to Software to Restaurants and beyond. And I get to learn about their companies' internet marketing challenges. Sometimes when I meet with potential clients, they want to know if Fusionbox has experience in their vertical. Sometimes we do, and sometimes we don't; it doesn't matter either way. The principals of user centered design, usability, and search engine friendliness are the same across all kinds of businesses.

If you agree with our design sensibility (not everyone does), and our skill sets match your needs, we can create an effective web presence or service for you. Sometimes we aren't a good fit for a client and we tell them so and try to match them with a company that will fill their particular needs. There are quite a few companies out there doing good work. If you are looking for clean, search engine-friendly design, and solid open source software solutions, we're a good fit for you.

Subaru Drivers

Here's another list. The worst drivers:

Subaru Drivers (consistently slow and defensive)
Saab (something an asshole buys)
Audi (self-absorbed)

Seriously, the next time you are behind a Subaru pay attention to their driving and you'll see why I avoid driving behind them at all costs.

Stealing Content

For some reason today I decided to Google our website content to see if anyone had scraped or used our content. Well, it turns out that one of our Denver Web Design competitors has used our exact content from our services section for their service section. This competitor is even in Colorado. If they had edited our content just the littlest bit, I never would have known. I guess they were lazy and didn't think they would ever be found out. So now they'll be receiving a nice little letter from our attorney. Do yourself a favor and check your own content.

TailRank

Does anyone use TailRank? I don't understand how they could possibly compete with Digg.

I posted a link to our offer for a free Denver SEO review. It'll be interesting to see if we get any traffic from it.

The List

Our Denver web development team went out for lunch on Friday. The topic of discussion was your most hated actors and actresses. We agreed on most of the members on the list, though Jen has a top three who she said she would take out if she had a deadly illness and had to die anyway.

Here they are in no order of most hated:

Jamie Lee Curtis
Whoopi Goldberg
Cameron Diaz
Gary Busey
Robin Williams (what happened to him anyway?)
John Travolta (John Revolting)
Joaquin Phoenix (in everything except Walk the Line)
Kirsten Dunst
Tom Cruise (of course)
Jude Law (needs to go away)

Jen's list was Gary Busey, Nick Nolte, and shoot I can't remember.

Who is on your list?

Organic Postioning Takes Work

We'ver been really busy at the Denver web design firm Fusionbox that I work for. I haven't been doing much search engine work and it shows. We've gone down from position 5 on organic search engine results to 8 or 10 in the last couple of weeks.

I always tell clients that search engine marketing takes work and maintenance. Now, I just need to follow my own advice. The Denver search engine marketing landscape is a competitive one. In order to stay at the top of our game, we need to work at not only adding content to our site, but by following the other techniques that we teach our own clients.

Flash Intros

Flash Intros

At a seminar that I gave last winter, I told a group of marketing people that if they were considering Flash Intros that they should seriously reconsider this choice. About half of the group had "uh oh" looks on their faces. They had all planned Flash Intros and had no idea why these intros will kill traffic to your site.

Flash intros are the bane of users. Users hate waiting for them to load and about 90% of users skip them anyway. Whenever I see a Flash Intro, I bail immediately. This means you are losing site traffic right away. We always tell our clients not to use them because, besides being usability nightmares, they usually cost quite a bit and don't add any value to your site.

Perhaps the only audience who actually watches these things are marketing people. That's because they are marketing people. Your users aren't marketing people and your Flash Intro is not going to convince them to buy your products or services.

Do your bottom line and your users a favor and don't add a Flash Intro to your site.

Fusionbox is a Denver web development company.

Denver Internet Marketing

The rules for internet marketing have changed drastically over the past couple of years. Internet marketing is no longer just optimization-- it's really more Public Relations than anything. It takes time to do, but pays off over and over again, especially now that users are finding companies not just through search engines, but through social media outlets, press releases, articles, and forums.

This is good news for our clients because we can teach them how to use these tools themselves. Clients are no longer tied to an SEO for life.

The best rule of thumb for increasing your organic search engine ranking is adding value to your users. All of your efforts should work toward this goal. This means adding helpful, relevant content, putting resources out on the web, and establishing yourself as an expert in your field.

To learn more about Internet Marketing, give us a call at 720-956-1083.

Writing for the Web

Many of our clients want to write their own copy which is fine if they know that writing for the web is much different from writing a brochure, sales letter, or print ad.

Here are the basics to look for when writing for the web:

Rule #1 - Users don't read, they scan.

Use:
Bolded Items
Short Sentences
Bulleted Lists
Short Paragraphs
Use Headings and Subheadings

Rule #2 - The longer the line of text is horizontally on the page, the harder it is to read and comprehend.

Use:
Narrow column widths (there is a reason newspapers are they way they are
Left aligned text (never right or center align it)

Rule #3 - The good stuff should be above the fold.

Use:
Calls-to-action and offers above the fold
Linked keywords above the fold

Rule #4 - Your content makes or breaks your search engine ranking.

Use:
Keywords and phrases in title, tags, headers
Keywords as far up the page as possible
Often, but not too often
As internal links

Rule #5 - Less is more except when it comes to search engines

Use:
Less than 100 words per page, if possible
Case Studies, Articles, Blogs to add content that everyone may not read but that is important for search engines

Follow these rules and you'll have happy users and high search engine ranking.

Ivy Hastings is a Project Manager at Fusionbox, a Denver Internet Marketing and Web Design Company.

Fusionbox is offering a complimentary review of your site's search engine marketing friendliness.

Contact us to sign up.

Exito Travel Case Study

We recently were contacted by Exito Travel, a company based in Ft. Collins, Colorado that provides travel deals for passengers going to South and Central America. They needed our expertise in design, usability and search engine optimization. Their current site needed some help in these three areas. The goals for the project were to:

• Redesign with a cleaner, more modern look and feel that appeals to their target audience. Use design to drive user actions like performing a flight search, or calling Exito.
• Increase leads by improving the lead generating forms.
• Create a central navigational system that considers key user paths.
• Rewrite the code in order to increase organic search engine ranking.

All of these goals supported increasing site traffic, page views, time spent on the site, and of course leads and bookings.

Here's what we did:

Design
When redesigning a site, Fusionbox always considers the following rules:

• What is the first thing you want a user to do when on your site? How will the design support this critical user action?
• What is the second thing you want a user to do on your site? What are the key user paths and how are we going to make them as efficient and readily available as possible?
• How will we tackle the 30 Second Rule? (Showing users who you are, what you do, and what the user should do next within 30 seconds.)
• How are we going to most effectively use prime real estate - the area of the site above the fold in a user's browser?
• What design look and feel supports the brand and appeals to the target audience?

For Exito Travel, the first thing they wanted users to do was pick up the phone and call them. The second action was to do a flight search. With these key actions in mind, we made the phone number much more visible and placed the flight search tool at the top right of the page where users expect to perform an action (this is according to eyetracking studies).

We tackled the 30 second rule simply by keeping the logo at the top left of the page where the eye goes first, and creating calls-to-action that underscore what Exito does and what the user should do. For example: Book a Flight, Search Group Flights, and Search Flights to Mexico. This way users knew exactly who Exito was, and what option they should use that fit their needs.

In the previous design, important calls-to-action were placed below the fold in 1024x768 meaning most users would completely miss them. This most certainly meant lost leads. We made the most of the real estate above the fold by moving up these important calls-to-action that support key user paths.

The current design had some great elements, and then some that weren't necessarily working toward an end goal. We redesigned to appeal to a young target audience (20-40) by using modern colors, rounded, contemporary, 2.0 looking shapes, and removing stock illustrations.

Here’s the old site:


Here’s the new site:



Usability
Users complained of "getting lost" and not knowing how to get back. To improve usability, we created a central top navigational system that was missing from the previous site so users could navigate around to different sections without getting lost. We also added a breadcrumb trail to help users orient themselves on the site. We developed a left nav that was very clear and also managed to use keywords, i.e., Flights to Mexico, Belize Tours, etc.

We put the all important Booking Tool on every page in the same place so users could take advantage of booking from anywhere on the site. This way, users could be reading about a Tour in Guatemala, and then book that tour immediately on the same page. This increased bookings dramatically.

Before the redesign, the lead generation forms were lengthy and bulking. We recreated the forms and eliminated unnecessary information from the tools. Fields like Mr./Ms./Mrs, Fax Number and auto filling information whenever possible. We also presented the information in the form in steps rather than one long form that is intimidating to users.

Search Engine Improvements
The most dramatic success of redesigning Exito Travel’s site was the boost in site traffic by 50%. This is due to the search improvements we made to the existing code. By optimizing and streamlining the code, Exito Travel’s organic search engine results improved dramatically. We did not launch any other internet marketing strategies, and did not change the content in any way, but Exito still increased unique page views by half.

Fusionbox is a Denver Internet Marketing and web design company.

Exito Travel Traffic Increases by 50%

We've recently finished a project at Fusionbox where we redesigned and redeveloped a travel web site for Exito Travel.

The goals of the project were to:

Improve website design look and feel
Improve usabilityIncrease organic search engine ranking

All of these goals support the end goal of getting more traffic and conversions. The project has been an overwhelming success.

Here's the old site: old.exitotravel.com

And the new one: www.exitotravel.com

Right away you can see the difference in design. The site is more modern looking, less complicated and contains clear content areas. The code is clean and search engine friendly. These changes have resulted in 50% more traffic for Exito.

Increase Ecommerce Conversions

Research says that 59% of ecommerce users abandon the process before it is complete (Clickz.com). The reasons why users abandon the process are:

Not revealing pricing up front - Users want to know exactly what they are in for. You need to be up front about product pricing and, shipping and handling costs. Don’t try to trick users about pricing. Ever.

Poor usability – The process needs to be seamless, fast, and intuitive. Make buttons big and obvious. Error handling should make it very easy for users to go back and fix mistakes.


Asking for too much information – Fields like Mr./Miss/Mrs., Title, Company, Fax, Home Phone and Business Phone are not particularly valuable to you, and can really frustrate a user. Eliminate them and make the process shorter. Auto fill any information that you can. Have the country field default to US. Auto fill the shipping address.

Not presenting the process in steps –users respond to processes that are presented in steps. They also want to know where they are in the process and how much they have left to complete. We’ll segment the checkout process.

Forcing users to register in order to buy – Buying should be as easy as possible. Users have a block when it comes to registering. These are busy people. We need to let them get in, buy, and get out.

Presenting outside links or navigation –How often have you clicked on an outside link and then come back to find all the information that you have just added missing? Let’s keep the users focused on checking out.

Follow these best practices and you will increase your conversions dramatically. By giving your customers a pleasant buying experience, you will turn them into lifelong advocates of your products and service.

Ivy Hastings is a Project Manager at Fusionbox a Denver website design company.

When AdSense Goes Wrong!

Dave Gannon, a Denver freelance designer, noticed that we had a competitor listed on one of the AdSense ads. The fact that this competitor is advertising with AdSense pretty much shows that they don't know squat about getting organic results. So, as far as competition, I'm really not worried. They are an ad agency and every ad agency I know, offers web design and then just outsources it and marks the work up by 50% and is more concerned with design and flash than usability, web best practices, etc. Too bad their poor clients don't know that too!

Check out his blog entry here: Dave Gannon :: Denver Freelance Web and Print Designer Blog

Jabbits Launches

This is a development project that we did at Fusionbox. We did the design, the Flash video, and an engine that connects to your web cam automatically to record questions and answers.

Soap Opera Names

Today someone told me that I have a Soap Opera name. Hmm. I'm not a soap opera actress, though my life does resemble a soap opera from time to time. I'm just a lowly project manager at a Denver web design company.

Here is a list of what I think are good soap opera names. Please add yours to the list.

Male:
Roman
Stone
Clint
Hank
Storm
Forrest
Landon
Sterling
Palmer
Dr. Rick Slater
Nash
Beau
Alan-Michael (This is a real character on Guiding Light played by my longtime friend, Michael Dempsey. Isn't he cute?)

Female
Chrystal
Bianca
Caitlin
Brooke
Sage
Victoria
Starr