Color is a very important thing to be considered when it comes to branding and identity. SEO is not the only thing thats going to get you brand identity theres lot more than that of which color is one among the very important elements. My self proclaimed teacher for my seo and online marketing learning’s  an smarty had written an excellent post regarding to color branding which is a major resource for this post. Some website colors can make you leave immediately and some sites will stick your eyes on them for their appealing color. Whenever i think of samsung my mind associate it with blue color, when i think of coca cola it associates with red color. The impact of the color in your webpage can very much affect,

1. Your brand awareness by marking your brand name into visitors mind
2. Immediate positive or negative association related to your brand color
3. your new visitors engagement and interactivity in your website
4. the tendency to make them come back and check whats going on in your website

Courtesy: SEO Smarty

There’s only one chance at making a good first mental picture.  That’s why your home page is, by far, the most important page on your entire website.  Optimizing your home page is not just about SEO, but it is also about optimizing your most crucial landing pages for conversions.

Most people don’t recognize that the ultimate common purpose of a web site’s home page is to gain interest and establish credibleness.  It is NOT to try to sell everything under the sun on the first page they get to.  It is NOT to present every single possible important fact across a lengthy home page.

If the first encounter with a web site doesn’t have a clear message and create positive feelings of a match to what they are looking for, the visitor will be lost forever.  Producing a favorable impression and evoking strong visitor trust within the first few seconds leads to more clickthroughs, which leads to more sales, which leads to better SEO ranking.

So how you can measure the rate of success for the changes ? obvious answer is Google Analytics if you didnt done it yet, then its the first step to jump in,

To determine the effectiveness of your home page take a few minutes and ask yourself the following two questions.

1. Is the purpose of your website reflected on the home webpage? It is time to step back and look at your web site from the perspective of a first time user. Does your landing page clearly communicate what products and services you offer? It is a good idea to conduct a small marketing research and ask non-related people for their opinion on the purpose of the site. If their answers surprise you, it means you are doing something wrong. Start by putting clear goals and objectives and then transform them into an attractive selling message using the language appropriate for your target customer. Use reassurance logos, testimonials,  recommendation and privacy statements to build trust and confidence.

2. Is your home page logical with  the nature of your business and target customer? The written matter and design of your home page should clearly convey what your product is, reflect the image of your brand and your target customer. A website selling software to retail stores has to use a different approach from the one selling software to technical companies. Sounds like a given but you will be surprised how many websites totally ignore this aspect of design. Do competitive research and find out what your target customer is expecting to see.

3. How powerful is your call-to-action? You may have a web site far superior than your competitors but if you do not clearly indicate what action you want people to take, you just lost the most important battle. Having a powerful (not overpowering) call-to-action always results in better ranking and higher conversions. A great call-to-action is:

Placed in the most visible part of the home page.
Offers different options from mild to more aggressitve (ex.: e-mail us, live chat, request a call back, call now, get a price quote etc)
Tested regularly for utmost conversions

Always boost visitors to leave contact information. Even if it doesn’t immediately result into sales, capturing customer information leaves a room for further interaction.

4. Are you tracking your goals and objectives? Implementing Google Analytics will help you to monitor the effectiveness of your webpage and allows you react promptly. Keep in mind that making drastic and sporadic changes over a short period of time can cause your ranking to bounce back. To achieve optimum results, changes have to be gradual and well thought out.

5. What is your competitor doing? Learn at competitors expense! You don’t need to reinvent the wheel.  See why your competition is successful and learn from it.  It is always a smart move to research your competitors’ websites for ideas of what works and what doesn’t. Keep in mind that blunt plagiarism is  a terrible idea for a lot of reasons.  To outsmart your competitor you need to take a creative idea and raise it to a new level by adapting it to the specific needs of your web site.

6. Does your web site work properly? Functionality is the key. There is nothing more repelling and damaging to your site reputation than broken pages. The web site needs to be tested in different browsers on both big and small resolution screens.

7. How long does it take to load? There is no widely accepted benchmark for page loading. My rule of thumb is that you have 2 seconds for the page to load and 5 seconds to sell a prospect. Therefore to maximise sales you should give yourself maximum selling time.

8. Do you have enough copy on your homepage? Give search engines something to read. Many website try to hide the scarcity of written text behind the abundance of images and “cool” graphics which obviously doesn’t help the ranking. Search engine heavily rely on copy in determining the popularity and relevance of your site.

9. Is the use of multimedia components justified? Think how you feel when you go to a web site searching for a product and as a result are sentenced to watching minute-long intros and animations? Most web design firms try hard to outperform the competitor by using elaborate layouts and special effects Here is the thing. Static sites with conventional layouts exist for a reason. Unless done skillfully and in moderation, the use of macromedia flash adds very little to the quality of the webpage and has a zero contribution to SEO. What it does, it significantly increases your initial costs and causes annoyance among visitors. The same rule applies to video and audio components.

Google Analytics Advanced Segmentation in Google Analytics is a treasure for any marketing campaign that will help you learn more valuable information about your visitors to improve the user experience and increase website conversions.

When looking at the broad , corasely made up analytics we end up assuming things working great where it really aren’t !

This will give you information version rates, bounce rates and time on site as applying across the board that wont be helpful in making crucial decisions for marketing.

In order to learn more about your users you need to break these numbers down into segments which is built with Google Analytics.

Your website is your gateway for selling leather shoes online and your primary markets are the Malaysia and Singapore. Checking Google Analytics you read that your bounce rate is 60%. You may assume things are working great as planned,. But what if the truth is 20% bounce rate is from Singapore and 80% from Malaysia which gave you the average 80% bounce rate which you thought was okay. To eradicate these problems you need to use segmentation tool in Google Analytics. To do that, create a profile for visitors from the Singapore and another profile for Malaysia.

You have the exact data required based on the geographic statistics and you can start optimizing the campaign to increase the sales leads from Singapore by following some specialized optimization methods like dropping a Singapore welcome feature box, making it more personalized for singapore visitors etc.

Engaging in social media communities is still the top priority for many bloggers to drive traffic.

source:http://newmediachatter.com

Digg, StumbleUpon, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter etc have the potential to spread word of your site or posts on it virally through the network and beyond. It takes a lot of time to build up these networks to the point that they are effective at driving a lot of traffic. Start building your networks now.

Social Media is about building your network over time, writing the type of content that goes well to every member in your network (brainstorm what types of stories go viral on these sites) and making connections with others on the networks.

Bilalbadry.wordpress.com

If you are into social media forgot the concept of being ‘fast’. It may some times wipe your sites reputation all over- you can probably use some techniques to get fast traffic but a more profitable strategy over the long haul is to build a blog that people become loyal to and proud to belong to over the long haul. Do this and they’ll take care for the word of mouth marketing of your blog to others for you and in the long haul you’ll see bigger growth.

Consistent value – people try to do one off spam, it just doesn’t work. You have to keep offering value.

Ask your Clients:

Who else carries more credibility in linking more than your clients? Moreoever it also build brand reputation and awareness about your service or company. Dont be shy in asking links from your clients.

Magnetize Bloggers to Link to you:

Give away freebies to bloggers in your niche and want them to link to your landing page/main page.

Tickers:

Create talk make it big with countdown ticker  for events or announcements from your company/service.

Provide a Great Review about a Product:

Reviewing some products like just another review wont work these days, instead target one product have an excellent Review including customers voice, statistics, videos, photos and press releases about the product and let the product owner know about your review. They will surely love to link to your article atleast from their press release page.

I wish all  Indians around the world a Happy Republic Day :)

India celebrates January 26 every year to celebrate the day it adopted its constitution in 1950. The Celebration is marked by military parades and cultural pageants across the country.

The main celebrations were held in fog-bound New Delhi with a parade on the avenue that links the Presidential Palace and the India Gate.