The Axandra newsletter archive

4 February 2003

This week we're continuing our series that tells you what you can do to get a better sales/visitor ratio.

Besides the latest search engine news, we're introducing the new column "Articles of the week". This allows us to hint you to interesting articles about the search engine world that previously didn't fit. Have fun! :-)

You know that a high ranking is important to get high quality targeted traffic to your Web site. However, a high ranking alone is not enough. Many webmasters have the problem that their visitors don't buy something on their site even if the way the visitors reached the site indicates that they're interested in the products.

For that reason, we're going to tell you in our new series what you can do to improve the effectiveness of your website.

PART 2: How to keep Web surfers on your site

Last week, we told you which three critical points your Web site must pass before Web surfers even consider taking a look at your Web page. This week, we're telling you what you can do to keep these visitors on your site.

1. Come straight to the point

Your home page is the most important page on your site. It's the very first page of your site and the page that people see first when they come to your site. Therefore, it's important that your home page is interesting for your visitors.

Every visitor wants to get a prompt answer to the question "what's in it for me?". On the first paragraph of your home page, you should tell your visitors the following:

• what you do
• why people should stay on your site
• what's in for your visitors

If you don't answer these questions quickly enough, people will go away.

Of course, every home page owner is convinced that they have the best product on earth and that everybody should buy it. Unfortunately, visitors don't know that.

If you don't tell them the major benefits of your product, no one will take the time to dig into your site. Web surfers are a very impatient group.

2. Don't annoy your visitors with animations they cannot see

Some people use Flash animations or big pictures with a meaningless text such as "Welcome to the world of tomorrow" as their index page that redirects to their actual first page. Don't do that if you don't want to lose a big part of your visitors.

Flash intros take minutes to load on a slow modem connection so most Web surfers will go away before they even had a chance to see your actual home page.

In addition, Web pages containing only a Flash animation cannot be indexed by most search engines. If you use a Flash intro as your index page, chances are that your site will never show up on search engines.

3. Respect people's time

Until high-speed Internet access becomes widespread, don't use large bandwidth-clogging graphics.

As a rule of thumb, no single graphic should be larger than 30 KB to 50 KB, and no single page should have more than 200 KB of graphics.

If you must include a large, detailed image, provide your visitors a smaller, thumbnail version so they know if seeing the larger image is worth their time.

4. Test with different Web browsers

Not all Web surfers use Microsoft's Internet Explorer in version 6. It's important to test your Web site with different Web browsers.

Try to test your Web site with Internet Explorer version 5.0, Mozilla/Netscape and Opera.

5. Be consistent

Professional Web sites always have their navigational bar at the same side. They use a consistent style for headlines, headers and text. Don't use more than three different fonts in different sizes.

Try to avoid colored or textured backgrounds. They make text difficult to read. Of course, dancing buttons and blinking text don't belong to a professional Web site, either.

Once Web surfers have decided not to go away on their first impulse, you have to keep them with a good sales copy.

In the next issue, we're going to tell you how to write a good sales copy and how to create trust and confidence so that your visitors will buy something on your site.

* Yahoo hired key executive from Overture

Yahoo said it had hired away a key executive from Overture to expand its own paid-inclusion services.

* dmoz.org (Open Directory Project) has been updated

After five months, the DMOZ RDF dump has been updated. The RDF dump is used by hundreds of search sites to display DMOZ results, for example Google, Lycos and Netscape Search.

If you submitted your site to dmoz.org within the last five months, chances are that your site can now be found in a DMOZ search.

This might mean that the Google Directory (which is based on DMOZ) will get a full update next month.

* AOL Anywhere now shows four Google sponsored AdWords

If you advertise with the Google AdWords program, you'll be happy to hear that AOL Search now displays four sponsored links (instead of three).

* Espotting links now appears on Freenet.de

Good news for German users that advertise with Espotting. Five Espotting pay per click links now appear on Freenet.de, Germany's second largest Internet Service Provider (ISP).

* LookSmart reported fourth quarter and fiscal year results

LookSmart has reported its financial results in a press release: "[...] fourth quarter 2002 revenue of US$31.3 million, a 65 percent increase from the fourth quarter 2001."

If not for a one-time gain, LookSmart's earnings would have been US$3.4 million.

* SearchEngineWatch announced award winners

The reputable search engine site SearchEngineWatch.com has announced its award winners for 2002. Google has won five out of eight categories.

* New Google country

This week it's Google Paraguay opening its doors.

* Interview with Tim Mayer of FAST Search

Tim Mayer is FAST's director of search. FAST operates the search engine AllTheWeb.com. He explains what a webmaster must do and mustn't do to get a good ranking on AllTheWeb.

* Interview with Craig Pisaris-Henderson of FindWhat

FindWhat CEO Craig Pisaris-Henderson recently attended a chat session. Read what he thinks are the top three mistakes made by new users.

* There's a revenue limit for search engines

A white paper on search engines claims that there's a revenue limit for search engines of US$200 million unless they introduce pay schemes, such as Overture's.

* Do you want to get better responses to your link requests?

Exchanging links is an important way to get visitors to your Web site.

If you're not getting many responses to your link request messages, you might want to fine-tune your email message texts. Download our (free) ebook and find out what you can do to get a better response rate.

* Web sites we recommend

• How to make your Web site more effective, part 1
  
  
• Frames and the NoFrames tag
  
  
• The importance of robots.txt
  
  
• Take care of filter words and stop words
  
  
• Happy New Year
  
  
• Yahoo to acquire Inktomi

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