The Axandra newsletter archive

18 February 2003

This week we're continuing our new series that tells you what you can do to get a better sales/visitor ratio. As always, we're also bringing you the latest search engine news.

High search engine rankings are 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 a 5-part series what you can do to improve the effectiveness of your Web site.

PART 4: Make your Web site easy to navigate and guide Web surfers through your pages

Last week, we've told you how to write good sales copy to convince Web surfers. This week, we're telling you how to direct your visitors to the right (order) pages.

1. Keep it simple, stupid (KISS)

Your navigation must be easy to understand. People must be able to find your links and they must know how to use them.

To achieve this goal, your navigation (and your whole Web page design) must be consistent from page to page. It's a good idea not to reinvent the wheel. Blue underlined text links work best as everybody knows how to use them.

Even if you have an image map (a picture with links) or navigation icons (see below), you should always have text links on every page. Some users turn off the display of images in their Web browser. They need text links, as well as the search engines which cannot index text on images.

Don't use Flash/Shockwave to design the navigation of your Web site since many users cannot access them.

2. Design navigation icons wisely (if you must use them)

Many people use little graphics or photos that link users to their pages as navigation elements. These navigation icons are offten unnecessary.

If your icons don't denote by themselves what the page stands for, don't use them. For example, don't use a meaningless icon like a smiley for a link to your contact page.

3. Use descriptive text links

Your visitors want to know what they can expect on the other end of the link before they click on it. Use descriptive link texts so that your visitors know what they get when they click on a link.

For example, the link text to your contact page should be called "Contact us" or "Contact information". This is what users expect and what they know. Don't experiment with texts like "Our address" or "Tell us".

4. Guide your visitors through your site

It's important that you guide people through your site. Don't give them too many choices. That will only confuse them.

Make sure that your visitors don't have to search for your important "download" or "order" links. Make it easy for your customers. If you have several support pages on your site, you don't have to list them all on your index page. A single link to your main support page is enough.

You can link to all other support pages on your main support page.

Don't link to other Web sites on your index page. People have finally managed to come to your Web site. Don't send them away by placing outgoing links on your index page.

Links to other Web sites are an important way to make your Web site more valuable for customers and for getting reciprocal links from other sites. However, use an extra "links" or "resources" page for outgoing links and open outgoing links in a new window.

Be sure that you customers can find what they're looking for on your site and that they don't have to search for it.

Make a test with a relative or a friend who is a bit unsure surfing the Web. Tell him or her to find out the price of your product or service. Look over his/her shoulder and find out how people can find ways you've never dreamt of. :-)

Your Web site navigation should be easy to understand and it should be consistent throughout your whole Web page. If people cannot find what they're looking for quickly and easily, they will leave your Web site.

In the next issue, we're going to finish this series by giving you tips on how to simplify your ordering process.

* Google buys Blogger.com Web service

Google will acquire Pyra Labs, the company behind the personal publishing site Blogger.com. Blogger.com provides weblog services to one million registered users (200,000 of which are active).

Ordinary people with limited technical knowledge use the weblog service to update their personal Web sites and online diarys.

Google spokesman Krane said that Google planned no immediate changes to the Blogger.com service and that Google would disclose additional details of its Blogger plans in upcoming weeks.

Rumor has it for a long time that Google gives more relevance to weblog pages. It will be interesting to see if Google gives more relevance to its Blogger.com pages than to the competitor services including Movable Type, Radio Userland and LiveJournal.com.

* News from AltaVista

1. AltaVista has added the capability to limit the results in its news search to articles within a specific date range and to articles with images.

AltaVista also increased the size of its new multimedia index to more than 240 million files, featuring larger images and more international image files.

2. AltaVista is going to power the search functionality on CricInfo.com, which claim to be the most popular cricket site in the world, reaching 15 million visitors.

3. It seems that AltaVista has quietly published a small version of its search site for mobile phone users.

* Overture signs on MSN Japan

Paid search leader Overture Services signed a two-year deal to provide paid search results to MSN's Internet network in Japan. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

* New beta version of MSN Search

MSN Search had added the ability to limit searches to Microsoft Office or PDF documents to its beta search site. The relevance of the search results should have been improved and the result pages should load more quickly.

* Google was an accident

Brad DeLong has posted a collection of scattered notes from a recent talk given by Google Co-founder Larry Page.

Larry Page: "It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. [...] Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation..."

"Today: profitable since 2001:Q1, 700+ people, 60+ Ph.D.s, 86 languages, 14 offices, 150M searches/day."

* AllTheWeb/Yahoo/MSN Search rumors

"Google ought to watch out for reversals of fortune. Fast Search & Transfer, based in Oslo, Norway, is rumored to be in talks with both Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN for the privilege of answering search queries on those portals."

* Google goes public

The Red Herring magazine is speculating about an Google IPO.

* Microsoft may look to LookSmart

"MSN [...] isn't expected to be too happy when it realizes its checks for Inktomi's Web search services are being cashed by Yahoo."

* Check the link popularity of your Web site

CompletelyFreeSoftware.com writes about the freeware tool "Link Popularity Check": "If you are endeavoring to earn an income from the Internet, or if you are just curious, Link Popularity Check is a must have".

Find out how popular your Web site is on the search engines.

* How link popularity can help you ranking

A good link populartiy can increase your search engine ranking while getting a lot of targeted traffic through reciprocal links.

Read our special article to learn more about link popularity.

* Web sites we recommend

• How to make your Web site more effective, part 3
  
  
• How to make your Web site more effective, part 2
  
  
• 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

The Search Engine Facts newsletter is free. Please recommend it to someone you know.

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