What do you expect to see and experience when you visit a webpage?
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Give your visitors what you would appreciate experiencing yourself. Give consideration and value and receive a return. Reciprocity builds community and trust. Trust and “authority” are two things that give people comfort when scanning a webpage.
What is your online “persona” and how does it speak your message to your intended audience?
How to establish
Trust and Authority?
For what sorts of problems will your products and services offer help and remedy? What of the visitor’s needs and issues will your offerings be solutions? How will their lives be made better by contracting with you?
Webpage Speed Optimization, SEO, Web Analytics
Your pages should load as quickly as possible, look good and be easy to navigate on phones. They should be represented compellingly and cleverly on search engine results pages, for your most important keywords. They should talk interestingly about topics the visitor finds interesting and relevant to their lives, desires and available time.
When you can hook your products and service solutions into current events “news”, you can hook into emotional trends and hot spots and people make purchase decisions based on emotion at least as much as on logic. (As was published in Forbes article about Facebook manipulation of timelines and feeds…)
Caching and site speed.
Your server may have special “caching” available or you may have a “cache plugin” installed on your WordPress site.
Without caching,
your site seems to
take forever to load!
Caches are a technique to get sites to appear to load more quickly as they take stuff that is supposed to be fairly static and serve to the person’s web browser the cached version instead of, having site tell the server retrieve all the little bits and pieces required to construct the page from the database, assemble that into HTML and send that down to the person’s browser.
Then again on the person’s browser, there are cache settings there also. Basically one sets up some code that tells the browser how “fresh” the actual webpage is and if it’s within a reasonable time, to just use whatever the Browser has stored in its memory (from visiting the page in the past) instead of requiring a fresh download from the server. Without caching, your site seems to take forever to load!
Why bother looking at Google Analytics and what is it anyway?
You can’t determine the success of something you don’t measure. Hence the importance of Web Analytics. Google makes it so easy to install tracking code on all your site pages and as long as you don’t mind giving web visitor data to Big Brother’s servers, you have a free and powerful way to analyze monthly visitor trends and patterns.
You can’t determine the
success of something
you don’t measure
Knowing how to evaluate and navigate through the hundreds of “views into your data” available with any good web analytics program can reap you rewards of insights. These can serve as confirmation of both challenges and opportunities available for fine-tuning and adjusting on your website pages.
If you can define at least three business questions, Google Analytics can provide dozens of actionable insights – if you know where and how to look. Comparing standard metrics in current and past months can provide fruitful information that can help you spot trends and take advantage of timely current events and issues.
Befriending Analytics and active involvement with your site content (and any relevant conversations), You can organically grow, in Google’s eyes, your site’s relevance as a topically important and authoritative reference for Google’s main customers – those who consume web content suggested by its search results pages. Paying attention to this will get you noticed by Google and if getting more web traffic is a goal, noticed by Google can be a good thing!
(And remember, there exists Life outside of Google. What unique and golden opportunities are there for you because your competition may have focused solely on Google?)