I cannot count how many times I have solicited a business about managing their website and get a story about how much they paid and it, website, has done nothing for them. This is due to them getting a graphic designer that does websites and not an internet marketer. They have a site that looks great but nobody knows it is there. This page will discuss what a website needs to be successful and how to make them better. First I will discuss vital statistics, and their terminology, that will help you measure the performance of the site.

• Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate is, in simple terms, much like in the music world is a “One Hit Wonder”. This is a visitor that views one page and then leaves. Bounce rate is determined by the ratio of the total number of visitors by the number of visitors that view only one page. A bounce rate of 0 to 15 percent is unattainable, 16 to 35 percent is fantastic, 36 to 50 percent is good, 51 to 60 percent is average, and 61 to 70 percent is poor and 71 percent and up is horrible. In my experience graphic designers fall in the 51 percent and up.

Causes of a high bounce rate can be caused by different variables. These are load time, use of a portal page (www.vikingpools.net is a good example of this since it has virtually no information on it and requires the viewer to click through to another page to get anything out of the site), and poor layout and color scheme.

• Load Time

Load Time is the length of time a web page takes to be transmitted to your computer from the server that it is stored on. On a standard DSL connection it is imperative that takes less than a second from the time they click on the link to when it appears on their computer screen. Any longer than that and you will have a high bounce rate. To understand this more fully ask yourself how irritated you get when you wait on a website to arrive on your computer screen. Large pictures (more than 15 kilobytes), anything that uses a java script, and intricate graphics created to make the site look good.

• Portal Page

Somehow this type of website is sold to businesses by graphic designers to show off their talents. It looks great but it irritates most of the internet surfers out there.

• Layout and Color Scheme

Your choice of colors used in the website, for the back ground and text, is critical to communicate your message. A classic example of an extremely poor site that supposedly trying to sell pools is www.fiberglasspoolstx.com (to see copy and paste into your browser). The back ground is black and the text is white. If this site does not irritate you please send me a contact form and explain why it is not. Black is used in websites that are for professional services such as doctors, lawyers, architects and engineers. Colors are used to accomplish many things.

For instance have you ever noticed the traffic signs that contain critical information that you need to know to operate your car safely on our highways. Reduced speed curves, bridge may be have ice, trucks entering the highway, and merge left or right have a shade of yellow as the background and black text. Yellow, in marketing terms, or any color similar is called a “Thought Process Interrupter”. What yellow accomplishes is it stops your brain from processing current information and makes it focus on the message that it contains allowing unobstructed processing of the information on the sign. To test this try to remember the billboards that are on a route you drive on a regular basis. The signs you remember are the ones that employ this method.

Other colors are used to excite emotions such as: Red is used for excitement, Blue is used for serenity, Violet is used to portray exquisiteness, Black is for professionalism, Orange can also be used as a Thought Processor Interrupter and mild excitement, and Green is used to set a peaceful tone. Of course there are many other colors in the spectrum but the important thing to remember is that color is used to communicate your message.

• Sticky Rating

A key measure of a websites performance is called the “Sticky Rating”. Its name gives an accurate description of what it means; how sticky is the site or in other words how many pages does the average visitor view. A sticky rating of a 0-1.5 is extremely poor, 1.6 to 2 is poor, 2.1 to 2.75 is average, 2.76 to 3.1 is good, 3.2 to 4.5 is great, and above that would be beyond any expectation. If you are using Google Analytics the rating would be about 2 points higher since they remove the search engine spiders from the equation. Good website logs analysis software will also tell you how long, in minutes, your visitors are staying in the site. The website logs analysis software I use, which is very user friendly, is called MACH 5. If you purchase this software and experience troubles using it contact me by using my contact form and I will assist you.

• Hits versus Page Views

I get tickled every time a salesperson comes into my office and starts describing how well their website performs and what it can do for me. The first thing that comes out of their mouth is how many hits they receive last month. One that comes to mind was when an online newspaper told me their website is getting 200,000 hits a month. So I ask them what does that mean “Hits” and they always respond “the number of people visiting the site”. That is when I tell them that is not the number of visitors.

The number of hits actually means how many files were downloaded from the website. To illustrate this every websites pages has multiple files on it. These are comprised of pictures, buttons, logos, banners etc. My number one website that I maintain has over 100 files on one of the pages contained within. So every time someone visits that page the hits go up by 100 or more. Now you can see 200,000 really does not look so big.

In the sticky rating paragraph I mentioned page views and visitors. These are the true numbers you want to hear. The number one website that I maintain has had 2.5 million page views, as of December 3, 2008, from some 500,000 visitors. Of course I could be like the salesman and say my website has received some 120 million hits this year and would be entirely true but definitely inflammatory. So do not be fooled by the term hits.

Certainly there are more stats that are important to having a good working site and I could go on for a long time but I have just illustrated the main ones you need to understand. I actually measure over 20 different stats so I can tell how well my site is working. To understand these you would need to monitor them on a day to day basis to get a clear picture. To illustrate everyone knows when they are sick but when a diagnosis is critical a doctor will do blood and urine work on you. So these other measures would require a professional to monitor and then diagnose the problem.

Website Basics

I wholeheartedly agree that there is a multitude of web design companies out there. And they all tout they have the internet guru of the century. When searching for one of them to design your web site there is a few basic questions you need to ask.

• Along with showing me a web site you have designed can you give me statistics on how well it is performing over the previous design? These stats would be sticky rating improvement, bounce rate improvement, visitor’s improvement, and page views improvement.
• What is the three click rule? The three click rule is any visitor can find, easily, any information in the web site by utilizing three clicks from the home page.
• What will be your strategy for getting the web site recognized and getting position on search engines?
• Which search engine will you optimize for and why? Yes sometimes Yahoo is your better search engine for your market rather than Google. This will be discussed more on the Search Engines page.

Websites are completely useless unless someone knows that it exist. Much like the old days when you needed a yellow page ad for consumers to get your phone number you have to get your website recognized and positioned on search engines before any significant amount of visitors and traffic starts occuring. Sure you are going put your web site address on your business cards and on your business vehicle plus any advertising you may subscribe to. This means Search Engine submission is critical for the survival of your business.

• Search Engine Submission

There are many services out there that will submit your website to search engines for a fee. Let me tell you this first “I have never paid a submission company to submit my websites to a search engine”! That is because I know how to do it. No I will not tell you how I do it; that secret stays with me. However I will do it for a small onetime fee. Fill out my contact form and I will send to you how to make the payment to me. Note: My fee will be considerably less than a submission company and I can usually get Google to position your site in three to fourteen days and five to twenty-one days with Yahoo.

Note: Google and Yahoo are the only Search Engines you are concerned with since between the two occurs 92% of the searches out there. All the other search engines out there for the most part get their information from these two.

After consulting with many who have paid these companies I have determined they do not help you at all and do hurt you in the long run. This is because they submit your sites home page too frequently, once a month, which irritates the search engine. You only need to have search engines see your site once. Let me say that again “You only need to have search engines see your site once”. Once they know you exist they will send their spiders back on a regular basis to keep updating your position.

Updating your site on a regular basis will cause the search engines to come back more frequently because it knows that the site changes on a regular basis. This too will help you get better position with them since it emphasizes to them you have a legitimate site.

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engines are constantly changing how they figure out who gets the top positions on an organic search (keyword phrase search). You can read a lot of information about SEO and for the most part it is very helpful. However there are two kinds of SEO experts: ones that are using their SEO skills for customers and ones that write about it. I know this because I read everything published about SEO but my real expertise comes from building and managing over 2000 web sites.

I will never write a book about SEO because of two things. (1) I make my living at SEO and (2) the internet and search engines are constantly changing so the information would not be very accurate by the time the book gets published.

I will however give you the basics. The main thing you need to be concerned with is what is called the Head Tag. This is where a web site designer will put a <title>, <meta name:  “Description” content=>, and a <meta name:  “Keywords”  content=>. Below is a partial head tag for this page.

<title>Websites That Work page for Small Business Genius Web Site By Alex Gilmore</title>
<meta name="Description" content=" Websites That Work page for Small Business Genius Web Site By Alex Gilmore">
<meta name="Keywords" content=" Websites, Work">

The head tag is just part of the equation since whatever is in the head tag needs to be in the text contained in the web page. I also do web site SEO consulting. For information on this go to my contact page and submit the form to me.

This should arm you with enough knowledge on web sites to help you get your monies worth. If you have any questions do not hesitate to ask me on the contact page.