Responsive Web Design With more devices come varying screen resolutions, definitions and orientations. New devices with new screen sizes are being developed every day, and each of these devices may be able to handle variations in size, functionality and even color. Some are in landscape, others in portrait, still others even completely square. As we know from the rising popularity of the iPhone, iPad and advanced smartphones, many new devices are able to switch from portrait to landscape at the user’s whim. How is one to design for these situations?   Increase your visibility! Online shopping comparison websites like Google Base (Froogle), the Bing Shopping Network and the Find.com, can bring thousands of visitors to your store…       Search Engine Optimization UnReal Web Marketing can improve your search engine placement to boost visibility and increase your competitive edge. Web Development UnReal Web Marketing has studied the evolution of website design in depth, and its team of designers are constantly monitoring factors that come into play. Ecommerce Stores Our ecommerce solution is trusted by thousands of successful business owners nationwide. Web-based administrator area and installation wizard make setup and maintenance of the shopping cart as easy as point and click. Social Media Marketing Unreal Web Marketing develops and leads powerful social media campaigns that will increase your organic traffic, brand awarness and lead generation. Our social media campaigns will bring you back to the map
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As advances in technology and the Internet have allowed websites to utilize a bevy of creative enhancements, website design developed into an art and a science. Advanced HTML and sophisticated software has thankfully rendered ugly frames a thing of the past, and layout possibilities are endless. However, there are still many elements to avoid that can cause visitors to wince, become frustrated, and ultimately leave your site in favor of another. As a website designer or someone seeking website design services, you may favor certain components. However, you must also realize that every website is different, and what may benefit one site may be detrimental to another. Below you’ll find a listing of five elements that should be used only if absolutely befitting of a website, or not at all. Text: Avoid using extra large or extra small text, and creative fonts that are hard to read. A website might have a great layout and creative graphics, but unnecessarily extra-large text can render that fancy layout displeasing. Worse still, it appears amateurish, unprofessional, and is the online equivalent of shouting. No one wants to be shouted at. Likewise, text that is too small will turn visitors away. Sometimes an amateur web designer might purposely lower the font size in order to fit more text within a certain area on a web page. A better option would be to have a copywriter examine the text to see if there is anything that could be deleted. Visitors who are confronted by a mass of tiny text will likely click away before reading a single word. Browsers today easily enable users to adjust the size of text as they see fit, so there really is no excuse for a website not to have text at a legible, reasonable size. There is also no excuse for text blocks written in an artistic, creative font, unless perhaps it is a website showcasing fonts. Creative fonts are best left for headlines or captions consisting of only a few words. They are meant to make a bold or stylized impression. If used throughout an entire sentence, or worse yet, several paragraphs, readers will become frustrated and give up. Pop-ups: Annoying and intrusive, they instantly create a negative impression. These days, there are several kinds of pop-ups webmasters and web designers may utilize, but most people agree: they are all annoying. The last thing a visitor to your website wants to see while viewing your content is a pop-up that suddenly obscures a portion of your page. Most browsers are now equipped with pop-up blockers, but they don’t block everything, and even when they do, it’s also annoying to receive a message that a pop-up has been blocked. Users prefer to have no interaction with pop-ups whatsoever, and a good website would be smart to avoid using them. Clutter: Information is great. Too much information is not. Visitors click on your site looking for information. They want to find that information quickly. If faced with a page showing dozens of links, multi-tiered drop-down menus, excessive paragraphs of text, pictures placed haphazardly, and virtually no discernable structure, they will leave. There is no need to compile as much information as possible onto a single web page. It’s understandable that a business might want to let visitors know about all aspects of a business, but certainly there is a better way to present it. Your home page should contain pertinent information about the company, the links leading to the expansions on what your company offers, sells, or promotes, and any additional links to other areas of the site, such as your company’s philosophy or contact information. Additionally, text should be laid out in a neat manner. One long block of text is frustrating to read. Separate paragraphs, and use bold captions to summarize content. Flash effects and animations: Flash is great, except when it delays access to information. Many templates are Flash based, and the allure of such creative bells and whistles may be hard to resist. Ultimately though, such effects can begin to wear thin on a visitors patience. Customers don’t care if a link vibrates, shakes, glows, rattles or dings when they hover the cursor over it or click on it. They just want to click-through to the next page. Additionally, unless your entire site is meant to be excessively creative, avoid using flash animations that last longer than a second or two, or need a few seconds to load before running. Delaying a visitor access to the information they seek will frustrate them. And don’t forget, many Internet users are still on dial-up, and flash animations will seriously hamper the performance of your website on computers with a slower internet connection. Large graphics: If you must use them, make sure they are optimized for the Web. Large images are fine if your website is showcasing art or photography; visitors expect it then. But otherwise, large graphics or images can look sloppy and worse yet, slow down a web page’s loading time if not optimized for the Web. Again, someone on dial-up is not going to wait 30 seconds for an image to load. The website design professionals at Active Web Group know how to design a creative, engaging website that functions efficiently and delivers a rewarding user experience. Active Web Group is Long Island’s leading full-service online marketing agency. Please view our web design portfolio, and be sure to follow AWG on Twitter for online marketing tips, news, and information.

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You can make a safe assumption that the reason I am visiting your online store is because I have an intention to buy something from you. All I need from you is to help me find what I am looking for and then take me from point A (product page) to point B (checkout). I am ready to fork over my money if you show me a clear path. So it is up to you to decide how easy or difficult you want my journey to be.

15 Conversion Hot Spots

1. Don’t Require Registration. Do not force me to register during the checkout process. If I click on checkout, that is usually a safe assumption that I have made a decision to purchase. Please get out of my way so you can take my money as quickly as possible before I change my mind. Don’t present me with unnecessary registration steps or other information that would slow me down. If you want to give me an option to register after the checkout is complete, sure, I will consider it.
2. Write for Humans. Remember that Google is not your target customer – I am. Don’t write your product descriptions or other content containing tons of SEO keywords with a sole purpose to please Google. Sure you need to focus on SEO but the product description has to make sense to customers first. At the end of the day, you might get a good ranking on Google but if consumers don’t understand the content on your site, you will not win.
3. Watch Out-of-stock Items. Don’t let me add something to the cart if later you will tell me that it is out of stock. If you already know that something is out of stock, can you please show that upfront on the product page so we don’t waste each other’s time?
4. Delete Empty Categories. Do you have categories that do not have any products online? Can you please disable those categories so that I don’t have to click those categories, just to find a “No Products Found” message?
5. Clean-up Your Home Page. Just because you have a lot of promotions and products on your site, you don’t have to show all of them on your home page. Please keep the home page clean and focus only on few key promotional or merchandise messages that truly tell a compelling story. If you have more than 100 links on your home page, you are trying too hard.
6. Establish an Arrival Date. It would be nice to know when I will receive an item – not just when you plan to ship it. You know my zip code – you know the delivery times with UPS and FedEx, you know your processing time – so can you please show me a date when I should expect to see the item at my door instead of having me do all guesswork in my head?
7. Don’t Over-recommend. If I add something to the shopping cart, please show me the cart before showing any other recommendations or offers that I might be interested in. Don’t slow me down by showing 10 recommendations before I get to my cart page. I have a short attention span and if I get overwhelmed with too much unnecessary information, I might just leave.
8. Be Careful with Email Addresses. If you take my email address during checkout, please make good use of it. For example, if would be nice of you to follow up few days later to check if the item arrived properly, and if I would be interested in writing a review for the item. I don’t mind writing an honest review – you just have to ask and remind me. Which is a good segue to the next point.
9. Don’t Change Negative Reviews. If I write a negative review about a product, please don’t go out of the way to moderate the review to put a positive spin to my content. Please remember that customer reviews are supposed to be unbiased and any attempt from your side to hide or suppress the negative reviews is a sure way to lose trust with your loyal customers.
10. Disclose Final Price Early-on. Don’t wait until the final step in the checkout to show me the final price including the coupon discounts, taxes and shipping costs. I would like to know that information at the shopping cart page so there are no surprises during the final step. If you need my zip code in the shopping cart page to calculate these costs, just ask me and I will be happy to provide that information to you. Which leads me to the next point.
11. Avoid Duplicate Entries. If I have told you anything about myself such as my zip code, please try to remember it. Don’t make me re-enter that information at the time of checkout. There is a good probability that I will not change that information, but just give me an option to change it later if I need to.
12. Help Customers Reach You. Please don’t try to hide your contact information just because you want to minimize the number of customer service calls. If you have an 800 number hidden somewhere on the site, please display it prominently. Customers need to know upfront that there is an easy way to contact you if something goes wrong with their order.
13. Don’t Ask for Too Much Info. When I am providing my credit card information, you really don’t have to ask me what type of credit card it is because you can figure it out from my credit card number. Just show me the credit card type for confirmation and I will let you know if there is a problem.
14. Simplify Security Checks. While you are thinking about that checkout experience, can you also do something about that Captcha? It is nice to know that you are concerned about our security and want to make sure that I am a human. But for the sake of humanity, please don’t make me decipher that 10-character Captcha image. Just try to keep it simple, if possible.
15. Turn Off Advertising. If you display any AdSense ads on your retail store, can you please turn those off? That sends a mixed message to me as a customer. If you are truly an online retailer, your focus should be on selling products, not making a few bucks from customers who accidentally click on those ads and end up somewhere else.

Some of the above points may seem obvious but it is amazing to see even large online retailers who end up building complex checkout processes, overlooking some of these points just because they have a complex business. If you think from customer’s perspective, they really don’t care about complexities in business – they are looking for a simple and intuitive shopping experience. David Montalvo is the CEO of UnReal Web Marketing LLC . He has achieved over 100,000 top 10 positions for Fortune 500 companies since 1997.

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Conversion Rate Exercise: Communicating Value

Our last conversion rate exercise asked you to perform several very simple exercises to answer the question for your visitor: why she should  do business with you. Did you come up with a good TweetVP and identify the 25 interesting things about your business? There are dozens of these exercises that you need to do to achieve the proper fitness level for maximum persuasionability. Today, I’d like you to focus on identifying the value that your visitor needs, while differentiating yourself from your competitors. This exercise works equally well for retail as it does for business to business products or services. First, how this works for retail: Pick a few of your products and find the same model (or something similar if you are selling non-branded items) on at least 2 of your competitors’ websites. Print off the product descriptions for each and as you go through your product description find the copy on your competitors’ descriptions that say approximately the same thing (even if it is in slightly different words). A Retail Example: As a working example, I’ll choose the digital camera Sony DSC-W80 (it’s a bit older now and fewer retailers have it in stock today). Take a look at the description for the Sony DSC-W80 from these retailers below: They all are pretty much identical in what they say. They may say it in different formats, some in sparse bullet points, others with the details a bit more fleshed out, but essentially they aren’t providing the visitor with any unique, new information from which to make a purchase decision. This is what Amazon figured out early is one of the advantages of having review information. If all you are going to provide is the manufacture information, you can not communicate anything of value differently to your visitors other than price (and competing on price alone is not the best strategy). Unless of course you’re in a commodity business, in which case the only thing to communicate that has any value is your differentiator. What would you bet that all the retailers above would strongly object to being described as being the commodity business — despite that by their action and inaction they are treating their product precisely like a undifferentiated commodity. So once you realize there is nothing very different in your description from your competitors,  how can you find out what is of value to your visitors? In Amazon’s case it is reviews. Let’s look at the summary of reviews for this product on Amazon using the Pluribo plugin for Firefox : Almost all the reviews talk about the speed of the camera as a key benefit. Now go back to all those retailers and notice how not one listed speed anywhere in the description. This is where all the customers are seeing “value” in this camera –  don’t you think your visitors who haven’t yet made that decision to buy might find “speed” as important? What you should be doing is incorporating copy that plays on speed as an important aspect of the product. If you don’t have the benefit of all these reviews, it is your responsibility if you want increased sales to find out these key benefits and communicate them. Someone is going to sell that camera to that customer — and if it’s isn’t you, then that’s your fault. B2B Product or Services Example On the B2B side, let’s look at online meeting or conferencing software as an example, since so many people are familiar with it. If most of what you are saying is that you can easily give presentations on both Mac and PCs, that people can meet online all across the globe, that you can use the product for training, sales or collaboration, is that seriously enough to differentiate you from all your other competitors? As Bruno might say , “Ich don’t think so.” Take a look at competitors who offer similar solutions and focus on the benefits that differentiate you. You still need to include some of these basics so that people know that you work on both the Mac and PC — because if all your competitors offer the same benefit it almost “converts” the benefit into a plain ol’ feature –  but you need to find out why your potential customers would choose you over your competitors. Keep in mind as you (and your competitors) evolve your online efforts, you need to evolve this approach as well.

David Montalvo is the CEO of UnReal Web Marketing LLC . He has achieved over 100,000 top 10 positions for Fortune 500 companies since 1997.

UnReal Website Marketing LLC. All Rights Reserved. – Long Island – New York – 631-891-8536

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Customer Segmentation and SEO — A Beautiful Couple SEO can be a very useful tactic to drive rankings within search engines and bring leads to your site. But people often stop there and assume the rest will take care of itself. When “the rest” means driving conversions or leads online, most people assume that user experience takes over as the primary catalyst once the visitor reaches the Web site. Although it’s fair to say that SEO involves only “bringing the horse to water,” content optimizers can also do a little to help ensure that the horse’s lead is pulled down gently (or yanked in some cases) to ensure that a drink is taken. Through developing a deeper understanding of your primary market(s), customer segmentation becomes an important SEO consideration when applied to two factors that can lead to a higher probability of end conversion: the meta description and optimized page content . Here are some best practices to consider when creating compelling descriptions, as well as mixing SEO-strong copy with the right amount of calls to action. Meta Descriptions — Not Just for SEO As a general rule that is accepted by most experienced SEOs these days, the meta description isn’t considered too important to the actual ranking ability of a page. The primary value of the meta description is that it will often be used by the search engines to provide the first introduction to the page’s content. Thus, our content writers optimize this tag with user experience and “call-to-action” primarily in mind. The search engines are most likely to use at least part of the meta description when it includes the keyword searched-for; thus, we still recommend that primary keyword phrases are included within the tag, because it becomes bolded within the search result. Having a compelling optimized meta description can lead to a higher CTR , and also serve as a pre-qualifier to increase the chance of a valuable visitor. It’s crucial to have a solid understanding of your target market(s) demographics to craft the most effective meta description. Additionally, when occupying a first page organic position for a keyword search, and also bidding on the term within paid search advertising ( PPC ), having dual first page positions can yield the ability to provide complimentary messaging. For example, an organic meta description can focus on product or service benefits, while the PPC listing creative can be more sales/conversion-oriented. On-Page Content — Think Optimized Plus Incentivized When analyzing the conversion performance of organic-ranked pages versus specialized paid search landing pages, the organic pages generally have a lower conversion rate. Over the past few years, as search engines have incorporated a quality score into the PPC listing placement rules, search marketers have begun to understand that deeper descriptive content can sometimes lead to a higher quality score for a landing page used for PPC. This has led sophisticated search marketers to begin to create more “hybridized” landing pages that could technically rank well organically. The reverse of this process is to consider the conversion funnel more seriously when creating organic pages, which can serve as “landing pages.” This is much like the old school “doorway pages” which became outdated with the addition of links into search engine algorithms. The best way to talk to your customers is to understand what they want. Usability testing should go beyond simple navigation questions to asking participants to rate the quality of the content on the page itself. Does it speak to their needs? If the answer is generally yes, and the content still maintains enough keywords and semantic equivalents within the copy, then you’re closer to the “perfect page.” In some cases, clients have at least two vastly different target markets. For example, someone may want to target both B2C and B2B online searchers: if you sell a product online, but also have a large client base of distributors, your message to each group can be quite different. In these instances, the actual search terms used to find the products may not include tip-off modifiers such as “bulk” or “reseller discounts.” To satisfy both markets, the copy has to be clearly compelling to both. In this specific example, it may be wise to create two subheadings on the page that is most likely to rank for the “root” term, and then lead visitors down the path that is most appropriate to them. Many marketers still try to apply a one-size-fits-all approach to SEO, assuming that once the visitor gets to the page, they’ll find the content that speaks most compellingly to them. But this is sometimes a click or more away. Instead, Web content owners should think about segmentation from the beginning to the end of each page. They should start to speak to multiple targets within the meta description, and ensure they close the loop for all possible segments by developing multi-purpose landing page content that provides clear and compelling paths to conversions. Frank Watson Fires Back Smart use of the meta description tag — given its placement in the search results — is definitely something any good search marketer should have in their marketing system. Finding the best relationship of pages and search terms and descriptions is more important now. We know the SEO basics that work well for improving rankings, but it’s time for advanced optimizers to be looking at conversion. Looking at the links clicked on a site’s pages is another area marketers need to start adding to the influence and method of working to improve conversions. Smart marketers see the move to CPA advertising as the next big way people will buy advertising. Conversions need to be the main focus of any marketing effort. Just like choices in advertising, marketers need to move to conversion — if they’re not already using it as the central force. You can be very effective with lower-ranked pages if they’re using strong meta description messages and grabbing the customers ready to be converted. David Montalvo is the CEO of UnReal Web Marketing LLC . He has achieved over 100,000 top 10 positions for Fortune 500 companies since 1997. UnReal Website Marketing LLC. All Rights Reserved. – Long Island – New York – 631-891-8536

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Given the challenging business environment, cost-efficiency is paramount. That is why Active Web Group, one of Long Island’s leading web development and web-based marketing firms, is offering our Pay-Per-Ranking(c) services to fellow HIA members.

Unlike Google’s Pay-Per-Click where you pay each and every time someone “clicks” on your search term, with Active Web Group’s Pay-Per-Ranking(c), you only pay when you arrive on Page One! You pay nothing at all until Page One results are achieved.

Active Web Group does all the preliminary work including consulting with you to assess your business priorities, composing a list of targeted search terms, and then building a microsite for each search term. Still…you pay nothing!

Then, on the first day of every month, you will receive a Google Report to track the progress of your Pay-Per-Ranking(c) campaign. If you do not see your business on Page One, you STILL pay nothing. If you do, you pay as little as $100. Simple, effective, and most important, affordable.

Active Web Group representatives will be exhibiting at the upcoming HIA Show on May 21st. To learn more about Pay-Per-Ranking, stop by our booth to sign up for a free, no obligation consultation with one of our IT specialists.

We look forward to seeing you at the show.

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