WARNING: YOU HAVE 3 SECONDS!

That’s right! Research indicates that you have between 3 to 8 seconds to get a searcher to click on your listing or to make your visitor decide to stay on your website, rather than ‘click on’ and go elsewhere.

In a recent Conference Call, we discussed how you need to ensure the key elements of your website ‘grab’ your visitor and make them decide to stay, as well as eye-tracking studies that reveal the way that searchers view Search Engine Results Pages (’SERP’s). So here’s a bit more about how to grab your visitor and make him/her stay…

Eyeball It!

We are becoming ever more internet-savvy and impatient for results… Recent ‘heat map’ eye-tracking studies of search behaviour described by thinkeyetracking.com indicate that - in the last 3 years - we have gone from reading every line of the search results (the old ‘F Pattern’) to reading mostly just the results in the top left corner of the screen.

A study by eyetools.net similarly shows up the ‘Golden Triangle’, in the top left corner of the SERPs, dominantly viewed by searchers, with a brief glance at the top sponsored results at the top right.

And you should watch the video below, and view Google Blog page Eye-tracking studies: more than meets the eye, to understand just how fast the average person searches a web page to check whether it has relevant information!

And this applies to Landing and Sales pages too! As the eyetools study comments… “People don’t always realize that they can optimize their landing pages using eyetracking results to better convert their traffic into sales. If you’re paying for traffic, you can make a huge improvement in ROI by optimizing landing pages (30% boost in sales!)”.

Google Page 1

In the thinkeyetracking study, “87% respondents replied that they would modify the search terms or refine the search by category” if they couldn’t find their desired search result on the first page of Google, rather than go on to further pages.

So being in the top 5 to 10 listings on the fist page of Google results really does matter - whether for Organic or Search results!

Grab Your Visitor by the (Eye)balls!

Within 3 seconds of your visitor arriving on your website, the page needs to have convinced him/her clearly that they’ve (at last!) come to the right place!

Some of the key elements that will help convince your visitors stay on your website - and hence reduce your ‘Bounce Rate’ (people leaving from the page they arrived on) - include:

• Easy viewing of key information ‘above the fold’ in the ‘golden triangle’  - ie visible in top left corner of the first screen.
• A strong headline that includes the Keyword they used to reach your site
• A graphic that mirrors the Keyword
• Few distractions
• A clear reason to go on reading…

You can read more about background and strategies for this at the following websites

• Five Tips for Writing Effective Web Headlines
• 3 Match Types With The Same Quality Score

Don’t worry about the ‘Adwords’ angle etc – focus on what these tell us about how we need to grab visitors’ attention and lead them through our web pages by KEEPING THEIR INTEREST!

So the moral of the story is ‘think like your prospects’ - as they say, “walk a mile in your customer’s shoes!”

Grab your visitor by the eyeballs, take him/her by the hand and lead them briskly through your page sequence, feeding their excitement as you go, till you make them a ‘no-brainer’ offer they can’t refuse - what Mark Joyner calls the ‘Irresistible Offer’.

Happy copywriting!
John Thornely

The Secret Of Web Success…

Getting Traffic to your website is the secret to any successful on-line business, in just the same way as footfall is vital to a high-street business.

But traffic is no use unless your website converts them from ‘Suspects’ to ‘Prospects’ or from ‘Prostects’ to ‘Customers’. We’re talking Conversion here – it’s no good getting traffic to your website if it’s not visitor-friendly and doesn’t convert well!

For starters, your ‘landing page’ should immediately make clear to the arriving visitor the purpose of the site and what benefit the reader will get by looking through it.

One… Two… Three… You have 3 seconds to convince them. So put on your ‘Prospect’ hat and look at your website objectively!

Think of this: If you were expecting company at your home, there are certain things you might do in advance. You would make sure your home was clean, that there was fresh soap and clean hand towels in the bathroom, and you might prepare some snacks, or even an entire meal.

Preparing your website follows the same concept. You want to make sure that things are neat and tidy. Make sure that your navigation follows a logical sequence. Make sure that you have plenty of good content, and that everything is spelled correctly.

All Join In, Please!

You also want your visitors to be able to participate in your site – to take action. Look at each page, and determine what type of action your visitors can take. Do you have a forum or blog? Do you conduct polls or surveys? Do you have a subscribe box for your opt-in list on every page of your site?

Make absolutely sure that your website is ready for company! Also make sure that your pages lead your visitors to take the action that you want them to take, no matter what that may be.

That is the first and most essential step of traffic generation. If your site isn’t pleasing and welcoming, any traffic generation activities you do from this point on are wasted! Take the time, and put forth the effort to make your site as good as possible – and learn to look at it from your visitor’s point of view!

Your Invitation…

Once your website is ready for company, you are ready to start inviting that company. You do not need any special tools for traffic generation. What you need is your computer, an Internet connection, your mind, a willingness to do the work, and knowledge. That’s all it takes.

Action List

Make absolutely sure that your website is ready to receive traffic.

• Do you have an opt-in page?
  
• Do you have a subscribe box on every page of your site?
  
• Look at each page, and determine whether there is enough content, and if there is an action for your visitors to take on each page.
  
• Make sure that your site is optimized for the search engines.

SEO Tip

Make sure that you are using all of the best known Search Engine Optimization techniques, such as making sure that you have clean HTML code, that you’ve used your keyword effectively, that you have keyword rich text links and alt tags, and that the title of your website, in your HTML code, has your main keyword or phrase as well. Take some time to explore SEO techniques, so that you can draw natural search traffic as well.

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com

1. Search engines ‘like’ your website if it has good content. If it looks like spam, the search engines are smart enough to treat it like spam.

2. Don’t use duplicate content – all good search engines are smart enough to recognize this – but you can successfully use RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and other automatic feeds to build your website content – and yes, Armand Morin does this to build his 9,000 blogs!

3. Get quality websites to link to you. The search engines like this and take notice. Don’t bother using link exchanges or just sign other blogs with your links. While this won’t penalize you, it doesn’t help you at all.

4. Use the keywords you are targeting strategically on your pages in the headlines, sub-headers and body text. The search engines give weighting accordingly.

5. Use the keywords you are targeting within the < TITLE > tags, as the search engines give this a lot of weight.

6. On both external links to your website and any internal links, use ‘anchor text’ with keywords you are targeting in the links.

7. Similarly, if you have images that click to pages, include your targeted keywords in the ALT parameter within the < IMG > tag.

8. Generally, use common sense and stay away from trying to trick search engines (cloaking tricks for example). It can get your site penalized or even banned from the search engines.

9. If you don’t know how, or don’t want to spend your time doing search engine optimization, just search Google for SEO – there are many excellent resources out there.

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com

Single Page Sites are designed to sell one product or service — and to keep the visitor focused on this. They are usually ‘name squeeze’ pages or sales letters and their success is based on either selling a product or service to visitors or capturing their email addresses.

They may be designed to capture the name and email address of visitors (‘Name Squeeze’ pages) using a variety of offers, such as a free report or eBook, newsletter, eZine, CD, etc that entices the visitor to trade her/his details for the information provided by the site.

This is “permission-based” marketing where a relationship is established between you (the owner of the site) and the visitor on a voluntary basis. You then have permission to contact the visitor and develop a relationship that allows him/her to market to the ‘opt-in’ — this is most likely to succeed if the website owner provides good information and value.

In most cases, the visitor is unlikely to return if they didn’t find anything of interest for them the first time or the site owner simply bombards the ‘opt-in’ prospect with offers by email.

Multiple Page Sites will normally seek to do everything that single page sites do — sell products and services as well as harvest email addresses — but they also offer something Internet visitors crave and Search Engines love — information to solve their problems.

The Internet is now the #1 source of information and the quality and quantity of the CONTENT on your site is vital. A site which contains relevant content for your visitors and is regularly updated entices visitors to browse and return to your site for information.

Add an eZine and/or a Blog and maintain regular contact with your visitor to eventually convert them into customers and clients. If your site is interesting and valuable, visitors will come back again and again. Put a navigation bar on a multiple page site to make navigating around your site as easy as possible.

Both types of site work — so choose to suit!

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com