AIMS Canada

Using Web Content Management Software to Drive Traffic to Your Web Site

Post by Michael Assad

Does your content management system have what it takes to capture and retain new Web traffic?

Download this article in PDF from the Agility Web site  

More is Better

Your Web site serves many purposes.  It helps to raise awareness about who your company is and what you do.  In many cases, your Web site is used to sell your company’s products and services.  In other cases, your Web site provides content that draws users to your site for educational or entertainment purposes.  Whatever your Web site is used for, the more traffic it gets, the better known you are going to be and the more products and services you are going to sell.
Increase your Web site Traffic

How do you increase your Web traffic?  That’s the million dollar question, but there are easy ways to create a measurable increase in traffic with a relatively small amount of effort.  First, you have to attract new visitors to your site.  Then, you have to give them a reason to come back for more.

How do you capture and retain your Web audience?  Read on.

Capture your Web Audience

If you want to generate more traffic to your site, people have to find it.  The three main ways people are going to get to your site are from entering the URL directly, linking to your site from another source or finding your site using a search engine.   The following sections discuss how to increase traffic from these sources.

Optimize your Content

No matter what you are trying to achieve with your Web site, it is critical that the content on each page is relevant to your audience.  Think about what search terms your audience are going to use and make sure that they are contained within the content of your site.  Make sure that your content is concise and consistent with your corporate message or sales strategy.  Don’t try to trick search crawlers by incorporating invisible text with the keywords that you want to get hits for – that will backfire and you will get poorer results!

Tag your Web Pages

‘Meta tags’ contain the information that search crawlers use to learn about your site.  While not visible to your human visitors, it is often the first thing that robot search crawlers will see when they visit your site.  It is important to utilize the ‘meta keywords’ and ‘meta descriptions’ on every page. Also, Meta tags should be relevant to the content on the specific page, not just to your company or products in general.

Set up Paid Search Ads

Paid search ads are a great way to supplement ‘organic’ search results.  You can set up accounts on all of the major search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN.  Paid search ads are displayed on top of or beside organic results.  When someone starts a search using the keywords you’ve listed, your ad will appear.  You only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad.  The more you pay the higher up or more prominent your ad will be on the search results page.  Paid search keywords can fit into any budget and are easy to adjust as your budget fluctuates.  Ads are easy to set up and maintain and results are easy to track.

Use Search Friendly Technologies

One of the first things to consider when building your Web site is what technologies you should use.  With the vast array of options, this can be a daunting decision, even for the most tech-savvy.  In general, you want a system that generates pages with ‘human readable’ URLs for every page and pages that aren’t bloated with unnecessary code.  The more streamlined the code is for your page, the more likely search crawlers are to index the entire page.  Be careful with Flash-only sites – you have to be clever if you want search engines to find them at all.

Syndicate your Content

Syndication using a standard called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is becoming a common way to open up new channels for Web content.  RSS helps drive traffic to your site from new sources.  Syndicate your product list, blog posts, show times or event dates and people can pick up your content using a variety of programs and devices.  Syndication also helps to retain your audience because once they are hooked up to your feed, they will automatically receive updates to your content.

Retain your Web Audience

Return visits can make up a significant proportion of your Web traffic.  Here are some ways to make sure that your Web audience comes back for more.

Make Your Users Feel at Home

If you want visitors to come back, make them feel comfortable on your site.  Make sure that you have a clean design with a consistent, usable navigation system.  It is very important to have an accessible search function that returns relevant results.  A sitemap is also a useful utility to help visitors get around.  Avoid the use of slow-loading flash elements or cheesy sounds.  The more comfortable users are on your site, the longer they will spend on it and the more likely they are to return.

Keep Your Content Fresh and Relevant

Each page of your site should have content that is consistent with your message or sales strategy.  Put new information up quickly and take stale content away.  Offer promotions to move products, or develop a column dedicated to relevant industry commentary.  To expand the reach of your content, syndicate it using RSS.

Target Your Content using Analytics

Monitoring the behaviour of your Web traffic can help you learn about your audience.  What is the percentage of new versus repeat visitors?  How are they getting to your site?  What pages are they leaving from?  How long are they staying?  These and many other questions can be easily answered with an analytics package.  There are a wide variety of tools available from the free Google Analytics to the more sophisticated commercial solutions from WebTrends, HitBox and others.  Analytics will help you determine where the “high priority content” is.  Once you know that, you can further tweak your content for your audience, place ads on the more highly trafficked pages and set up cross-sell or other product promotions to direct visitors to other areas of your site.

Allow Your Users to Contribute

The Web is all about community and sharing.  Giving your audience an opportunity to contribute to your site will help them feel part of your brand and will give them a compelling reason to revisit your site.  Add a “reviews” section to your product catalog; allow users to comment on news articles or blog postings; set up a rating system or a poll - the possibilities are endless!

Make Sure That Pages Load Quickly

The faster your pages load, the more pages your users are going to visit.   This means more exposure for your products and services, more ad sales, and a greater likelihood that users are going to come back and/or recommend your site to others.  Slow pages will turn away both human and search crawling visitors.  With so many options on the Web, visitors are rarely going to stick around to wait and see what you’re trying to say or sell.  It is also important to make sure that every link on your Web site works.  There is nothing more frustrating to your visitors than seeing a cryptic error page.

Web Content Management Systems

The Web content management system (CMS) industry emerged when CNET Networks spun out their internal publication system as Vignette in 1995.  Since then, thousands of systems have been developed for publishing content to a Web site, each with its own capabilities, strengths and weaknesses.  When choosing a CMS, it is very important to determine the current and future requirements of your business and your Web site.  A magazine Web site for a publishing company will have drastically different requirements than a corporate Web site for a law firm, for example.  Budget is also an important factor when choosing a CMS.  With options available at every price point, it is important that you don’t pay too much for features you don’t need, or too little for a system that doesn’t fulfill your requirements.  Lastly, it is important to consider the resources you have available to you.  Most CMS implementations will require multiple resources from marketing, IT and creative departments.  Depending on your available resources, you may choose to have your CMS implementation outsourced to one of many companies who specialize in this service.

For a full history and overview of Web content management systems, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system

Author info:

Michael Assad, Co-founder, CEO
Edentity Web Systems Inc.

The downside of widgets

Posted by Kathryn Lagden...

It seems every day brings a new widget. In typepad (the service we use for the AIMS blog) there are currently just over 100 widgets available.

Some of these widgets are incredibly helpful. They're relatively simple to implement (ie. no coding required) and add interesting content and/or functionality to the blog.

However, as a blog reader I seem to be bumping into some frustrating widgets these days. In particular, the ones that pull content from other sources and package it up to display nicely on your site. When it's implemented the content is fresh and the links/sources relevant.

As with many things, time wreaks its havoc and the links can quickly become outdated, broken, or just not relevant to your readership. For example, If the widget is pulling content from a source outside your site and that source stops publishing

One of the widgets we use at AIMS is the blogroll. It's a list of internet marketing blogs AIMS members might be interested in reading. The blogroll is managed by one of our expert volunteers, Katharine Came, and she puts up new blogs as she finds them or people send them to her (more details here). I'm not sure if we follow-up and make sure the list of blogs we're linking to are still publishing content that is relevant to our community. It's definitely something that should be on the to-do list!

Bloggers - do you review the content being pulled into widgets like blogrolls and revise regularly?

Are you a blog reader? What is your experience with widgets on the blogs you read?

One Burning Question With… Kathy Kohn (CCO & Partner - henderson bas).

Post by: Anne Marie Lorriman, henderson bas

Q. henderson bas has always had an interactive media department, but how has your motivation for providing media services changed over time?

A. We’ve always been fortunate to have extremely strong, intelligent resources that allowed us to provide media services.  The key word is ‘services’ – an offering that gave clients a one-stop shop for online ads and media. 

My ‘ah-ha’ for the power of media came from a Levi’s promotion where the media buy was instrumental in creating one of the most successful campaigns in the history of our company.  Carolyn Convey, our media guru at the time, knew the buy was the key to success, not just the creative – shifting our perception of media forever. 

Our motivation for providing media changed from offering a service to offering incremental results.  The media buy, actually the media strategy, is equally, if not more important than the creative.  Media units can appear on the same site, on the same page – but the media strategy that drives the placement and type of creative execution can significantly impact results.  And that’s what it’s all about.  Great creative that works.  Net net – media has become more than a service offering – it’s become the indisputable link between great creative and great creative that works. 

The Definitive List of French-Canadian Social Media

Post by SearchEnginePeople.com

You can’t spend more than a day in the world or search engine optimization without being exposed to the social media mantra: you have to get your site exposed on Digg, Slashdot, Fark, Netscape, etc.

Have to.

And why again? To gain fame or customers? No. To get links. Links, links, links. Tons of them.

With reciprocal linking schemes out of the door, playing the social media card has become the way to build links for a site.

When we put up a story, an image, a video, a tool, a whatever, with the strong hope, desire and intention that it will attract and build links, we call that content linkbait. Some find it a dirty word, some find it a misnouner. Others find that is a time tested rebranded technique.

Whatever you call it and however you may feel about it; it works.

Why target the French-Canadian market

If your business in any way operates in Canada, you’re working a market that contains within it a unique, virtually untapped, because unaddressed, market. French Canadians, most of which are located in the provence of Quebec.

5 million plus users. Among the top Internet users with one of the highest rates of growth for use from any location. Top penetration of broadband access — where broadband access is of course the key enabler for online buying.

In other words, a huge market that often doesn’t get communicated with in its own language on the Internet.

And of course, just like English is used in Canada and the United Kingdom, to name two places, so French also is used world wide. Not just in France, an Internet superpower in its own rights, but also in Belgium, many parts of Africa and even by more than 2 million in the USA, for example.

Targeting the affluent French-Canadian market also means targetting a worldwide community of Francophones.

Digg the Fuzz about Nuouz

Want to target the French-Canadian market? Post your linkbait on Digg, Reddit, Netscape — the whole shebang. Puzzled? I hope not. Francophones are not isolationists by nature; they too use those major English sites.

But yes, after that they also use pure french sites.

...

Read further: English version, French version

The Swiss Chalet website design keeps me coming back for more

Posted by Kathryn Lagden...

As an internet marketer I'm quick to criticize poor website design and frustrating usability. So I thought it only fair to sing the praises of a website that has consistently delighted me with its ease of use.

When I'm busy and the only thing left in the fridge is a box of baking soda and an empty jar of mustard, Swiss Chalet is my quick fix solution. My dietary choices might be questionable but it's so quick and easy to order online that I can't seem to stay out of the special dipping sauce. A walk through the process (my selections in bold)...

Step 1: 'Visit the Website' or 'Order Online'. (No menu surfing needed, after all I'm on first name terms with the driver)

Step 2: Select 'First time customer' or 'Returning Customer'. (and of course the returning customer log-in fields are pre-populated with my information)

Step 3: Welcome Kathryn. Is your delivery information correct? Links to change profile, add new profile, or click through to order

Step 4: Select 'Delivery' or 'Pick-up'

Step 5: Select 'Order Now' or 'Pre-order for later delivery'

Step 6: Select from the menu. There is a link for 'Place your last order on file'. I would prefer that it default to my last order and let me add/edit from there.

At first glance it seems like a lot of of clicks to get to your order. But each step is so simple and doesn't require any thought. I'm never guessing what is behind a click...it's all very obvious.

As a customer I much prefer a couple of extra clicks if it means the site can figure out what I'm looking for and take me quickly to the right page. Nothing worse than being hungry and faced with multiple ambiguous links on a page!

Care to share the website(s) that wows you with excellent usability?

Q&A with Andrew Goodman: Chair of the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Toronto

Posted by Kathryn Lagden...

I recently caught up with Andrew Goodman, a Toronto based search expert, who has taken on the role of Chair for the Search Engine Strategies conference being held in Toronto June 12-13. Andrew is President of Page Zero Media, editor of Traffick, and the author of 'Winning Results With Google Adwords'. And he also volunteers on AIMS search engine council.

KL: I know you've participated in the SES conference before, why did you decide to take on the role of chair this year?

AG: They asked. :) I've pretty much done everything but wash dishes over the past 20+ SES's and have had the opportunity to watch how Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman have weighed various priorities in attracting audiences and keeping things fresh. It's a great opportunity to step up and mingle more with both the audience and a wide variety of speakers, rather than sticking to just the panels I'm responsible for.

KL: What is the biggest change in this conference compared to previous years?

AG: The enormous, record-breaking attendance. :)

Not to be discounted are new sessions on social media, online PR, local search, and marketing to women online. On the basic front I've spruced up one of the introductory SEO sessions to address major faux-pas, myths, and scams.

Finally, this is the first year for which Yahoo and Microsoft actually have dedicated search ad programs for this country! So this news to many.

KL: Any tips for how attendees can prepare so they get maximum value out of attending the conference?

AG: Get some background. Read some bits of recent books or key blogs in the search marketing space. Remember that presentations will be available on the website.

Don't attend a "basic" looking session if you're advanced, and vice versa.

If attending a clinic session decide in advance if you're willing to have your website up onscreen, and volunteer it if so.

Finally, meet people and learn from them - or form a business relationship. Come a day early, or leave a day late, attend the social functions and sit with strangers at lunch. Enjoy a nice restaurant away from the hotel district, or take a ferry to Toronto Island, to celebrate another successful search marketing conference.

Trek Bikes: Interesting Community Initiative, Poorly Executed

Posted by Kathryn Lagden...

A few weeks ago a cycling friend sent me a link to the Trek website with a note saying 'You should do this!'. Intrigued I clicked on the link. As you can see in the screenshot below, I had one option.

I selected my country (Canada) and was then prompted to select a language (English). Looks like they're tailoring the content to me...Nice.

The offer was laid out on a simple, easy to read page.  Trek was going to select 5 women to share their riding experiences. In exchange they'd receive Trek bikes and gear.

From the website "If you're chosen as a winner, you'll be asked to share your riding experiences through online diary entries, videos and photos. You'll need to keep a daily log and provide weekly web updates".

As an avid cyclist, amateur photographer, regular blogger, and occasional video creator I was VERY interested in this offer.

You can imagine how disappointed I was to read point 5 in the requirements.

Must be a resident of the US? But I just told you I was Canadian and spoke English. Argh.

Trek scored big points with me for reaching out to the cycling community. Too bad it was executed so poorly on the website. Oh well, the weather is warming up and my Specialized bike is back from its Spring tune-up. It's time to hit the road.

AIMS Member Survey - Last Chance to Win the 30GB ipod

As you probably know we've been running our annual member survey for the last couple of weeks. This is your last chance to enter for a chance to win the 30GB ipod. The survey closes May 9th at midnight so don't delay!

Click on the link below to complete the survey:

http://survey2.delvinia.com/wix2/p58415109.aspx

Good luck! And thanks for your input, it really helps us plan AIMS events and activities.

New Poll: How Do You Read Blogs

One of the regular features on this blog is a poll...check it out over on the right hand column of this blog. (If you're reading this in a reader you'll need to click through to the blog to see the poll).

This poll asks about blog reading habits. It will be interesting to see how people follow their favourite blogs. Please add your voice and vote!

Previous polls are on the website.

Rocketfuel Productions: Award Winning Company Shares CNMA Experience

Posted by Kathryn Lagden...

As we lead up to the 2007 Canadian New Media Awards I decided to check in with one of the winners from last year. Ken Bautista, CEO and Executive Producer of Hotrocket Studios Inc. and Rocketfuel Productions answered the questions below...

KL: What category did you win at the 2006 CNMA awards?
KB: We won the "Most Promising New Company of the Year" award.

KL: Tell us about the type of work you do at Rocketfuel
KB: Rocketfuel Productions is a joint venture between two Edmonton  interactive companies, Hotrocket Studios and Redengine. We created  Rocketfuel specifically around an original interactive content  property called "C.I.E." The C.I.E. (Central Institute for  Exploration) follows the inner workings of a secret kids-only agency  dedicated to exploring the past, present and future. When four C.I.E.  Agents suddenly go missing, it's up to the audience to work together  to unravel a series of clues transmitted via mobile phones, blogs,  podcasts, and video. Blending technology, science, real-world  locations, interactive storytelling, and online community, C.I.E.  activates kids (ages 8-12) in an alternate reality experience like no  other.

KL: How has your company changed since winning most promising new company of the year?
KB: Since the CNMAs we've had a lot of attention and support gained  for our project and company. The project is currently being supported  through Telefilm Canada and the Virtual Museum of Canada. It was also  recently selected as 1 of only 2 projects in Canada to be supported  by the TELUS Innovation Fund announced in 2007. Recently, we pitched  the project and took the top prize at the international Pitch It!  competition at the 2007 KidScreen Summit in New York City in front of  a room of 1,200 execs from the children's entertainment industry. I  was also recently invited to speak on a panel of digital content  creators at the 2007 Digital Entertainment Leadership Forum in Hong  Kong, specifically talking about our project and company.

Congrats Ken! Sounds like a great initiative.

The 2007 CNMA awards will take place on May 28th. Tickets are available at the CNMA website.