December 25th is just around the corner and festive time is coming soon. Time will come when we will have to bid goodbye to 2014 and welcome 2015. With less than a month left before Christmas season arrives…
How about planning web development tasks and getting your online store or website ready for the New Year?
Stores that have both a physical and virtual presence are getting the maximum return, proving how a strong online presence is now a necessity. Building up a beautiful website alone does not solve the problem, you also need to actively maintain it in order to check your customer’s behavior statistics and manage it accordingly.
How To Improve Your Website For A Strong Online Presence?
Track Activities Using Google Analytics
Using Google Analytics will tell you the number of vistors you are receiving to your website and whic.h pages are gaining the most traffic. You can also avail of tools like Crazy Egg, where you can track down which parts of your website are receiving the maximum number of clicks by viewing your site’s demographic picture. This will help you to renovate your design or page contents to improve your website conversations.
Impose A Call To Action Using To-The-Point Message
There are certain things which you need to keep a check on your website. The first thing is that you need to use fonts of bigger size. If your customers are unable to get an instant picture about what your website is all about, then they would not take a second to check out from your site. Your message should be concise and to-the-point. Tell them what you have to offer? Will they get discounts for the season or a reward gift for making a purchase? Add a call to action like ‘Shop Now!’, which will instigate the customer to buy instantly.
Direct Your Target Audience Using An Effective Landing Page
A landing page is essential for a website to help your target audience know what to look for. If your website has a number of services to offer, then you can divide them under different categories and each of these categories can have their individual landing pages to display what products you can offer. Your visitor must not get confused once they click on a particular link to see what services you have to showcase. An effective landing page would guide your reader to view what they want to see. Also, your landing page must have a relevant message with the ability to call for an action from the customer’s side. Make sure your landing page heading matches with the text that browsers use to type down in the search engine. This will prove to be effective as they help to increase your organic search engine rank.
Update Your Website With Fresh Content
Customers will not come to your website to look at the same old content. They already know about it. Get some fresh content to lure your visitors to check out for what’s new. They are bound to come and look for new offers and updates. You need to provide your visitors with the power to share. In this way you would be able to improve their knowledge and also improve your
You can take a quick look into all these simple things right now and quickly fix them up so that, when holidays are over and you are back to business during the peak market hours from the month of January, your business profits does not slide down. Besides, here is a short market review to boost you up for the new year e-market scenario.
While the Asia-Pacific region would lead the E-market by 33.4%, North America would turn out to be occupying the second position by 31.7%, followed by Western Europe by 24.6%. So let’s hope that your market statistics will be in proper position to handle the peak hour market rush. Your New Year resolution with regard to web development , should be based on the recent report
M-Commerce To Dominate The E-Market
I was doing some research work, on how the internet market will turn up for my business and came to learn that mobile commerce would be dominating the market. You can expect M-commerce to dominate a large segment of the E-commerce (up to 24%) in 2015.
It seems evident, given the rapidity with which smart phone users are increasing. Also, big smart phone firms are trying to reach the consumer market of the developing countries, by coming up with cheap devices. The most recent attempt that I can remember of is Google’s Android One.
As retailers witness an increase in online purchase via smart phones and tablets, website owners need to give their first priority on maintaining a responsive website along with integration of suitable plug-ins.
3 Things You Can Do To Make Your Website Mobile Friendly
#1. Implementing An m.site Only For Mobile Users
Usually, with the help of an m.site address, a website can easily jump from the main URL to the version made for mobile devices in just one step. However, in reality this does not appear to be the case as most online sites are seen to redirect users 3.03 times, before websites can take them to the proper page.
You can avoid this problem by implementing an m.site, which would mobile optimize your website’s content. This minimizes the total time required by a user to access a content.
#2. Conduct Test On Your Site Using Different Devices
If you have recently improved the look of your website or set up a new one, make sure to check the site using more than one device. Also, analyze your site to see how it looks in different locations, through different browsers and different versions of internet connectivity (for example- 3G/4G/LTE). There are many tools available in the market, which you can use to check how your website functions but the best way to understand what your customers feel about your website, is by checking it through your smart phone manually.
The main purpose of setting up a mobile website, is to ensure that your viewers are able to access relevant contents, wherever they are. Performing these tests will help you to eradicate any cause of page loading disturbances. Give your customer the best user experience they might be looking for this 2015.
#3. Making Your Site Responsive Anytime, Anywhere
M commerce is here to stay for long. So make your website an omni-channel shopping platform. Today, customers are owners of a large number of devices such as smart phones and tablets. They may browse your site from one device but purchase a product from a different device. You need to rethink the idea of adapting your site for any device. With e-commerce expected to reach US $2 Trillion, worldwide by 2015, going responsive should be the basic need of web development this Christmas.
Watch Out For The Panda 4.1
I take it that you already have made some improvement of your website content, after the roll out of Panda 4.1.
Panda 4.1 is much stronger than 4.0 and will not spare your site, if your site supports low quality content. With 2015 round the corner and lack of any predictions as to when Google will again roll out another stronger version, why not refresh your content by adding some new information. As Panda 4.1 helps sites that have gone unrecognized for a long time, to regain their image. If your website have had trouble in 2014, its time to gear up for 2015. Here are some basic guides which you can follow to improve your site before Christmas begins.
3 Things You Can Do To Combat Panda’s 4.1 Radar
#1. Have A Rich Quality Content
Here, it means that your content must be rich as a whole, since this new version Panda can hold you under its radar for anything. That includes grammatical errors, plagiarism, poor framework of sentences, limited number of words ( the safest word limit would be to keep it between 500-600 words).
Before you publish your contents online, get it scrutinized by some high authority.
#2. Search Your Website For ‘Low Quality’ Sections
You can refer to the Site Explorer report from your Analytic, to keep a track on the average number of bounce rate, page views, time duration per visit and more. This way you can chalk out pages that contain low quality contents. If you have certain pages with no content at all, then use 301 redirect to permanently switch the URL of these pages to your site’s relevant page. Using 301 redirect notifies search engine crawlers regarding any change in your page URL. Do not think of removing the pages, as doing so would result in 404 error.
#3. Use Rel Canonical Tags For Your Website
If your website has a thin quality content but need to keep it, then use Rel Canonical tags to non index those pages. Rel Canonical tags are inserted into the HTML header. This helps search engine crawlers to distinguish the primary or original contents and the duplicate contents. Doing so, the search engine bots will only index and provide credit link to only the primary contents while surpassing the duplicate ones.
Use Innovative Strategies To Get Rid Of Lead Spams
If your website is still being affected by lead spams, then it is time you get ready to filter them out. While implementing the traditional CAPTCHA codes and spam filter plug-ins can still top your Christmas to-do-list, here are some other strategies which can turn out a bit different from the rest:
3 Ways To Protect Your Leads From Spams
#1. Encrypt Your Lead Form Using JavaScript and CSS
You can encrypt your forms using JavaScript or CSS. Spam bots cannot decipher a form in JavaScript. On the other hand, using CSS for your lead forms will hide some additional fields. Spammers invading your form, will read it in HTML and fill out those hidden fields. The forms that will have those filled up areas, will get automatically deleted. This is great and you don’t need to worry. Your human viewers would be able to identify those fields and leave them out while filling up the form. However, spam bots are blind to CSS and would be outsmarted, when they step into those hidden traps.
#2. Provide Your Customers With An OTP
You can hand out OTP (One Time Password) to those who wants to fill up your form. Once the customers types down the password, they could access your lead form. In this way, you can not only avoid spams but also connect with only those who are interested to convert into clients.
Another thing, which you can do is ask viewers to sign in using their individual Facebook or Twitter accounts. For twitter account sign ups you can track visitors using twitter analytics later on. This way, you would be assured that your customer’s identity is real and already verified by a third party.
#3. Include A Check Box To Ensure Your Customer Is Human
Implementing check boxes will keep your form away from the reach of spammers. You can ask a simple question like whether your applicant is human or not and ask them to click on the Yes/No button to answer.
Split Test To Maintain Your Website’s Traffic Increase
Christmas is a time when everyone is out on the streets to enjoy with family and friends. A quick A/B split test can get you assured that your website’s traffic would not drop down when you are not around.
3 Ways A Split Test Can Improve Your Website
#1. Decide Upon A Relevant Hypothesis
Now is not the time to split test your entire website. I am sure, you have done that throughout 2014. Its time to check whether a particular button color or your new web design for the coming season is safe to keep or needs improvement. Perhaps you feel the little ‘sign-in ’ red button, if turned green, would instill a ‘GO ’ signal in the reader’s mind. This is hypothesis. You feel that changing a particular element would generate better outcome. Having a hypothesis can make your things work faster and help you to test only what is necessary.
#2. Consult A ‘ Split Test ’ Consultant For Proper Traffic Segmentation
This helps you to reach faster to your target audience. Your website is visited by different people for different reasons. Some come in search of job vacancy while some come in search of what service you are offering. You can easily segment your traffic, so that your customers can reach to their destination in just one step instead of wandering around.
#3. Analyze Your Test Using A Holistic Approach
You can start testing right now to look for a bigger picture behind any traffic change. If you have added two or three fields, which have reduced your traffic, probably it was not because it was not because it took them more time to fill up the form. It could be that they are hesitant to share so much information with you. You need to analyze a customer’s psychology from different angles, before coming to a particular conclusion. Cross check your data by replacing the existing fields with these newly added fields. Perhaps you would get a different picture.
There are more ways to improve your website ranking before you sign off for a cool December holiday. As we head on to the new year, website owners aim to find out what e commerce trends can elevate online customer traffic. Before you too step on to follow the new trends, let’s get back to fix the basics and then start on with something new.
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year in advance!
