6 Ways To Improve The Success Of Your Website Insights from the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference, Hong Kong, 2010
Andrea Martins
Sara Lander was thrilled. Finally, her clothing design business's website was up and running and she was hosting a celebration party for 50 of her friends and potential clients to commemorate the grand opening of her online doors. After months of anguish and back-and-forth with her web designer, Sara was proud to be showcasing her gorgeous website at her Glamour Bar launch party and even more excited that finally the whole world was going to starting coming to see and buy her unique clothing designs. But were they...?
Sara has good reason to be excited. An online retail presence is indeed a fabulous opportunity for people across the globe to find your products and buy from you at all hours of the day or night. The question is, how easy is it to find Sara's new website and what can Sara do, to improve the chances of her website being a success?
Last month, I went to the first-ever Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in Hong Kong to find out...
Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference
The SES conference first started in the United States several years ago, but now runs also in Toronto, London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Shanghai, Tokyo and Hong Kong.
At this year's conference in Hong Kong, we enjoyed listening to 60+ speakers – many who had flown into Hong Kong just for the occasion. Some of their names include: |
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Avinash Kaushik (keynote speaker) – Author, Blogger and Analytics Evangelist, Google; |
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Tianfeng Feng (keynote speaker) – Chief Consultant for Search Engine Marketing, Baidu (the world's largest Chinese website); |
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Mel Carson – Community Manager, Microsoft Advertising; |
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Cindy Deng – Senior Director and Head of Performance Advertising, Asia Pacific, Yahoo; |
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Matt Harty – VP Fox Networks, Asia Pacific, Fox International Channels; |
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Brent Payne – SEO Director, Tribune; |
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Crispin Sheridan – Senior Director of Search Marketing Strategy, SAP; |
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Rosemary Lising – Head of Search, Asia Pacific, GroupM; |
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Jay Oatway – Independent Digital Journalist and Strategist; and |
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Debra Meibury – Master of Wine, Meibury Wine Media Ltd. |
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| To paint a clearer picture of what was discussed at the conference, here is a sample listing of some of the conference session topics: |
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SEO performance marketing; |
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Search and display advertising: The new dynamic duo; |
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The future of search and advertising; |
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Search and social integration; |
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Search and social goes mobile; |
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The business value of social media; |
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Blogging for business; |
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Analytics best practices; |
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Increasing ROI through B2B lead generation; and |
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Understanding how consumers in China access the Internet. |
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Each of the speakers had their own unique stories to tell and their own (sometimes very
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Basics
The Hong Kong conference was designed primarily for people who understood the basics of search engine optimisation (SEO) – for example, what to put in your website's page titles, URLs, meta-tags, heading tags, keyword text and so on. For this reason, this article does not focus on SEO basics, so if you would like to learn more about the basics of SEO, as a first step, I encourage you to consult Wikipedia 's SEO entry here.
Instead, I would like to share with you six of the extra things discussed at the conference, that we could all be doing to improve the success of our websites.
6 Ways To Improve The Success Of Your Website different) opinions about the best way to improve your chances of website success. |
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"Experiment or Die" said Avinash Kaushik. If you follow mainstream logic, most webmasters will tell you that the term "Sign Up" is the preferred term to use if you would like someone to click on a button or link and sign up to your site. However, Avinash showed us the case study of President Obama's campaign where, instead of doing only what they should do, his digital campaign managers tested three versions of his sign-up page. The most successful page? Not the one with President Obama's picture and the button saying "Sign-Up". Not the one with a video of President Obama making a motivational speech about the good of the country and the button saying "Sign-Up". But the most successful version of that campaign's home page was the one with the studio photo shot of President Obama with his family and the website button saying "Learn More". This is something that they would never have learned had they not been proactive and experimented with their website offering. |
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Check what you are talking about. One great way that Avinash showed us to check what we are talking about on our own sites is to use Wordle. You can either paste some text onto Wordle, or if your blog/web page has an Atom or RSS feed, you can paste the URL/web address instead. This simple process will then produce word clouds or tag clouds that show you which terms you are using the most. The question then is, are these the terms most relevant to the audience that you are trying to target? If not, should you be changing the terms that you use on your site to improve the chances of your audience finding you via the search engines? |
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The image above shows the results today from our Expat Women Blog's URL. Looking at the words, it seems to grab text from the most recent blog posts, not the blog overall, so it is not particularly accurate for assessing your whole blog/website, but it still seems to be a very useful tool in assessing even your most recent blog/website output.
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Different Countries, Different Websites. One message that came through loud and clear at the conference, through the presentations by multiple speakers well-versed in the Chinese market, was the vast differences between the online audience in China versus the online audience elsewhere. We quickly learned how incredibly foolish it is to ever think that merely translating a website into a different language would necessarily replicate the success of that website in a different country and culture. |
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The Chinese online audience, for example: are younger; spend more time on the Internet per user; are willing to pay less to use the Internet; prefer crowded home pages with hundreds of links and flashy advertisements; tend to revisit websites with very, very simple URLs; and many other differences.
The algorithm in the major Chinese search engines is also different (for example, to cater search results for the fact that a word like "I" has 28 different expressions and meanings). This means that the structure of a website designed for the Chinese market also needs to be different, if you want your website to be found by Chinese search engines and highly-frequented by Chinese users. |
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Focus Your Spend.
Crispin Sheridan (SAP) stressed that if you are going to pay money to appear at the top of paid search listings, pay only for those terms where you do not appear high naturally – for example, pay for words that your competitor beats you on, not words that you are already beating your competitor on. |
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Use Canonical Tags. Brent Payne (Tribune) talked to us about how, as of last year, website developers can now use canonical tags to tell search engines which pages are duplicates and should not be indexed (as search engines do not like duplicate content on sites) and also to tell search engines which way to direct page rankings. You do not need to understand canonical tags yourself, just make sure your website developer researches how to use canonical tags properly and starts using them to help improve your site, because apparently, canonical tags can help a lot! |
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Combine Your Strategies. Whilst the conference may have been designed to promote search as a primary strategy for getting your website found, it was clear that some of the presenters and attendees liked other strategies, such as display (namely, banner advertisements on other sites) as well. For example, Matt Harty (Fox International Channels) explained how display advertisements are more able than search engine results to create a "desire" for a product/service, and Cindy Deng (Yahoo) stressed how "search is finite, in terms of viewing time, but display can be infinite, if someone does not exit the page on which the banner is displayed". So do not think you have to stick to one strategy: mix and match the strategies that work for you. |
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Final Words
Give your website a check-up and think about what else you can do to improve it's success. For example, assess where you are at, learn from others, consult a web professional if you need to, test what you think is working and what might in fact not be working.
Then, as our keynoter Avinash Kaushik would say with a passionate but authoritative smile... when you find something that need fixing... "Fix it! Take action! Fix it!" |
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| Andrea Martins is the director and a co-founder of ExpatWomen.com. |
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| October 2010 |
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