Rich Page Ramblings

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Want to build better websites, and help optimize them? One of the best ways you can help do this is by gaining visitor insight - i.e. by surveying your website visitors to find out exactly what they are looking for.

Setting up simple survey questions like “please rate your experience from 1-5″ is also vital for obtaining and monitoring the ‘pulse’ for your website, and you can use the results in your weekly or monthly reports.

But what tools are available to create and run these surveys? There are very few places online to learn about these tools, and how they compare, so I thought I would create a mini-guide all about online survey tools, and which ones are best to use. So, lets get the ball rolling… Continue Reading »

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Bounce rate is usually one of the most powerful metrics to monitor for pages on your website. And when I mean bounce rate, I mean the percentage of people who arrive on a page, and leave immediately (or as Avinash Kaushik so nicely put it - ’they came to your website and puked’). Its a great way of identifying which pages to improve and optimize.

BUT if you take a closer look at how bounce rate is calculated, you will see it is actually sometimes misleading for certain types of pages. Yep. Even bounce rate can suck sometimes. Let me explain why… Continue Reading »

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I recently heard about a great conference just for bloggers - its called BlogWorld, and its just for bloggers to network and learn. Its coming up on Sept 20-21st (weekend conference!) and has a bloggers exhibit and seminars. Sounds like an ideal way to learn from the experts, and to network with fellow bloggers.

Anyway, I just signed up for it! It’s $300 for all access, but there is a coupon code from Mashable (great blog by the way) that gives you 20% off, which brings it down to $240 - well worth it! Just use the code ‘MASHVIP’ when you purchase your ticket.

So who else is going? I would love to meet fellow bloggers out there! Avinash Kaushik? Linda Bustos? Tim Ash? Manoj Jasra? Alex Cohen? Rand Fishkin? John Chow? Would love to meet you all in particular - I am big fans! Also, I will hopefully have finished my website optimization free ebook by then too. Let me know if you are coming, and I will buy you a drink there Viva Las Vegas!

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The Dark Knight has been setting astounding box office records lately, and it truly is a great movie. But I thought I would see how well their official website takes advantage of all this lavish praise and popularity, to see if it matches up to the high standards of the movie experience. So here is my next installment of my ‘Website Review and Rate’ series, on the official ’The Dark Knight ‘ movie website, TheDarkKnight.com. And lets just say, it was a VERY DISAPPOINTING experience… Continue Reading »

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Website optimization is one of the fastest growing, and in my opinion, one of the most impactful areas of online marketing. I have been a huge believer and fan of this field for quite some time now, so was very pleased to line up a major player in this field for my next web analytics guru interview: Tim Ash. Not only is he the author of an acclaimed new website optimization book (which I am currently reading) called ‘Landing Page Optimization‘, Tim is also the president of an exciting new website optimization company called SiteTuners. So without further ado, here is the interview with Tim: Continue Reading »

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For this next in my series of ‘Website Review and Rate’, I thought I would help one of the ‘littler guys’ out! I have a picked a smaller, up and coming website to review, who have an interesting idea. This website, called TypoBuddy.com, has a simple idea - they allow you to find misspellings on ebay auctions and on classifieds sites like CraigsList. But why would anyone care? Well, if no one is finding these items for sale because of typos when searched for, less people are bidding or showing interest, so its easier to get better deals on these because the sellers don’t have many interested buyers. So, how well do they execute this idea on their website? On with the review… Continue Reading »

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I find that SEO and SEM relate very closely to web analytics, more closely than a lot of people think, and felt like writing an article about this.

So, over the weekend, I decided to try something different - write an article for SEOmoz’s popular user created SEO related blog called YouMoz, to see if it would be accepted.

I wrote the article all about about how to stop wasting money on search engine marketing (SEM). And earlier today, I was happy to see they accepted it and published it on their site! Basically, I talk about pausing spending money on your website until you have done two things:

1: Optimize Your Website First

2:  Analyze the Bounce Rates of your Keywords

Go take a read of the full article here - hopefully you will find it intriguing and useful - I find that many website marketers often make the mistakes that I talk about, and you can learn how to rectify them. Oh, and lets hope they feature it on their main SEO blog - if they like it enough (and it gets enough thumbs up - hint, hint) they promote it to their full blog!

The article is also a taster of the new free ebook I am currently creating, that will reveal tips and tricks for how to optimize your website (for free/cheap), and fully elaborate on how stop wasting money on website marketing. I will be giving this ebook away from free on this blog, so keep your eyes peeled! 

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In Avinash Kaushik’s great web analytics book, he offers some web analytics kick start guides for different types of websites, including ecommerce sites, blogs and support sites. For some reason though, he doesn’t offer any specific advice for media related websites.

Given how popular these media sites currently are, and how I continue to work very closely with media related websites, I thought I would write a brief guide on how to kick start your media website analytics. And by media website, I mean a website whose primary purpose is to offer content to visitors (articles, videos etc), and is usually supported by advertising, or premium (paid) content. Examples of media websites are CNET and MarketingSherpa.com.

Ready? Lets get your website kickstarted… Continue Reading »

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Welcome to the second in my series of web analytics guru interviews. This time, I had the pleasure of interviewing a budding, very smart, passionate web analyst called Alex Cohen. I have been impressed with his way of thinking for quite some time now, so was delighted to get some insight into his web analytics thinking.

Alex Cohen is an interactive marketing generalist at Commerce360 (and blogs for them).  He does a bit of everything: web analytics, multivariate testing, paid search, SEO, and account management.  He also has his own optimization blog, Digital Alex. Anyway, on with the interview… Continue Reading »

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Being a pizza lover and an internet lover, I usually ordered pizza online through papajohns.com, who have a rather ordinary website, but I love their pizza. After it took an hour to get to me using papajohns.com recently, I thought I would give one of the other big chains a try. So, thought I would give dominos.com a try. And boy was I surprised with the whole experience! So much so that I thought it would be the perfect candidate for the next in my website review and rate series… Continue Reading »

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