Welcome back! Seen my website optimization services yet? I can help increase your website conversion rates and improve visitor engagement. Plus save $50 until Aug 31st.

So, you may have just got a sale or a lead from your website. Great job. So you simply move on to getting the next new set of visitors to your website in order to convert these too, right? Well, actually, there is a better thing to focus on to optimize your website further -  one of the easiest ways to generate more sales or leads is to actually build up a relationship with the last person you just converted. The best way to builld this relationship is by maximizing the usage of the emails you are already sending out to your new customers. And surprisingly few web companies do a good job email follow-up - leaving you with lots of potential to beat your competitors!

So for this next in my series of ‘Win at Website Optimization’, I have created a  list of great email tips that you should follow in order to increase the chances of someone ordering from or visiting your site again: Continue Reading »

I have used many web tools over the years, some not so good, some great, and some truly amazing.

And one of the more recent tools that I am fascinated with is Clicktale - its so good at helping gaining visitor insight, I still don’t understand how its possible. It records all your website visitors actions (including mouse movements) without them even knowing they are being recorded - enabling you to gain some amazing insights into your visitor behaviour!

And for a limited time, I am excited to announce they are offering up to 40% off their packages (which are already pretty cheap in the first place).

See Clicktale’s 40% off sale - and gain more visitor insight!

Here are some of the great insights Clicktale can reveal:

1. The real way users navigate your site - its often different than you think!
2. What parts of your forms visitors get stuck on - great for troubleshooting and improving shopping carts and signup forms.
3. Exactly how far people scroll down on your website - great for deciding how long to make your pages.
4. What links your visitors hover over, but don’t click on - allows you to optimize the call to actions on your links and get more clicks.

For the full scoop on the many ways Clicktale can help you, watch this:

ClickTale - Record, Watch, Understand - and now get 40% off!

I also love it because Clicktale is a much cheaper and quicker way of generating website user feedback than doing full blown website usability testing.

And yes, using the Clicktale links in this post will also help support my blog! So what have you got to lose? And trust me, you will be amazed when you see this in action on your very own website! And getting 40% off certainly helps too…

Being someone who optimizes and improves websites, I get countless questions all about what website optimization exactly is. Because of that, I have been gradually realizing that many, many people online still don’t know much about the powers of website optimization.

So, I thought I would write a quick ‘Website Optimization 101′ questions and answers session, sending you all back to school to learn more about this emerging  subject. So, pencils at the ready. Lets get started… Continue Reading »

Welcome to the first in  my new series of ‘Win at Website Optimization’ - these posts are designed to help you learn and understand major areas of websites that can be improved to increase conversion rates and visitor satisfaction rates (so they spend/engage more often, and come back more often).

This first in the series focuses on improving website navigation - without good navigation, your visitors will simply leave your site, go back to Google and click to your competitors who have better navigation. So, I present to you my top 10 ways you can improve your navigation to help satisfy your visitors needs and make sure they come back for more…

Continue Reading »

One of the great things that I love about Omniture is that they truly listen to their customers - each year at their ‘Summit‘ (which is going on later this week in Salt Lake City), at the end of the conference they have an open session where they take suggestions for product improvements from the audience, and then the audience rates which ones they should implement first. I think its essential to do that to improve products - listen to your customers rather than your product managers.

Unfortunately, I won’t be getting to attend the Summit this year, but still wanted to give my suggestions for improvement. So, here are my top 7 things that I think need improving with Omniture’s Site Catalyst web analytics tool, that I would be telling Omniture if I were there at the Summit… Continue Reading »

Dear Craig Newmark,

Like many others, I have been a huge fan of Craigslist for many years, and its helped me out many times - selling  furniture, finding a place to live, selling my camera, and more. But enough is enough. I just can’t take it anymore. I know you are trying to be a ‘non-profit’ organization, but your website has been pretty much untouched in 5 years. And unfortunately, its beginning to show its signs of aging. And its beginning to frustrate me (and probably many others).

There are SO many things that could be added to your site to help improve it - ever heard of web 2.0 for example? And you could be making more money too! So, being a website optimizer, I thought I would share with you my laundry list of things that I would LOVE to see improved on Craigslist.com… Continue Reading »

This post goes out to all those SEO firms that are bidding or ranking for the keywords ‘website optimization’ to parade their SEO services without knowing the true definition of  the growing and high impact art of website optimization (see image below - at least Omniture know proper website optimization services!)

This post is also meant to help educate all the web companies and people that still don’t yet know the difference between the two (or even know that website optimization exists!) - its important for them to know and take full advantage of!

 So without further ado, here is a list of reasons why its important to know the differences between website optimization and search engine optimization… Continue Reading »

If you haven’t already guessed, I just LOVE to optimize and improve websites! And I love to Twitter. So I thought, why not combine them both? Therefore, I’m proud to announce a new free service - website reviews via twitter! Yes, thats right, I will do a mini-review of anyone’s website in just 140 characters (which is the Twitter max limit per twit). How’s that for a good free service?

Here are the full details of my ‘Website Review Via Twitter’ Service:

- Send me a tweet on Twitter, with the name of the website you want reviewed. Or you can reply to this post with the website name too.

- I will give your website a quick look over and post a 140 character review of it on my Twitter account.

- This mini-review may take me up to 3 days - remember I have a full time job…

I can review any type of website too - ecommerce sites, blogs, media websites or support websites. I enjoy improving any kind of website!

To give you an idea, here are two example reviews that I recently did:

Also, I might modify this service slightly over time - I will see how things go. And for those of you that are looking for more comprehensive website improvement and review services, simply drop me a line and we can go over the details.

Oh and please do not confuse this service with search engine optimization! Website optimization is very different than search engine optimization - in fact, I am writing a post about later this week!

Anyway, I hope people find this new website review service valuable! And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter to get all my updates too.

Got Google Analytics installed on your website, or some other tracking tool? Getting some good website traffic reports? Good for you. But unfortunately these reports are only going to give you part of what you really need to improve your website - they only tell you ‘what’ your visitors did. Not ‘why’ they did it. Its very hard to optimize and improve websites based on just using these reports - what you really need is what your visitors think of your website, and how they would improve it - the true customer voice.
 
But what’s the best and easiest way of getting great feedback about your website? Its not as hard as you might think. I have put together a quick list of tools and sites you can use to gain this website feedback you need and start improving your website. And yes, you can even use Twitter to help you! Continue Reading »

Being Christmas and nearly the end of the year already (wow, 2008 flew by…) I thought I would round up some great blog posts from website optimization experts from around the web that will help you improve and optimize your website. There are some great minds out there that you can learn from - I know I have! So, here are my favorite website optimization blog posts of 2008…

1: The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for the Home Page
Too many homepages are poorly optimized, which is a terrible thing considering its often a visitors first impression of a website. Stoney deGeyter wrote a really great checklist full of ideas for helping to improving home page. A must read.

2: 25 Web Form Optimization Tips
Badly designed forms can often be a major cause of poorly optimized websites. Justin Palmer discusses some great tips to help reduce these problems.

3: Speed Up Your Website
Even thought high speed internet connections are now very common, many websites still suffer from slow performance issues - often driving your website visitors away. Alex Cohen discusses some great ways to help speed up your site.

4: Experiment or Die. Five Reasons and Awesome Testing Ideas
Testing plays such a key part in the optimization of any website. The analytics guru himself, Avinash Kaushik, gives some great advice on why you should test, and offers some great testing ideas.

5: Check Your Site Usability With These Fun Tools
Bad website usability plays a major factor in a badly optimized website. But just how can you find out how good your website usability is? Ann Smarty wrote a great revealing some cool tools to help you find how usable your website is…

6: 5 Rules for Quality Landing Page Design
Billy at Widemile discusses some more usual, great practices for helping to improve and optimize your landing pages. Very revealing!

7:  The Value of a Unique Value Proposition
If you offer no good reason for a visitor to use your website rather than a competitors,  then it really doesn’t matter how good your website is. Thats why its essential to develop a unique value proposition to help optimize your website.

8: 17 Rules for Successful Ecommerce Sites
There are many, many different ways to help improve ecommerce websites and therefore increase your sales revenue. SEOmoz reveals 17 great rules!

9: Losing Customers at the Register: 12 Checkout Blunders
A surefire way to lose a website visitor before making a sale is by having a poorly optimized shopping cart. Here are 12 common mistakes you should avoid.

10: 7 Ways to Measure and Improve Your Website
Alex Cohen gives some unique perspective on not just improving your website, but how to go about measuring your website most effectively.

So there we have it - after reading these 10 great blog posts from website experts, you should be in much better shape to start optimizing your website!

Oh, and Happy Christmas to everyone and have a truly optimized New Year!