Many of my website clients, after watching their website traffic statistics, are dismayed to see many people coming to their website leaving after only visiting one page (this is called the “bounce rate“).

They also often see visitors who may look around at several pages and then decide to leave without purchasing anything.

They even see people who were very close to a purchase. Visitors who after adding items to a shopping cart and starting the check out process, left before completing the purchase ( this is called “shopping cart abandonment“). While all of these visitor activities are normal and expected, what’s often surprising to my client is how often they happen.

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I recently had a good friend ask me to figure out why her friend’s website was not coming up in Google. After a quick review, the answer was obvious: the site had no text content, it was 100% flash. It also had zero backlinks. There was no reason why Google would rank this site, in fact, it wasn’t even in the Google index at all. It had a splash page, and played the same music on all pages. Which leads me to a familiar theme that keeps running in my head: who should you select to design your website: an Artist or an Engineer?

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My partner runs a dog training forum to provide a community space for her clients and others to share information about dog training. This morning, someone posted a fake item that I thought I’d share with you as an example of how NOT to build backlinks to your website and trust in your business.

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I’m a client of Aldebaran Web Design and Jill kindly invited me to post in her blog about my YellowPages.com pay-per-click advertising experience. This story is for you, the small business owner with a website, who might be contemplating hiring a company to do pay-per-click advertising for you. Please don’t do it! Please repeat after me: “I promise I will use Google AdWords exclusively, and consult Jill at Aldebaran Web Design for guidance if needed.�

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This video tutorial takes you through the basics looking at your website statistics using Web-Stat, my favorite website traffic tracking service. If you want to sign up for Web-Stat, click here, they have a 30 day free trial. Enjoy the video!

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Bounce Rate has become my very favorite metric to watch when looking at website traffic statistics. This article explains what bounce rate is, how it’s measured, what bounce rate statistics look like, and what the bounce rate is trying to tell you to do.
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I client recently asked me what is “social bookmarking”. You may have seen those little icons at the bottom of my blog posts and wondered what they heck they are for. Those are “social bookmarking” icons, and they make it easier for people who are members of social bookmarking services to bookmark my blog articles. I found this wonderful video that explains social bookmarking, in particular, “del.icio.us”, but it applies to many other services as well. Enjoy!

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I often encourage my small business clients to add WordPress blogs to their websites. WordPress blogs are a wonderful way to add relevant content that attracts visitors. Before visitors can find your WordPress blog article though, the search engines, like Google, need to crawl over your blog article and index it. How long does it take for search engines to become aware of a blog article, crawl it and index it? Read on…
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Perhaps you’ve heard about the latest craze on the internet: social bookmarking. I keep reading about how people are using one social bookmarking site called Stumbleupon.com to drive traffic to their websites, so I decided to run my own experiment on December 11, 2007. Amazing things happened.

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New websites often don’t rank well in Google’s organic search for several months and therefore to get website traffic, new website owners sometimes engage a pay-per-click campaign using well-known Google AdWords. Here are some tips and tricks I’ve learned from helping my own clients with their Google AdWords pay-per-click campaigns. I also recommend visiting the impressive Google AdWords online Learning Center - It’s got an incredible amount of information that teaches you how to totally control your AdWords campaign.

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I have a website client who wanted to know what the best internet yellow pages. So I did some research and here’s what I found:

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This is a short video of Matt Cutts who works for Google. He often publishes information that’s helpful to website designers. In this video, he explains the different parts of a “search snippet”, the results that people read and hopefully click on. I thought this would be helpful for clients who are trying to understand search engine optimization - understanding the different parts of the search results seemed like a logical first step. Here’s the video:

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Website clients often ask me, “how long will search engine optimization take” or “how long will it take me to have good Google rankings” ? There are many different opinions out there, and I’ll show you my answer, with real statistics from my own website.

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So you’ve just gotten a new website finished - maybe Aldebaran Web Design even developed it for you. If so, you’re in luck because it was designed to W3C industry standards and adheres to Google’s Quality Guidelines and is ready for the world!

So what should a new website owner do next?

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I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “if you build it, they will come”. It’s one matter, to get prospective customers to visit your website, it’s another matter to “convert” them to real paying customers. Tracking what your visitors do once they get to your website might sound impossible, but it’s not!

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You may have heard of “weblogs” or “blogs” for short and wondered what all the fuss was about. While blogs are a great way to express your opinions on a myriad of topics, they are also an excellent way to increase visitor traffic to your website. How do they do this?
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I’ve visited many websites that have “splash” or entry pages that come in many flavors: watching some animation, viewing a slideshow, or just a static graphic image. All of them prevent you from directly going to someone’s home page, and usually provide a link to “Skip Intro” to get to the home page in the event you don’t want to see the splash show. There are many articles out there written on whether splash or entry pages are a good idea or a bad idea, and I’d like to share with you an experiment one of my client’s ran recently to find out the answer.

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Beware of Pay-Per-Click Advertising on Citysearch!

After spending many months focusing on getting good organic search engine rankings for my own website, I decided to get some experience with pay-per-click advertising for two reasons. First I wanted to see if it would increase my own site’s traffic. Secondly, I wanted to be able to recommend a pay-per-click strategy for my clients. I decided to start with well known Citysearch. (Update: I now am confident in recommending Google AdWords for those clients who need pay-per-click traffic - but you must actively manage the ad campaign. If you want help managing a Google AdWords campaign, click here.)

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