Give Away Information to Get More Customers

This philosophy is nothing new in the world of website marketing, but I would like to give you a specific example to show you how to put this into practice.

One of my recent web clients, Kevyn Aucoin Beauty (KAB), is a high-end cosmetics company located in New York City.  Started by the late Kevyn Aucoin, this company continues to sell his makeup, accessories and books.  The company successfully capitalizes on their large customer base by offering free makeup lessons taken directly from one of Kevyn's books.

Smokey Eyes is the most recent example.  This lesson plan shows the visitor how to apply the makeup step-by-step to achieve the desired look.  Included in the lesson are links to the makeup, accessories, and featured book for purchase from their on-line store.

This free makeup lesson strategy works well for KAB as four of the top ten visited pages on their website are the lesson plans.  KAB's customers are continually looking for new and different looks using the company's products.

Take a look at the products or services that you offer for sale.  Is there anything that you can give away to entice your customers buy?

Google's Jagger Update and What it Means For Your Website

For those of you who may not be aware, Google has recently completed a three phase algorithm change called Jagger.  This has resulted in some pages either dropping in the rankings or disappearing completely.

Google, as well as other Search Engines, are in a constant battle to provide their searching audience the most relevant results for their particular search keyword phrases.  Identifying and cleaning up highly ranked "spammy" results is always paramount to the SEs.

Some of the more recent issues Google had to deal with were:

• Reciprocal linking abuse
• CSS spamming techniques
• Blog comment spam

Google brought some of these problems on themselves when it was revealed that incoming links to your website increased the rankings.  It didn't take long for people to devise ways to create thousands of incoming links to artificially inflate their link popularity.

What Does This Mean To You

To achieve high rankings for your site you really need to do only a few things:

1. Create compelling content that your audience needs.
2. Strategically place your main keyword phrases in your web pages.
3. Obtain links from other websites that are thematically related to you.

If you make your website a valuable resource to your target audience, then you will be rewarded in the SE rankings as well.  It's not going to be fast and easy, but you will be insulated from dramatic drops or exclusions from the SEs when they decide to update their algorithms.

If you have been using techniques that are meant to drive up your SE rankings then you'll eventually be caught, if not already.

What If You've Been Affected By Jagger

If you have been a victim of the Jagger update, then you'll have to undo whatever the offending practice you were using and then apply for reinclusion into Google.  Here is a great blog post by Matt Cutts, Google software engineer, on how to request for reinclusion.

Customizing 404 Error Pages

In the previous post I spoke about how to find out if you have any bad links on your website.  Today I want to discuss customizing your error pages.

Unless someone has already configured a custom 404 error page (document not found), the visitor's browser will display a screen that looks something like this:

This will definitely halt your visitor in their tracks and will probably scare them away to the next site.  The good news is that you can customize these error pages and direct the visitor back into your site.

When customizing your error page, you should include the following information:

• A simple explanation of what has happened
• Some basic navigation like a Home or Site Map link
• A link to the Contact Us page

For those of you out there who are technically inclined, you can also add a search box for the visitor to use.

The actual mechanics of creating these custom pages is not too difficult, but slightly outside the scope of this blog.  The details depend on the type of web server you are using and if your host has provided an easy method to create these pages.  So your starting point should be the control panel of your hosting account.  If you strike out there, send an e-mail to your hosting company and ask them for the instructions for their particular web server.

Lastly, for some additional information on his topic, please check out www.404-error-page.com/

Removing Bad Links From Your Website

If you make frequent changes to your website it is a very good idea to take a look at look at your website's statistics reports to see if there are any errors you've overlooked.  The most common error you'll see are the 404 or Document Not Found errors.  You will see this error if you click on a link and the requested page has either been removed or renamed.

If you have access to a really good stats program like AWStats, then you will also see bad links on other websites that direct traffic to you.  It is frustrating for a surfer to click on a link expecting some good information only to be disappointed with a Page Not Found error.  Not to mention that you could be losing out on a potential customer.

Once you identify the bad links, then it is fairly easy for you to remove or correct the link.  If you have a webmaster who handles this for you, then ask them to run the reports and fix any bad links that are present.

You don't have to wait until someone comes across your bad links first.  There are a number of free tools available that will check all of your links and generate a report for you.  Go to your favorite Search Engine and search for "free website link checking programs" or something similar.

Be aware that these link checking programs, or your own error reports, will not indicate that a problem exists if a link takes your visitor to a page that although exists, is not where you really want to take the visitor.  So it is always a good idea to run through your website checking links or having someone else test your web pages.

In my next post, I'll write about customizing your error pages so that if this situation does happen, you'll have a chance to save the visitor's experience.