Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

On our previous post we mentioned the importance of having clear calls to action and letting your visitors know what you offer to improve your website.

The guys from Five Second Test created a nifty little tool that, using their own words, helps test those out:

A simple online usability test that helps you identify the most prominent elements of your user interfaces.

It’s a pretty straightforward tool:

1. You upload your screenshot
2. You pick your test type which includes a) testers will be asked the things they remember after viewing the image for five seconds and b) testers will be given five seconds to click areas on the image and then asked what they clicked.
3. You let random people test the image.

It’s a pretty good tool for user experience designers, as it provides valuable feedback before uploading the real thing and not to mention it’s completely free to use. There’s nothing to lose here, try it yourself!

Credit: Econsultancy

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Your opening a business and you want to develop and design a website for it to let the world know about your ideas. Where do you start?

We’ve just been contacted by a potential client that’s in this same situation the only difference is they have a website but it’s poorly done! Remember when you were in high school and developed your first website in HTML 1.0? You get the idea!

While I was reviewing said website and started writing down our recommendations to improve it, I thought this would make a good blog post.

Here are a few tips that can help you improve your website in ten minutes: 

• Who are you and what do you do? Tell me what your big idea is and why should I care. Have it present on every single page, in marketing speak this is called your ‘unique value proposition’.
• People don’t read, they scan. Prioritize. Not all text is important, help people know what is important to them by having headers in different colors, short paragraphs and bullet points.
• Most people don’t use menus for navigation. There needs to be linked text within the content that takes a visitor to another page.
• What do I do next? Need to have clear calls to action buttons or text after copy that tells the visitor what to do next.
• Make sure your website is optimized for search engines. Make sure to have keywords present in the copy, headers, page titles and description.
• Make your most important content stand out. What’s your big idea? Some of the most important content is hidden in interior pages, help people know what your most important content is.
• Make it easy for people to find you. Add local information in the home page like where you’re located, phone number, etc.
• Tell your story. Why are you doing this? Have an about page to tell your story. If this is your dream, let people know how excited you are.
• What’s this about? Every page in your website must have focus. For example if you sell birthday cakes of all kinds, make sure your internal page for ‘super hero cakes’ has only content related to that. In the short term this will help you rank better for that keyword.

Following these tips will point you in the right direction, in what other ways can you improve an existing website?

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The anchor text from external links is still considered the most important factor for SEO according to SEOmoz.

Yesterday SEOmoz published their Search Engine Ranking Factors report, released every two years, which surveys some of the top minds in SEO about the dominant factors that determine search engine rankings. Here’s a summary of the results. According to the SEOs surveyed by SEOmoz, the following are the most important ranking factors:

As most things, SEO doesn’t work in a vacuum. It’s important to understand that following each and every single point here will only get you so far as other factors come into play such as competition for your keywords and the amount of competition your up against.

With the rise of social media it’s not surprising to see most websites get the most of their traffic from social networks such as Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook where factors such as immediacy and freshness play a bigger role.

SEO has matured, the game has shifted to social media and the benefits are superior.

Key Takeaway: Your best bet is to optimize your website with these factors in mind but focus most of your marketing efforts in creating relationships, bonding with your audience and giving the best possible brand experience, social media makes this possible in ways SEO can’t.

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Are you overlooking social media because you think it’s just a fad that won’t outlive it’s hype?

Erik Qualman doesn’t think so! In an effort to promote his book “Socialnomics”, which is about the business of social media, he created the video below and makes a strong case that it’s not a fad! It’s a revolution to use his own words.

With some juicy stats to prove his point, this video is already going viral!

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Many people can’t quite get their head around this whole social media thing. So what is social media?

To help explain the full benefits of social media to their clients, Park Howell president of Park&Co and his team created the presentation above.

If this presentation isn’t simple enough to understand be sure to watch Marta Kagan’s What the F**K is social media presentation released last year which was an online hit.

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