Thank you for reading the bc blog–a place where you can find useful tips for marketing, website design, SEO and more! To all my valued clients, I say THANK YOU for the opportunity of creation and imagination. And to those who are looking for a web designer, please give bc designs a call. I promise you’ll be glad you did.

Do you know if anyone is visiting your website? If they are, do you know where your visitors are coming from, who referred them, or what browser they were using? Do you know what the top pages of your site are? Understanding website traffic and behavior is crucial to any goal-oriented business so that you know how to best meet the needs of your visitors and potential customers. There are many different traffic analyzers out there-some free and some not, but one of my favorites is StatCounter. Not only is it free, but its invisible, highly configurable and gives real-time detailed web stats. With Statcounter you can find out what keywords visitors use to find your site, your most popular pages, links used to reach your site, what countries your visitors come from, and how visitors navigate through your site. I have used StatCounter with many of my clients’ websites, and I love the flexibility and ease of use.

Another traffic analyzer to consider is the popular Google Analytics. (GA) This is also a free service that generates detailed statistics about your visitors. However, it’s a bit more robust than other analyzers in that a webmaster can optimize AdWords advertisements and marketing campaigns through the use of GA’s analysis. GA also offers bounce rate reports, (how many people come to your site and immediately leave) site overlays and visitor type contributions. (how much time returning visitors are spending on the site vs. new ones) Currently GA offers about 80 different reports, which can be overwhelming to some, but extremely beneficial to a high-powered business. If you really want to know Google Analytics inside and out, you can take a free online training lesson by clicking here.

And for those who are convinced that “free” stuff is never as good as paying for something, check out OpenTracker at http://www.opentracker.net. For about $19.95 per month, (plus a 4 week free trial) you can basically get the same info as Google Analytics with a couple of more bells and whistles and easy to read reports.

Regardless of who you use to analyze your traffic, web analytics can help you drive more traffic to your site, convert visitors into customers, and improve traffic flow. Although deciphering these stats can be time consuming and sometimes tedious, it has become a necessary component in website marketing.

Although RSS feeds have been around for awhile, they have become popular in recent months as technology continues to go mainstream and more and more people realize the benefits of keeping updated through RSS. RSS or Really Simple Syndication is an XML-based format for content distribution on the Internet. When a new article is posted or a change is made to your website, the RSS keeps track of the changes and delivers them to your customers. RSS feeds can be a great addition and there are several benefits of incorporating them into your website.

1. Brings more traffic to your site - A frequently updated feed can easily bring to massive amounts of traffic in a short time period. When a visitor sees the headline they want to read and click on the summary, this takes them to your site to read the rest of the news. RSS feeds offer convenience. If you make it easy for your site visitors to keep reading your quality content, you’re more likely to keep visitors coming for more. The more gateways or distribution channels you add, the more your content is going to be seen on a regular basis.

2. Its an easy way to update your audience - RSS feeds are a great way to effectively communicate your message without overwhelming your customers with a large amount of emails. If you send out a newsletter, with a link to your rss feed, you not only drive traffic to your site, but you are able to push out updates more frequently and more efficiently. Plus you can recycle old content that is still relevant which can save time in the long run.

3. Increases your exposure in niche markets - As you disseminate relevant information to your audience and control the flow and type of information they receive, you can start to define yourself as an industry expert and establish trust and reputation with current and prospective clients. This in turn, increases your exposure to more targeted visitors which can result in a higher sales conversion.

Ready to enter the RSS world? Numerous websites will help you build and publish an RSS feed for free or for a small fee. Check out these websites:

http://rss.icerocket.com/

http://www.erssbuilder.com/

http://www.ponyfish.com/

I would like to invite everyone to check out my new resource directory called bc linkup at: http://www.bclinkup.com. I am always coming across fabulous websites and wanted to create a venue where I could share that information with everyone. Only the websites I find original, useful and full of quality content is posted in this directory. If you have found a website that you are just dying to share, please click the “suggest a listing” button at the top of the home page. Enjoy browsing and I hope you find the information worthwhile.

We all know that one of the best ways to get more business is to advertise. But we also know the cost of advertising, especially on television, is outrageously expensive and for most, doesn’t fit in any kind of budget. But with the emergence of YouTube and Google Video, companies have found a new way to advertise their business - for free.

YouTube currently is accessed by over 130 million people. One video can create alot of interest by how many organic reviews the video gets as well as how many times it is forwarded on. Most people won’t forward on a straight advertisement. But if a business can be a little creative, having some entertainment value as well as being informative, that video can have the potential of driving hundreds or even thousands of new customers to a website–in just one day.

Take David Rachford, for example. David Rachford is a CPA and online marketer who posted an advertisement on YouTube which depicts a humorous scene where a CPA loses his mind and attacks his client. His message was : “Fire the bad clients and get better clients with Mr. Rachford’s marketing services.” The production cost him less than $400 to make. The result? He had a 42% jump in website traffic in the very first week.

Or how about David Frey? He increased traffic to the marriageadvice.com website by more than 60% in less than three weeks just by using an online video.

Internet video marketing presents a tremendous opportunity for small businesses by creating mini-ads, displaying testimonials, and showcasing products. YouTube even has the “YouTube Nonprofit Program” where non-profits not only can deliver their message with premium branding capabilities and top tier placement throughout YouTube, but there is also and option to drive fundraising through a Google Checkout “Donate” button.So get those creative juices flowing, get one leg up on the competition and start generating some low-cost buzz. Engaging your customers in a new and active way can only have positive results.

P.S. That Dove commercial you see generated 3 times the amount of traffic to their website than their Super Bowl commercial did the previous year.

Have you ever visited a website and noticed a small custom image next to the URL?  Favicons have become a popular way to provide visual cues so that visitors can identify your website.  Not only does it make your site look even more professional, but its a great additional way to brand your website and your business. 

A favicon is simply an image that the website designer tells the browser to display and can also be made available to users when bookmarking your site.  To create a favicon, a great online tool is: http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/  Upload the icon to the root directory of your webhosting server and then add two lines of code within the head section of your web pages:

<link rel=”icon” href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/images/favicon.ico“ type=”image/x-icon”>
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/images/favicon.ico“ type=”image/x-icon”>

Viola! Your favicon will appear in most current browsers.   Not only will your favicon add more interest but its just another way to add community awareness to your product.  Happy branding!

Ah one of the more popular debates in website development today: 1024 x 768 vs 800 x 600. Which resolution should your site be designed for? One local marketing firm told me recently that they “only design for 1024 x 768 because no one uses 800 x 600 anymore.” Its true that with the emergence of bigger monitors and an upcoming tech-savvy generation that more and more people are using a resolution that is 1024 x 768 and greater. However there is still a small but steady segment of the population who still use 800 x 600. In fact, if I look at the statistics for websites that I design, I consistently see for several that 10-20% of visitors are still using 800 x 600. That doesn’t sound like much, but if you have 10,000 visitors coming to your site every day, that’s a pretty significant minority.

I am still of the mindset that most sites should be designed for the lowest resolution that consumers are consistently using. However, demographics and the audience you are designing for also play a role. If you are designing a site that is usually only going to be viewed by internet savvy computer geeks, then chances are they are going to have the latest and greatest with huge monitors and high resolutions. However, if you are designing a website for the older generation, they probably have a lower resolution for a larger typeface. Although its impossible to be all things to all people, your ultimate goal should be to make your site usable for almost everyone; not usable for some and annoying to all the rest. 800 x 600 resolution is on the way to extinction, but until that time, don’t be afraid to give it some love. Your 800 x 600 diehards will be glad you did.

To make a website visually appealing, everyone wants to use photos to create interest, feature a product or give context to their copy.  For some, taking their own pictures is the most cost effective way, although most of the time, the photos fall short of looking professional.  Large businesses, on the other hand, will spend thousands of dollars for a custom photo shoot or spend the same amount of money purchasing photos from places like Getty Images or Corbis.  But what about small businesses who can’t afford to spend a ton of money on quality photos? Notice the images I used on bcdesignsit.com?  Would you believe they only cost a couple of dollars?  The concept of “$1 photo websites” has been on the scene now for a few years and they are starting to gain in popularity because of the quality and cost.  Photo services such as www.istock.com and www.dreamstime.com sell user contributed photos that cover a variety of topics, objects and people.  Yes, you have to sort through some lousy ones, but if you are patient, you can find some great photos for web and print and not break the bank.  Other websites such as Stock Xchng at http://www.sxc.hu/ and the Microsoft Clip Art Gallery have also beefed up their photo sections over the last couple of years and offer some really nice photos for free.  So don’t get discouraged–finding inexpensive images is no longer an angst-filled chore.  Check out some of these sites and happy browsing!

If I were to list one of my top five pet peeves in this universe, spammers would be close to the top of the list.  Not only are they aggressive, dishonest, and annoying, but they stay in business because enough people are dumb enough to click on one of their viagra ads.  One of the questions I get asked often is:  How are spammers getting my email address?  Obviously, if you are signing up for various newsletters, subscriptions, discussion groups and bulletin boards, more than likely, your email address will eventually end up on someone’s spam list.  But there are other ways spammers are easily getting that email that you may not be aware of.

WHOIS INFORMATION:  Have you ever done a whois search on your domain name?  Go to www.whois.net and type in your domain name and then click on  ”View Whois.”  You will see all the information you used to sign up that domain name, including your email address. This information is harvested by spammers to send spam. So what to do?  Use private registration when you register a domain name.  Every domain registar offers it and although this service will cost you about $8-$10 per year, believe me, its worth every penny. 

EMAIL ADDRESSES ON WEBSITE:  Spammers often use robots to collect email addresses from websites.  They scan your pages for mailto: links and — ta-da– easily grab your contact information and enter you into spammer hell.  One way to combat this is to have your web designer/developer use an email anti-spam encoder.  The one I like can be found at:  http://willmaster.com/possibilities/demo/aelgwase.html  This nifty online tool “is an encoding scheme designed to cloak email addresses from spammer’s email harvesting robots, yet be visible and readable for your site visitors.”  I love this website tool and have started using it with all my clients’ websites.  Its an effective method of making it difficult for those spamming robots.

As stated earlier, if you are posting your email on any bulletin board, usenet group, or even signing up for trip contests and the like, a spammer is going to get that email address.  If you feel the need to do any of the aforementioned, don’t use your personal email address-set up disposable email addresses.  Yahoo Mail has this added feature for an additional cost as well as other email services.  Use your personal email address just for friends and family and then use those disposable email addresses for all the other fun junk.  As soon as you get spam through a disposable address, you disable it, and all spam sent to the disposable address bounce back to the sender.  (isn’t “disposable” great?)  You can set up as many of these as you like and then your really important mail won’t be hard to find amongst the plethora of get rich schemes and porn advertisements.

Let’s face it:  spam is here to stay.  You may not be able to stop it, but by using some of these tips, you at least won’t be giving the spammer a free ride.

Although I am not a Search Engine Optimization expert (SEO) another question I get asked alot is:  “How can I be at the top of the search engines?”  SEO is a dynamic field which requires constant fine tuning of strategies to get a website at the top of any search engine.  Hiring an SEO expert can cost tens of thousands of dollars and many don’t realize that getting to the top and staying there is a time consuming endeavour.  But there are a couple of basic SEO tips you can easily incorporate into your website which, with time, can increase your website’s visibility. 

Keyword strategies.  Search engines like Google base their rankings on a variety of criteria including keyword selection and pay-per-click rankings.  A good resource to find out which keywords your competitors are using is www.spyfu.com  Spyfu will tell you which keywords other businesses are optimizing their sites for and is a useful tool for Google Adwords when trying to determine an estimated spend for individual keywords. Another good resource is Google Trends at http://google.com/trends.  Google Trends identifies the seasonality of keyword searches and their keyword tool will take a large list of keywords and give you 12 months of data and keyword occurences.  Knowing the most popular keywords in your industry to drive traffic to your website is crucial in staying ahead of the competition and getting business.    

Another important factor for search engines, and specifically Google, is link popularity.  Link Popularity is simply defined as the number of sites that are linking to your site and are an integral part in determining search engine ranking.  The number of links, the relevance of those links to the subject matter on your site and diversity of keywords contained on sites linking to you are all variables that Google analyzes when determining rankings.  If you have the time or the budget, creating a link building campaign is a great way to improve your search engine ranking.  Using reciprocal link exchanges, posting in blogs and forums and purchasing one-way back links can increase your traffic if done on a consistent basis.  To find out your website’s link popularity, go to www.linkpopularity.com.  This free tool will show you who is currently linking to your site and help you strategize on how to implement a link building campaign.  To learn more about keywords, links popularity and basic SEO, check out: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2167961.