October 05, 2006

Online Mistakes Are Costing You Big $

n SEO and SEM, time management is critical. Almost anybody in the industry will tell you that you can spend countless hours "tweaking" a website, looking at traffic analysis and conversion stats, and employing solid link building campaigns. These are all essential parts of a good SEO service but limits have to be placed on the amount of time you'll spend doing this for any one client.

Newer clients or those that are in obvious need for improvements can--and often do--have more time dedicated to each of the above, but you still have to budget your time effectively in order to prevent your profits from circling the drain. And this goes for every SEO, it doesn't matter how much you charge per hour!

The problem with time is that there are only a limited number of hours every day. I have the same 24 hours to use each day as Donald Trump and George W. Bush. When I go home after a full day of what feels like non-stop rushing to manage one client after another, I often think about how these guys must feel. They have vastly more responsibility than I, but still the same number of hours in which to get stuff done.

If I could have one wish, it would be to have more hours in the day and to require less sleep each night. OK, that's two wishes but I'd settle for either one of those--preferably the latter.

I often have clients ask me, "What more can we do to improve X". My response is almost always the same. There is plenty more that we can do, so long as you're willing to pay for it. Unfortunately, that ends the conversation for most clients. Heck, I don't mind providing a value added service every now and then; swapping images or giving advice on how to make a site more appealing to visitors. Conversions are an important part of the optimization process, but even time spent there has to be limited, unless the client has purchased an SEO package with an in depth conversion analysis service attached. Days can be spent analyzing data and improving a site for conversions and that kind of analysis simply can't come cheap.

When we put together our package pricing, we first figure the number of hours that are generally required each month to perform a task, ensuring that we’re able to create a successful end result. That’s our benchmark and we use it with the knowledge that clients will occasionally need more time spent each month on a task, and less time in other months.

Other things that have to be factored in is time spent that’s not the actual doing of the work, but communicating with the client or others about the project. Most don’t realize that this can add up to a significant amount of time, which is why many SEO firms limit the amount of “consultation time” that a client can receive each month. Pole Position Marketing doesn’t charge clients for consultation since we believe that this comes with the package. We do factor this into the pricing, realizing that some months there may be several hours spent consulting with a client, answering questions, or working out the details of the ongoing SEO campaign, while other months may be only a few. This is all taken into account.

When you consider that you have only 24 hours in a day, time management, regardless of your field, becomes one of the most important aspects of your professional and personal life. This may sound odd, but even when relaxing in my home; I’m monitoring my time. Why, because I want to make sure I get family time, chore time and even time for myself each day. Every bit of that is important for health, business and for your family as well.

There are many great books at there on time management, one easy read that comes to mind is the One Minute Manager, probably one of the most popular books on the subject of time management.

Finally, I would like to wrap this up with something that I believe came from John Maxwell, regarding the value of your time:

“To know the value of one year - Ask the student who failed their final.
To know the value of one month - ask the mother of a premature baby.
To know the value of one week - ask the editor of a weekly magazine.
To know the value of one day - ask the wager earner with six children.
To know the value of one hour - ask the lovers who are waiting to meet.
To know the value of one minute - ask the person who missed the plane.
To know the value of one second - ask the person who survived the accident.
To know the value of one millisecond - ask the Olympic silver medalist.





About This Author
Stoney deGeyter is president of Pole Position Marketing (www.PolePositionMarketing.com), a search optimization marketing firm providing SEO and website marketing services since 1998. Stoney is also a part-time instructor at Truckee Meadows Community College, as well as a moderator in the Small Business Ideas Forum. He is the author of his E-Marketing Performance eBook and contributes daily to the E-Marketing Performance (www.eMarketingPerformance.com) marketing blog.

October 04, 2006

How to Convince a Client They Don't Need a Splash Page

Following up yesterday's article, How to Convince a Client their Site Doesn't Need Music, I decided to write a similar one about splash pages. Splash pages are the pages that the user sees before they actually get to a website; typically, they're flash and offer some kind of introductory animation. The user clicks "Skip Intro" or "Enter Site" and from there is taken to the site. Splash pages can also exist between pages on the same site. Clients love to request them and these are the arguments I use to shoot them down:

Search engines will spider the splash page instead of the real content
Search engines look at the text on a page to determine what the page is all about. If your page is entirely in flash or some other kind of multimedia, chances are the search engines won't be able to spider any text on it. This will result in both you not ranking for the terms you want and the spidered page having a description next to it in the search results that says something like "Click to Enter." Examples include: accuplacer.com johnellis.com reachmediatv.com. A search at Google for "Click to Enter" or "Skip Intro" reveals many sites that have non-descriptive text associated with them due to their use of splash pages. These results aren't likely to get clicks.

Client: "So use a flash intro but stuff text in the meta keywords tag"
Search engines stopped caring about meta keyword tags a long time ago--it's all about what's actually on the page now.

Client: "So use a flash intro but hide keywords in the page"
Search engines can figure this out and you can get banned for it.
From Google's Webmaster Guidelines:

Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."


Search engines won't be able to spider beyond the splash page
If your splash page is done entirely in flash or with some other kind of multimedia plugin, the search engines might be unable to spider your content and your content will be absent from the search results.

Straight from the horses mouth
I found a great quote on MarketingSherpa from Jared Spool of User Interface
Engineering at Macromedia. When asked, "Flash intros, good or bad?", this was his response:

When we have clients who are thinking about Flash splash pages, we tell them to go to their local supermarket and bring a mime with them. Have the mime stand in front of the supermarket, and, as each customer tries to enter, do a little show that lasts two minutes, welcoming them to the supermarket and trying to explain the bread is on aisle six and milk is on sale today.



Most users immediately click "skip intro"
Pretty much everyone I've spoken to on the subject of splash pages always admits to immediately clicking "skip intro" before watching the animation they're presented with. Newfangled did some digging into their access logs and had this to say about their findings:

The number one reason for getting rid of our splash page was that it turned away at least 25% of our site visitors, sometimes more. This percentage has actually been researched and it turns out that at least 25% of site visitors will immediately leave a site as soon as they see a “loading” message for a Flash splash screen (even if there’s a “skip intro” link). Our access logs confirmed this for us and this over all the other reasons caused us to get rid of it. The opportunity to “prove our creativity” was not worth the loss of such a high percentage of visitors.


Slower connections will have to wait for the page to load
Dialup users are basically screwed (SCREWED!), especially if the skip button isn't readily available.

"Click to Enter" is redundant
By visiting your site they've already agreed to enter, why do they have to do it again? It'd be like opening the door to a store only to find another door that says, "haha, just kidding. Open this door to enter for reals this time."

Minimizing steps
You want to minimize the number of steps involved in reaching your offerings. Having an extra click from a splash page does not align with this idea.

Content from the splash page can probably work inside the home page
Most of the time the splash page can be trimmed down and worked into the homepage of the site. This is an effective compromise with the client because they get to keep whatever idea they were trying to promote but aren't necessarily forcing it on the user. It also wraps the content from the splash page in a uniform navigation (which is good usability).
A great example of this is Adobe's website.

Uniform navigation - For The Win
Most splash pages don't have the same primary navigation as the rest of the site; some even drastically change the design when you go from the splash page to the real site. This is confusing to users who respond best to navigation that is persistent. Splash pages also enforce the idea that they are visiting two separate sites.