Extra! Extra!

The Gemological Institute of America (GIA), the world’s foremost authority on diamonds, colored stones, and pearls recently worked with Extractable to launch their new website www.GIA.edu. The new website was designed with a coherent navigational structure that promotes critical user paths.

The site design and information architecture should increase student applications and stone submissions while driving repeat visitors as they have a more positive online experience with the GIA brand.

If you need a stone evaluated, are interested in a jewelry career, need to buy a ring or learn more about a stone make sure to visit GIA online or visit them in Carlsbad.

One of the most important factors search engines use to rank your website for keyword phrases is analyzing the number of websites and how popular (or important) the websites that are linking to you are (note: I’ll refer to these type of links as “backward links” although other SEO professionals might call them inward links, insite links, etc).  Google even patented a link analysis algorithm called Page Rank (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank) which helps Google determine the ranking of your website on keyword phrases.

Hence, link building should be an integral (and ongoing effort) in any search engine optimization (SEO) program.  Where should you look to increase the number and quality of backward links to your website?

• Find industry related blogs; and blog!
• Find and participate in industry related websites and forums.
• Submit your website to free search engine directories like DMOZ.org.
• Build relationships with similar website owners and prove value in having them add a link to your website.

To elaborate on the last point a little more; in Google’s search engine find related websites by using the following search syntax “related:www.yourwebsitehere.com” and identify any websites that might benefit from adding a link to your website.   Don’t email or call the website owner blindly.  You will need to build a relationship and prove value to the other website owner that creating a link to your website is in their best interests. 

Show value!  For example, if your websites focuses on listing all the Happy Hour events in the city of San Francisco consider contacting websites like MustSeeSanFranisco.com or SFTravel.com.  Who on vacation in San Francisco doesn’t want to have a drink at a local Happy Hour event?

Lastly, don’t forget to “optimize” the hyperlink by including the primary keyword phrase in the actual link.  Example:  Instead of adding the following text to another website you are getting a link from, “Visit http://www.yourwebsitehere.com/ to see some social events including happy hours in the city” write “Visit our partner to find great happy hours events in San Francisco”

The direct benefits of getting backward links is A) your website will receive more site traffic from visitors clicking through on that backward link and B) search engines will give your website more “weight” when determining where your website should appear on related keyword searches.

Congratulations to Campus Federal Credit Union (CFCU) based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on the new website launch!

During the website redesign, Extractable worked with CFCU to make sure the new web experience on the CFCU website was as professional as larger financial institutions in the areas but also directly addressed the students, faculty and affiliates associated with Louisiana State University (LSU) that make up a large percentage of their member base.  The website was designed for ease of use and to enable members to have a positive online banking experience.

Before the website was launched benchmark figures were calculated in order to show a positive ROI on the project over the next several years.  Figures and base costs originating from the website were calculated for the member call center, average products/services per member and on the total membership of the credit union.

If you live in Louisiana or are affiliated with LSU please consider using CFCU as your primary financial institution because sometimes the “perfect bank for you, isn’t a bank at all”.

One of the most frustrating situations for any online marketer is not getting credit for sales that take place in the companies’ brick-and-mortar stores when the initial lead was generated online.  This often occurs when running a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign which attracts customers to the companies’ website (where they can purchase the product online) but who still choose to purchase the product at the companies brick-and-mortar store.

Here’s a trick on how to setup one of your Pay-Per-Click campaigns so you can get credit for the sale and receive the allocades of your coworkers you know you deserve!

Setup one of your Pay-Per-Campaigns so the ads only display in a major city where your company has most of their brick-and-mortar stores.

Example: If your company focuses on selling competitive priced jewelry, setup a PPC campaign to only display ads in New York (assuming that’s where a majority of your stores are located) and bid on keywords like “discount jewelry, jewelry distributor, diamond wholesaler”.

Next, write all your ads to lead with the city abbreviation “NY” (an obvious abbreviation for anyone living in New York) and then include some of the keyword phrases that you are bidding on (eg. NY Diamond Wholesaler).  Use the second line of the ad to explain what your company sells (eg. necklaces, bracelets, rings etc) and use the last line of the ad to “hook” your customer (eg. advertise free shipping and a coupon for 10-20% off any purchase).

Keeping best practices in mind, create a specific landing page for this campaign.  Include (and better yet bold) the keywords you are bidding on, pictures of your products, etc.  Most importantly include a 10-20% coupon that can be used online upon checkout or printed out for in-store purchases.

If you’re a PPC rockstar you’ll probably already realize that setting up a geographic targeted PPC campaign with targeted ads that include the city name and take customers to a custom landing pages will result in:

1.    Higher clickthrough rates (don’t be surprised if you get close to 10%)!
2.    Higher online conversions (who doesn’t like a good 10-20% discount on a product they are already interested in?)
3.    Higher total sales (since you’ll get credit for offline sales generated online).

Have you figured out how number 3 happens?

The coupon code!  By setting up your campaign this way, you’ll have customers print off and use the coupon in-store (in order to get the 10-20% discount)!  Since, this coupon is only on your PPC landing page you’ll get credit for the sale!

Congratulations to Credit Union ONE for launching an enhanced website which provides members additional features and benefits.

CU ONE approached Extractable to help design a website that would “provide exceptional value to CU ONE members by delivering outstanding products and services anytime, anywhere.”  By having the website function as a 24 hour online member center (by empowering members to do more of their financial tasks online and by organizing information on the website more clearly) the website is poised to be a success!

Some great CU ONE site features include:

• Secure loan and mortgage applications
• Ability to open and fund an account online
• Wide array of financial calculators
• Numerous online forms
• Detailed online map
• Numerous online forms
• Dynamic Frequently Asked Questions
• Print and send-to-friend features
• Online help demos
• Online chat support

In the next month CUONE will be working to implement RSS feeds on their website and dynamically pull in rates into specific webpages in order to ensure their members have the latest rate information possibly available.

If you live in Michigan (or surrounding states) and are looking for a stable financial institution that still feels “personal” please make sure to visit Credit Union ONE.

When developing a new website, most companies (or web development agencies if the project is not being done in-house) go through an exhaustive “Test Plan” or “QA Checklist” before the site is launched. This document tends to focus on checking for broken links, spell checking site copy, testing site features like search or online forms, verifying the presence of 301 redirects (on the old website), making sure the site is free of (CSS, JS, etc) errors, ensuring the navigation is consistent, checking cross browser compatibility and so on goes the list.

When of the areas that I believe that is most often overlooked when “QAing” a website before it is launched is verifying that the sites analytic and search engine strategies are in place.

So just because your QA team believes the website is free of errors and ready to be launched don’t forget to verify your analytic strategy has been addressed and you’ve taken the necessary steps to make it easy for search engines to find and understand your new website.

I am cheap.  No, I am not trying to ask my boss indirectly for a raise (although with gas prices and my long commute I wouldn’t mind one) its just that I have just been using the Internet since Al Gore invented it (jk) and am accustomed to getting cool services for free on the Internet - news, language translation tools, playing in a fantasy league,etc.   I have even found some great FREE search engine optimization tools (that can be used as plug-ins with Firefox) that I would highly recommend:

• SEO Quake - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3036
• Search Status - www.quirk.biz/searchstatus
• SEO Book - http://tools.seobook.com

The tools above capture and display a lot of valuable information that you will need when optimizing your website for search engines - Google Page Rank, backlinks, internal/external links, Alexa ranking, cached site pages, IP address, whois info, robots file, sitemap, compete rank, keyword density, etc.

The SEO Quake and Search Status tools can be used when viewing a particular website while SEO Book shows much of the same vital SEO information from search engine results pages.  Happy optimizing!

The Search Engine Strategies (SES) 2008 was one of the best conferences I have had the opportunity to attend recently. Some of the more interesting “take-aways” I got from the conference included:

• When marketing your brand online always tell a compelling story that will make customers connect with your brand.
• Optimize pages on your website for long tail keywords while keeping the visitors intent in mind. By figuring out what stage of the buying cycle they are in (researcher, comparison shopper, buyer, etc) you have a better chance of offering relevant information to the visitor and getting them to “convert” (eg. make a purchase).
• Always be A/B testing! Test the pay-per-click ads that bring traffic to your website and test the color of the button on your site that converts a visitor.
• Reduce home page bounce rates! How many visitors came to your website and found nothing on the home page that engaged them about the site’s content?
• There are ton of free Firefox plugins that can help you with SEO like: Bit.ly/gadocs, Bit.ly/gagoals, Bit.ly/gatabs, Bit.ly/gaiceberg
• Leveraging social media sites (examples: Twitter, facebook, delicious, digg, propeller, etc) can have a big impact on increasing organic search traffic if done right.
• There is tremendous growth opportunity in the search industry outside the US.
• Understand what your visitor wants to accomplish on your site. They don’t care if your are the company Best Buy they want to purchase the iPhone.
• The “Google Dance” which invited SES attendees to drink, eat and dance was a blast!

With hundreds of Content Management Systems (CMS) on the market, how does a company identify the best one for their website?
Over the last 5 years I have created a cheat sheet that has simplied this process to 3 main steps.

1.  Create a Requirements Checklist
Come up with a CMS requirements checklist.  What do you want the CMS be able to do?  Ask as many people that will be using the CMS system fill out this checklist, ranking each factor on a “must have”, “would like to have”, or “don’t care” scale. Ideally, have at least several employees (who will be using the CMS solution) from several different business departments complete the CMS checklist since requirements tend to verify by departments. 

Some example requirements might include:
• Permissions / Roles – Some users might have the ability to write or modify content while the authority to publish might be limited to only a few.
• Rollback / Versioning – Accidently removed the biography of the CEO?  How important is it to have a CMS system that will let you revert back to an older version of the webpage?
• WYSWIG – The benefit of having a CMS system is so non-technical users can update the website.  Make sure the CMS system has a friendly MS Word-like editor that enables non-technical users to quickly and easily update webpages .

Lastly, compile a master CMS requirement checklist in Excel where you can turn on the auto-filter feature to see any requirements all CMS users identified as “must haves”.

2.  Demo the CMS
Identify several CMS systems (within your budget) that meet a majority of your CMS stakeholder requirements.  Spending an hour on Google searching for phrases like “cms solutions compared” should help narrow down your list of CMS vendors. 

Verify with your IT team that the CMS solutions you have on your list could be implemented and maintained within your current infrastructure.  Example: If no-one at your company knows how to program in Java you might not want to proceed with evaluating any Java based CMS solutions.

Contact over the phone (and screen) several CMS vendors that are willing to come on-site and conduct a demo of their CMS solution.  Ask the vendor to demo basic functionality (authoring, publishing, etc) but make sure they also address all your “must haves” and “would like to have” the requirements that you identified in your companies CMS checklist.

3.  Gain Buy-in
Ask your CMS users (that attended the demos) which CMS they preferred; which CMS would they most be comfortable using?  At this point you should have a pretty good idea which CMS solution your team prefers. Now you just need your boss to write a check for it…

The other day I was reading about more negative news on the US economy when Jay Leno came on TV and began to ask people on the streets of Los Angeles (mostly young adults) basic financial/budgeting questions. Obviously, it was funny (yet shocking) how little some of the people he talked to new basic financial concepts.

More and more leading financial institutions are recognizing the importance of educating their members of the different financial products and/or services that are available to them. Why wait until a customer asks if you offer a 401K instead of educating the value of retirement services to them up front? I took a look at some of the leading financial websites (and some smaller ones) and its evident that many financial institutions are realizing the importance of actively educating their members on financial related topics. Here are some websites that caught my eye (and actually increased my financial knowledge along the way):

Financial Education
• CEFCU: https://www.cefcu.com/learning/financial-basics.php - The site has some great financial calculators, tools and articles.
• UFCU: https://www.ufcu.org/learning/index.php?loc=menu – Educational material for students, home buyers, vechice purchasers, etc.
• Visa Practical Money Skills: http://www.practicalmoneyskills.com/english/index.php - Financial literacy information targeted by user segments: School, Home and Work. The site has strong content with a personable voice and a nice range of features.
• Schwab Money & More: http://www.schwabmoneyandmore.com/toolsResources.php?nav=2#articles – Site has various financial calculators, articles and a glossary:
Life Events (mostly targeting Gen Y)
The following websites do a good job at presenting specific financial products/services based on major life events a member might go through.
• CEFCU: https://www.cefcu.com/learning/life-events.php
• Schwab: http://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/planning/life_events?cmsid=P-1897641&lvl1=planning&lvl2=life_events
• WAMU: http://www.wamu.com/personal/learn_plan/browsebylifestyle.asp
• 360 Degrees of Financial Literacy: http://www.360financialliteracy.org/Life+Stages/
• Schwab: http://www.schwabmoneywise.com/milestones/ - Directly targeted at young adults or for adults who want to talk about the management of money with their kids.