6 Keys to Building a Successful User Experience

I have talked about user’s experience in one of my articles and I explained what the benefit of adopting UX when start creating the website for your business! In this article I would like to take about two things that can build or break the user’s experience and has negatively or positively impact to your business: copy and design. They are both essential and equally responsible for guiding the user through the steps of how to use your product. Great writing can enhance the user experience, just as subpar instructions can hamper your otherwise wonderful UI.

Here are 6 keys that leads to a great user experience:

1. Present it in simplicity

No matter what the technology that your product has or how sophisticated its features, always think of how your user think and try break things down to the lowest common denominator. Use simple language so that the average person (without technical training) can understand. Don’t use advance technical language to present your product and then trying to explain what it means–the more technical and specific you get, the less likely the reader will stick with you. Communicate the absolute minimum information your reader needs to understand the major components of the product and how to use it.

2. Nab your instructions

If your website offers online services or it is an application, dont go with repetitive instructions as it is come up with counterproductive. Don't repeat information on the tenth step in case they didn't read it in the first. Instructions are like training wheels on a bike: the goal is not to need them after some time. The design of the product should allow it to become self-explanatory after some initial instruction. 

3. Become one with the product

UX writing differs from content writing. Content writing is about creating a voice that readers can relate to. UX writing is about creating the best possible way for someone to understand how to use and enjoy a product or the services in your website. UX writing should reflect the product and its features, not the writer’s vision of the product or their opinion. For example, imagine teaching someone to left-click on the tools tab. You may say, “Easily left-click on the tools tab for an awesome experience.” Or you could simplify and say, “Left-click on the tools tab.” The less convoluted the instructions, the easier the action seems.

4. Start your FAQs as a user

Predict the questions users might ask and address them in your descriptions. Product testing, user comments and experiences will all help you identify any potentially confusing stages in using your services on your website. Integrate these questions into your instructions. For example, if people are used to study in traditional classroom, but your business service is to offer online learning community, point that out as one of its features before you have to respond to 50 messages asking how they can reach you and come by the institution or attend the classes. You want to be sure to give the user a heads up about the way your product may be different from what they’re used to. Anticipate questions and seed within your instructions to avoid future headaches.

5. Make sure that your content is being read

We can spend a lot of time to produce great content, no matter how efficient your workflow is. As the old saying goes, time equals money, and it only makes sense to get as much out of your content as you can. Good and useful content will yield vastly different results from your users. As we know it is hardly to anyone to start at the top of the page and read every single word until get to the bottom. We’re going to scan to find the essential information, so make your page scan-friendly. Provide users a visual that is easy on the eyes, no small print or hard to read fonts. Make sure the color of the text is compatible with the color of the background so that it doesn't strain the eye.

6. Use “You” secret’s word

Finally, using “you” instead of “we” is an easy technique to create intimacy between you and the user. Simply put, saying “you” makes the reader feel you’re talking to them. Using “we” on the other hand, makes them feel like they’re listening to you talk about yourself. Ex: “You’ll be able to organize your notes and ideas more efficiently with Evernote.” vs. “We at Evernote have created a revolutionary way to organize notes and ideas.” The first one tells the user about how they can benefit from your product. The second one tells them how clever you and your team are. Which one will get them to sign up? Exactly.

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Nobody Would Want To Pay Twice! My Advice For Websites Revenue

There are a lot of articles on the internet right now that showcase predictions for the next year and the trends that will dominate web marketing.  I would say websites have increasingly become the primary channel for sales of goods and services. Many small and medium enterprises (SME) rely heavily on their websites for their revenue. However, it is surprising how little attention is paid to analysis and measurement of this vital sales channel.

In my previous articles, I have discussed the role of content and keywords as a tool to promote the service or product you offer in your website and then the way of evaluating a website performance based on many factors. Online advertising is one of these factors that could help to let people interact with your site and increase engagement, but at the end you should learn to hammer the nails, and if what you build is sturdy and serviceable, take satisfaction in its plain strength.

Therefore, without tracking your profits on any Ads you spend, that means you don’t know if you’re making money or not, this in turn will lead to only one fact; you’re not going to be in business very long!

In this article I’ll give you simple formulas to calculate your ROI and show you how to measure KPI’s for the top three advertising goals.

Measuring your Return on Investment (ROI)

For instance, when you have a small business, I believe you likely don’t have a big accounting department to track and analyze your ad budget spends. Which is true!

But as I mentioned above you still need to learn how to hammer the nails. Perhaps this still seems like a paradox. How can you think carefully about not losing your customers and still be carefree about their options? I assure you that they are separate process. 

It is too simple when you adopt the ROI technique, if you’re spending money and you’re not getting back more money than you’re spending - you’re wasting your hard earned cash and means you are losing customers (Audiences).  You’ve got to stop the leak. You also should know if one Ad is generating more profits than another - so you can put more money into the profitable one.

Measuring your ROI doesn’t have to be overly complicated. You do need to do a bit of math, but, hey, that’s part of business. Let’s take a look at how to calculate your ROI.

A Simple Calculation for your website ROI 

As you likely know, your Return on Investment is basically a ratio of your net profit over the costs you spend to get the profit.  To put it in an equation, your ROI looks something like this:

Your ROI is your revenue less your cost of the thing you sold divided by the cost of the goods sold.

So, for example, let’s say you sell necklace. The cost to produce one necklace is $10, and you sell them for $20. You sell 100 of them from advertising them for example on Google. Your revenue (as you can see) is $2,000. Your cost to produce them was $1,000. And you spent, let’s say, $500 in advertising.

Your ROI is:  2,000 - (1,000 + 500)/ (1,000 + 500).

Do the math. Your ROI ratio is .33, which is 33%.

Measuring your Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

Key performance indicators (or KPI) are metrics that measure the performance of a task against the objective that it was set out to do. In other words, it is finding out how you are doing to attain your business objectives. While KPIs can be applied in just about any working environment, in can be an effective method to measure the performance of your online business.

What I would like to say, you will never make your mark in your online business, unless you develop a respect for your content and quality of the service you offer. This is what I have pointed out in my previous articles

 

So, metrics can either be represented as a ratio or a number to measure certain tasks in relation to the objectives of your business. In the SEO field, Revenue, Visits and Page Views are measured through numbers while Conversion Rate, Bounce Rate and Average Sales are measured by ratios. These two forms of metric generally make up KPIs.

To find an effective KPI, you must first understand the objectives of your online business very well because this will be the basis for setting up your KPI. Outline your objectives into specific measurable goals. Then select a Key Performance Indicator for each goal.

To set an example as I gave you for ROI, let’s define a conversion as a completed sales transaction. To calculate a conversion, the basic formula can be: 

Conversion Rate= (Total Transactions/Total Number of Visits) * 100.

That is (6 transactions/50 visits) * 100 = 12% Conversion Rate. And so 12% is your Key Performance Indicator for your Sales Conversion Rate. In this example, it is obvious that having a score of 12% is below the expected performance of your goal for sales conversion. Having this sort of information will allow you to target which area to focus on as you try to improve the performance of your conversion rate. In this case you can try to optimize the functionality of your website.

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Building Your Content Hub is A Way To Build Your Brand!

There are thousand topics talks about how to build a content that driven website. Last 5 years you may have noticed a change in the way you are consuming content. With more and more large companies looking to find ways to connect to their ideal consumer there has been a shift in the way content is being developed and shared.

To begin with, I would like to give a brief about the way of building a content driven website which could help to boost your business in marketplace.

There is quite of planning involved in developing a content rich website. Here are step-by-step instructions that will make it a simple task:

Do your research

Use a keyword research tool find theme-related keywords that are high in demand and relatively low in supply. Find a sufficient amount of profitable keywords that will enable you build 50 to 100 pages that are focused on an individual keyword. This process will also allow you to evaluate your concept to make sure that there is enough demand and that the market is not totally saturated with competition.

Form a written plan

Prepare a three-tier plan for your content using the keywords. The first tier will be your homepage and should focus on the concept keyword that represents your niche or theme. The second tier will consist of introduction pages with keywords that are related to your navigation buttons. The third tier represents content pages that focus on keywords related to your second-tier pages.

Upload the content to your website

It is wise to add the content to your website as it is developed and make sure that it is submitted to the search engines. After you have about 30 pages of content, you can start promoting your site by getting it listed in directories, engaging in article marketing, participating in industry-related forums and blogs, social marketing, etc.

Continue to add content to your site and participate in link building activities

The more content that you have, and the more high-quality incoming links that you establish, the better your website will do in the search engines. Visitors also love content driven websites. If you provide the information that they are looking for, it develops credibility for you and you will likely convert many of your website visitors into repeat and referring customers.

Build up a content hub for your business

In the context of marketing, it’s a place where various types of content – articles, videos, images, etc – exist for the purpose of engaging audiences and spreading knowledge and information to current and future customers.

As Daniel Newman explains, we’re no longer living in a time where brands can simply publish content about themselves and successfully connect with their audiences. Newman puts it perfectly when he says today’s world of marketing “is more about sharing and collaborating and with that generosity comes interest, loyalty, and commitment to a brand.”

I would say, creating a content hub doesn't only apply to large businesses or corporate, and it also doesn't have to take a lot of budget and/or time.

Therefore, if you have a big business or even small business and you want to generate revenues for your business or product you offer, you need to not only choose the best products and services to represent, but you need to drive traffic to your newly created hub pages.

For example, if you are marking information products for home based business owners, you could create a hub page offering information and resources to network marketers. When this niche of people land on your hub pages, they will find valuable articles, blogs, reviews and other resources to help them grow their businesses. And, if they find your hub page valuable, they will likely return again and again. And when this occurs, you are increasing your opportunities for generating direct sales whether in terms of getting more traffic or hits.

Before one week, I was browsing American University of Shrajah Website www.aus.edu and I have found AUS web team have established successful affiliate digital strategy when they built faces.aus.edu which I believe it will another way to driving massive traffic to AUS website.

From my perspective, this is a great way to take best advantage to enhance your business or services you offer and get more reputation enhancement. Here we can back to my previous phrase and ask ourselves how do we choose which platforms to engage on? 

In the same time, I would say it is a real challenge between concentrating on the website we drive, and how should we coordinate all the many parts of our company’s social media presence in content hub. So at the end we and you should have strategy to use your company website as the hub of your product or service business to boost your business reputation

In summary a content hub can be used to:

- Increase website traffic
- Increase the time visitors spend on your website
- Increase brand awareness
- Establish thought leadership
- Increase social sharing
- Increase leads and lead conversion

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Don't Just Sit There! Start Getting The Proper SEO For Your Business

SEO could benefit many businesses who are looking to increase their online presence and drive more targeted traffic to their websites. Unfortunately the SEO industry is not known for its transparency and this can be confusing for businesses that are wondering just what exactly they will be getting in return for their investment.

What Should your SEO be Doing for Your Business?

It is important to know exactly what your SEO will be doing for you and how they will provide you with measurable results. Be wary of any SEO who offers a guaranteed ranking, it is impossible to guarantee a ranking with Google or any other search engine!

Any SEO who can guarantee results without even knowing which keywords you want to target is using this as a marketing ploy, how could they guarantee results if you wanted to compete for keywords like "Apple", "Google" or "Facebook"?!

Without conducting keyword research it is impossible to tell how likely the success of an SEO campaign will be and how long it is likely to take. SEO is an ongoing process of research, testing and analysis. It takes careful planning to identify the best keywords and to then put a solid strategy in place to rank for those keywords.

On-site and Off Site SEO

SEO takes into account factors that are both on-site and off-site. On-site SEO entails an analysis of your website. It involves looking at many factors including the site structure, use of keywords, the sites content, page loading times and the HTML and CSS that the site is built with. Good on-site SEO benefits the end user and also helps to avoid any technical "Gotchas" that search engines don't like, such as duplicate content.

A good SEO will start by analyzing your site and making recommendations to improve an optimize the site for both users and search engines. Off site SEO involves creating relevant backlinks from other sites to yours.

Each backlink is counted by the search engines as a vote for your site. Websites are given an authority score called Page Rank. Each time a site links to you it shares a little bit of its page rank with you, links from high authority sites share more of this page rank than lower authority sites. Incoming links to a site are known as backlinks.

To Follow or to Nofollow...

Some links carry no authority at all, many links carry a nofollow attribute that tell the search engines not to count that link as a vote. Webmasters and bloggers might add this attribute themselves if they don't their link to be counted as a vote for the external site or it could be automatically added by the platform they are using to publish their content, this is often the case when a site offers its user to add comments or content and the webmaster has little control over what links get created by the sites contributors.

Links without the nofollow attribute are termed "dofollow" and pass page rank from your page to the linked page. In HTML there is no actual dofollow attribute, dofollow happens by default in the absence of a nofollow attribute. You should never nofollow internal links as this will cause any page rank that would have been passed to that link to just evaporate!

Where Did You Get Those Links?

You should ask your SEO how they will create backlinks, a good SEO will try to build a varied backlink portfolio for you. This portfolio should include high value links that are found in bodies of text such as blog posts. These usually carry the most page rank but also require the most work as the SEO will need to build connections with blog owners and often provide the content themselves.

Any good SEO will look for quality over quantity, anyone promising a high number of links is probably best avoided. The search engines like to see "Natural Links of Love", a few high quality links will go a lot further than many low quality links.

Other linking strategies include using quality business directories or commenting on blogs and forums as well as using social media and social bookmarking sites.

Link exchanges are best avoided as these two way links don't look like natural links. Search engines can see the Internet as a series of connected nodes and easily detect unnatural patterns like this.

Your Business, Your Needs

Your SEO should talk with you about your business needs and goals and also try to understand as much as they can about your target audience. If they don't do this then they are unlikely to pick keywords that will attract and convert the right audience for you business. They should conduct extensive keyword research and be able to identify the keywords that will bring in more of the right traffic. Traffic is useless if it doesn't convert!

Added Value

Your SEO should also be able to research your competition and tell you what keywords they are targeting and also how much time it is likely to take to compete for the same keywords. They should also be able to come up with alternative strategies if those keywords are far too competitive for your budget or to bring in traffic while you work towards competing for the main keywords.

SEO takes time, it doesn't happen overnight. Your SEO should be able to provide you with a monthly report that shows how you are progressing through the search engine results for your keywords. They should also be able to run PPC campaigns on your behalf and also create content and copy for your site.

Many SEO's will also be able to promote you via social media and advise you on other Internet marketing techniques such as building mailing lists for email campaigns.

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How to Improve Your Next Business Engagement in 8 Steps

Nowadays, when people talk about social media, they are talking about all the ways using social media can increase their networks, reputation and the way of selling their image! On the other hand we can see most marketers are trying to use social media to increase a company's bottom line. At the end and as final outcome if we used it properly we can say social media has changed the world.
From my perspective, It’s not just about using platforms and tools for the new look and feel design of it, I think it’s important to remember how crucial the old fashioned relationship and business communications are.

In this article I would like to raise one of the most important elements which considered a key success factors in social media “Engagement”

But what does engagement actually mean? And are social media follower counts really important?

Engagement in a product or services business refers to how much people interact with a brand's social media and website. For instance, if you are selling chocolate cinnamon cake, I would say it may be tough to convince your clients or customers to share your secret chocolate sauce, a new dark chocolate product, or even a bad chocolate taste story with customers.

But, openness can go a long way in social media. Your community will feel involved in your company and appreciate the trust you show toward them. They may become interested in your story, want to get involved in your product trials, or stay in touch with updates. That hook may be what you need to generate new, long-term customers.

When I did my research via different online sources I found there are over 1.82 billion social network users worldwide; do you believe that?? That number is expected to increase to approximately 2.33 by 2017. Needless to say, being active on social media is an essential part of your marketing plan.

But active without followers like bird without wings. If you have followers on your social media channels who are engaged by your updates and realize tangible value from them your marketing efforts will be better rewarded.

I believe you have a question now and ask; how do you get followers and reach your audience over the internet? The answer is by providing them with real value and having a two-way conversation. People enjoy reading posts that offer advice, tips and tricks, but if they can then engage with the author of those posts or the company behind them, it takes their experience to the next level. Below are the most active steps that let your business, services, blog, website get more followers and engaged.

Tell a story

Perhaps the story is something as simple as how the new application that you developed on Android phones solved a memory size issue. Whatever the case, the power of a good story can’t be denied. It’s the follow-up to a story that was shared, including absorbing and responding to the reactions. It’s the action of connecting with someone that was affected by your story in one way or another and nurturing the beginning of a relationship with that person. Because of this, engagement can often unearth new stories or add to old ones, providing you with even more content.

Build trust

Building trust within your social community is considered an essential part and critical in online discussions. Building trust via social media channels is one way to build this credibility.

Respond to positive feedback

Positive feedback is your gate to pass the quiz in engagement session! It offers your brand a chance to turn casual fans and admirers into full-blown fanatics — the people we refer to as brand evangelists.

Respond to negative feedback

By listening carefully to your online community, you’ll easily spot customer complaints as they arise and quickly defuse find out a proper way to fix those situations.

 

Show your personality

Always keep in mind; you’re having a conversation, not publishing a press release. The simple act of responding like a human being will delight your community. If your brand was a person, what would you want people to say about him or her? How does your online presence reflect your answer?

Go beyond Facebook and Twitter

Though Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are still among the most popular, marketers can benefit from using social networks beyond these three.

Find, create, and share content

Producing and sharing your own content is a great way to add your voice to the conversations about your industry.

Follow back

Remember, not only is following those that follow you a kind gesture, but it will also help grow your overall following by showing potential new followers that you’re the type of brand who engages, not only broadcasts

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Going With Fresh Content is A Key For Successful SEO

In 2003, engineers at Google filed a patent that would rock the SEO world. Named Document Scoring Based on Document Content Update, the patent not only offered insight into the mind of the world’s largest search engine, but provided an accurate road map of the path Google would take for years to come.

Google Team have came up with Google’s Freshness Update, which places greater emphasis on returning fresher web content for certain queries. Exactly how Google determines freshness was brilliantly explored by Justin Briggs in his analysis of original Google patents. Justin deserves a lot of credit for bringing this analysis to light and helping to inspire this post.

Although the recent Freshness Update received a lot of attention, in truth Google has scored content based on freshness for years.

How Google Scores Fresh Content

Google Fellow Amit Singhal explains that “Different searches have different freshness needs.”

The implication is that Google measures all of your documents for freshness, then scores each page according to the type of search query. While some queries need fresh content, Google still uses old content for other queries (more on this later.)

Singhal describes the types of keyword searches most likely to require fresh content:

-- Recent events or hot topics: “occupy oakland protest” “nba lockout”
-- Regularly recurring events: “NFL scores” “dancing with the stars” “exxon earnings”
-- Frequent updates: “best slr cameras” “subaru impreza reviews”

Google’s patents offer incredible insight as to how web content can be evaluated using freshness signals, and rankings of that content adjusted accordingly.

Understand that these are not hard and fast rules, but rather theories consistent with patent filings, experiences of other SEOs, and experiments performed over the years. Nothing substitutes for direct experience, so use your best judgement and feel free to perform your own experiments based on the information below.

1. Freshness by Inception Date

A webpage is given a “freshness” score based on its inception date, which decays over time. This freshness score can boost a piece of content for certain search queries, but degrades as the content becomes older.

The inception date is often when Google first becomes aware of the document, such as when Googlebot first indexes a document or discovers a link to it.

2. Document Changes (How Much) Influences Freshness

The age of a webpage or domain isn’t the only freshness factor. Search engines can score regularly updated content for freshness differently from content that doesn’t change. In this case, the amount of change on your webpage plays a role.

For example, the change of a single sentence won’t have as big of a freshness impact as a large change to the main body text.

3. The Rate of Document Change (How Often) Impacts Freshness

Content that changes more often is scored differently than content that only changes every few years. In this case, consider the homepage of the New York Times, which updates every day and has a high degree of change.

"For example, a document whose content is edited often may be scored differently than a document whose content remains static over time. Also, a document having a relatively large amount of its content updated over time might be scored differently than a document having a relatively small amount of its content updated over time."

4. Freshness Influenced by New Page Creation

Instead of revising individual pages, websites add completely new pages over time. This is the case with most blogs. Websites that add new pages at a higher rate may earn a higher freshness score than sites that add content less frequently.

Some SEOs insist you should add 20-30% new pages to your site every year. This provides the opportunity to create fresh, relevant content, although you shouldn’t neglect your old content if it needs attention.

"UA may also be determined as a function of one or more factors, such as the number of “new” or unique pages associated with a document over a period of time. Another factor might include the ratio of the number of new or unique pages associated with a document over a period of time versus the total number of pages associated with that document."

5. Changes to Important Content Matter More

Changes made in “important” areas of a document will signal freshness differently than changes made in less important content. Less important content includes navigation, advertisements, and content well below the fold. Important content is generally in the main body text above the fold.

 Boilerplate Changes Count Less for Freshness      "…content deemed to be unimportant if updated/changed, such as Javascript, comments, advertisements, navigational elements, boilerplate material, or date/time tags, may be given relatively little weight or even ignored altogether when determining UA." 

6. Rate of New Link Growth Signals Freshness

If a webpage sees an increase in its link growth rate, this could indicate a signal of relevance to search engines. For example, if folks start linking to your personal website because you are about to get married, your site could be deemed more relevant and fresh (as far as this current event goes.)  That said, an unusual increase in linking activity can also indicate spam or manipulative link building techniques. Be careful, as engines are likely to devalue such behavior.

"…a downward trend in the number or rate of new links (e.g., based on a comparison of the number or rate of new links in a recent time period versus an older time period) over time could signal to search engine 125 that a document is stale, in which case search engine 125 may decrease the document’s score."

7. Links from Fresh Sites Pass Fresh Value

Links from sites that have a high freshness score themselves can raise the freshness score of the sites they link to.  For example, if you obtain a link off an old, static site that hasn’t been updated in years, this doesn't pass the same level of freshness value as a link from a fresh page – for example, the homepage of Wired.com. Justin Briggs coined this FreshRank.

"Document S may be considered fresh if n% of the links to S are fresh or if the documents containing forward links to S are considered fresh."

8. Changes in Anchor Text Signals may Devalue Links

If a website changes dramatically over time, it makes sense that any new anchor text pointing to the page will change as well.

For example, If you buy a domain about automobiles, then change the format to content about baking, over time your new incoming anchor text will shift from cars to cookies.

In this instance, Google might determine that your site has changed so much that the old anchor text is no longer relevant, and devalue those older links entirely.

"The date of appearance/change of the document pointed to by the link may be a good indicator of the freshness of the anchor text based on the theory that good anchor text may go unchanged when a document gets updated if it is still relevant and good."  

9. User Behavior Indicates Freshness

What happens when your once wonderful content becomes old and outdated? For example, your website hosts a local bus schedule... for 2009. As content becomes outdated, folks spend less time on your site. They press the back button to Google's results and choose another URL. 

Google picks up on these user behavior metrics and scores your content accordingly.

"If a document is returned for a certain query and over time, or within a given time window, users spend either more or less time on average on the document given the same or similar query, then this may be used as an indication that the document is fresh or stale, respectively."

Conclusion:

The goal of a search engine is to return the most relevant results to users. For your part, this requires an honest assessment of your own content. What part of your site would benefit most from freshness?

Old content that exists simply to generate page views, but accomplishes little else, does more harm than good for the web. On the other hand, great content that continually answers a user's query may remain fresh forever.

Be fresh. Be relevant. Most important, be useful.



Source: Cyrus Shepard to Advanced SEO

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