#discovertec

To prove how effective your efforts at optimizing your site for Internet searches is not easy. It is doubly difficult if yours is an industry in which customers decide at the spur of the moment to show up at your doorstep.

Customers quickly search the Web for the phone numbers of establishments that meet their immediate needs. If they want to go to a fast food restaurant, an urgent care center, or if they need to call a car towing facility, they certainly cannot wait around for you to respond to their email. They will search for your phone number and your address—and just call or drop in.

Yet your company has no way to track where these phone-in or drop-in customers are coming from. If they are out, they may be searching for your product on their mobile phone. Usually—about 70 percent of the time, according to statistics—they will just call your business right from the mobile search listing.

To keep track of these customers, you could use tracking numbers. These are, however, unwieldy for many small companies. They are expensive, and the temporary numbers to which they direct your customers expire quickly. Imagine the frustration when a regular customer tries to call your number from memory, discovering that the number has since expired. That customer will probably assume that you are no longer in business, or will go to your competitor. Tracking numbers are usually not the way to go for smaller businesses.

To address this problem, Google has introduced a new feature, called Website Call Conversions. It is both affordable and easy to test the call tracking’s usefulness. All a company needs to do is to update the code on their site. The site then receives a dynamic or fixed, trackable phone number, which the company can see in the site’s Web traffic reports.

This tool creates a Google forwarding number on your site when a visitor clicks through. The number stays active for 90 days after its creation. Furthermore, each of your company’s Adwords ads can get a different trackable phone number, which allows you to see which ads are performing well enough to keep running. You can also customize your own site with these phone numbers, which will help you to keep track of which pages—or which areas on each page—are more popular with visitors.

Sometimes the Internet can create information overload for people browsing online. Often, people become overwhelmed and tune out most of the material that they have to sift through. How to get your message through all of the static can be a challenge. One way to do that, however, is with an attention-grabbing headline.

There is no one magic formula to create the perfect headline. First of all, you need to take your target audience into consideration. What captures the attention of a dog enthusiast, for instance, may not even get as much as a click from someone whose major interest is foreign affairs.

Secondly, you need to take into consideration what type of media on which you want to publish your information. A headline that may be perfect for one particular social media site may not grab the attention of visitors on another social media site. What may work for a webpage title may not get any attention on a forum or article directory.

To create a winning headline, you must use a different tactic for each kind of media on which you want to publish your material. For an entertainment or how-to website, for example, lists are popular, such as “Seven Iconic TV Dramas from the 1960s,” or “10 Steps to Internet Publishing Success.”

Yet on other types of sites, such as those devoted to news or foreign affairs, these kinds of titles turn readers off. Their readers want to hear a new flash of insight or a breaking news story. Titles for articles on these sites, then, should reflect the urgency and importance of the information they contain.

One of the best ways to do background research to help you select a headline that will grab your readers’ attention is to get some demographic information about your target audience. Google Analytics, for example, can help you get to know your website’s audience. You can determine the location in which most of your audience lives, their interests, and even their average age. Once you have that information, you can target your headline to appeal to the main audience you want to reach.  

You never should offer more in your headline than you can deliver. People may read your information once, but they will probably never read it again. Furthermore, most of your audience can recognize when your title veers off into exaggerated claims. Unless your company has actually developed the technology to do so, don’t claim in your headline that you have found the cure for cancer—or that you have a cream that can rid your body of cellulite forever.

If, on the other hand, you offer information on how to reduce your risk of colon cancer by eating more vegetables and fruit, and your title conveys that, you will probably get many more visitors than a title that claims that you have a cure for cancer. If your title offers realistic, measurable results or answers a question many people have about your industry, you will have more success in the long run.

Social media headlines and content, too, are not a one-size-fits-all model. The readers of the social network sites Pinterest, Facebook, and Google Plus, for instance, prefer tips that they can use to accomplish tasks more efficiently. On the other hand, Twitter and LinkedIn users usually prefer information that can help them in their businesses or that keeps them informed about the latest developments in current events.

Creating a winning headline is indeed part science and part art. Once you have done some background research and have written some headlines that you think will grab your readers’ attention, test using different headlines for the same content to see which headline gets the best results for which audience. This approach will help you get a feel for what kind of title works best on which type of website—and what does not work.

Search Engine Usability

Flashback to 1995 – it was the birth of the unofficial original search engine. Yes, we’re talking about the beloved butler, Jeeves of Ask Jeeves. The concept was simple – type Jeeves a question, he’ll give you an answer to your query in the form of a web search result. It also incorporated keywords into its algorithm to deliver search results.

But that was in 1995. By 2005, plans went into motion to phase the Jeeves character out of things. Ask Jeeves as we knew it is now simply just Ask.com. Ask.com abandoned the search engine field altogether in 2010 and exists today as a user-generated question and answer website and mobile app.

Ask Jeeves was the earliest form of search engine usability. Surprisingly, the site was flawed – often bringing up fan boy websites and non-credible resources that were populated heavily with the keywords from the question that was posed. Unsurprisingly, Ask Jeeves was pushed aside when the powerhouse known as Google began developing new and better algorithms to give people the best resources and information upon a simple web search.

Today, Google and other search engines have a good grasp on the types of websites and resources that satisfy the needs of the web searcher. This is based on a variety of things such as:

Ease of use

Information relevant to the web search

Credibility of the source

Quality design

It is true that keywords and backlinks do make a difference in how a website is ranked. However, there are a bevy of other factors that Google takes into account that Ask Jeeves didn’t in the early days of Internet searching. Here’s a look:

Engagement metrics: Time spent on a page is a good indication of how good a site is. For instance, if you do a web search, click on the first link that is delivered, then immediately click back because it’s not what you’re looking for, Google takes that into consideration for future rankings. The goal of Google and other search engines is to provide the best, most credible and most relevant information first.

Panda: When Google’s Panda algorithm update was introduced in 2011, it rearranged 20 percent of all the search engine’s results. That’s because it incorporated data from human evaluators and their ranking of thousands of websites to complement the web data.

Content: It’s about a whole lot more than just creating continuous content these days. Search engines aren’t just looking to rank web pages that are updated more often than others, but they’re looking for content that is creative, informational and high-quality. Images and multimedia can also help in getting a page ranked higher in Google. Make sure that you don’t forget about SEO!

As you can see, search engine usability has come a long way. Back in the day of Ask Jeeves, anybody could populate their website with enough keywords and expect to see an increase in traffic, whether their site was credible or not. Today, things are different – and highly advanced algorithms are in place to judge the validity and quality of the sites that appear in the searches.

What’s more is that today, algorithms are constantly updated to make web searches more reliable and faster, as well as to weed out and de-rank the websites that are trying to get around the algorithm.

How Content and Audiences Go Hand in Hand

When creating content for your business, you want to feel connected to your audience. After all, these are the people who can help your company to succeed. The best way to do that is by writing information that will both entertain your readers and have them thinking about what you’re saying. At the end of this all, you want them to feel something. Don’t forget these points when you’re writing your content:

Will your audience find your content useful or useless?

What is the end goal of your content?

Do you think your audience will share your content?

Here at some points to remember when drafting up your content:

What is the purpose of your content?

Why are you even writing this content in the first place? Once you figure out the reason behind your content, you can then focus on what to write that will have audiences doing exactly what you want them to.

Make sure you hit your targets

Place certain keywords into your content, so that your writing appears at the top of search engine results. This is the best way to get the word out about your business to readers who are unaware of your company.

What is the point of your content?

Once your audience finishes reading your content, what do you wish they came away thinking? Will readers feel and act the way you intended them to?

Write content that will have your audience taking action

Whether you leave your audience laughing or more interested in the message you’re trying to get across, it’s very important that you get your audience engaged in some way, shape or form. 

Get the word out about your content

In order to spread the word about your business, you need to get your company’s website to rank high in search engines. The best way to do this is by listing search engine friendly keywords in your content.

Measure and track your campaign

It’s crucial that you keep track of who’s looking at your website and how many overall hits you’re receiving, so that you can tell if your campaign efforts are efficient.