Archives For: February 2009

The bounce rate is a critical, but often unknown, website statistic that every business owner should be carefully monitoring so that they can continually improve the effectiveness of their website. The bounce rate tells you the percentage of visitors that leave your website without ever interacting with it. This means they go to your homepage (for example) - and then leave your website without going to any other pages on your site.

Oftentimes, bounces occur in less than 3-5 seconds. Here's what the bounce rate statistic looks like in Compass' stats (although most stats programs should have something similar):

In this site, 20% of visitors are bouncing. Is this good or bad, and how do you go about reducing your bounce rate?

Fixed-Fee projects can be dangerous commitments for service providers and consultants. If you use fixed-fee pricing, I have developed a simple model that can help you account — and be compensated for — your level of risk by using a complexity factor.

The model I use for quoting projects is below using a fake widget-making project that assumes an hourly rate of $10/hr. I'll follow up the model with an explanation of how it works and breakdown its various components.

This approach has really increased my quoting accuracy dramatically - and is pretty straight-forward to setup using Excel.

If you are a service provider, you likely bid engagements on either an hourly or fixed-fee (project, not-to-exceed) basis. You might even alternate between the two. How do you decide which approach to use? In some industries, there may be a set or unspoken standard that decides this for you. In other industries, you may have the option of using either. I use both - and have found that looking at it from a risk perspective has helped me eliminate headaches.

In the early days of the web, putting in 200 keywords on your page was the norm. I tracked down my company website from 2001 - and here are the keywords I was using:

Graphics, Web Design, Web Site,  Web Page, Frontpage, Design, 3d, Site, Business, e-commerce, entrepeneur, Small Business,  html, authoring, site creation, layout, style sheets, hypertext markup language, web, home page, website, media, communications, animation, marketing, page, designers, mulitmedia, scripts, web sites, html design, PHP, Perl, web hosting,  hosting, hosting services, computer, web pages, web design professionals, web page authoring, graphic, new website, new web site, Web master,  web page designer, web site designer, webmaster, webmasters, web masterst, web designing, Professionals, dhtml

Yes - that was on ONE page! The sheer volume of keywords became popular because search engines used to actually use this information to rank pages. Now - keywords are virtually useless when used in this way. Instead, there is a much better way to choose and place keywords on your site - and it's proven to be very effective for me. I call it the 3-1-2 rule.

I hear it all the time. "We'd like to point 57 domains to our website to help boost our search rankings." Godaddy offers domains for dirt cheap. A cup of your favorite venti triple-shot insert-favorite-flavor-here cappucino probably costs more these days. It's no wonder you may be tempted to buy up a ton of domains and point them all to your website - especially when you are looking at your site stats and trying to find ways to get your traffic numbers up. Here are the common reasons I hear for wanting this:

More domains  = more traffic
The idea goes like this: 1 website = x amount of traffic. 80 websites then, must equal 80x the traffic. This is a common misconception. Just because the domains are out there doesn't mean  you are increasing your chances of someone finding your site. You still have to promote that domain like you would your primary domain.

If I have more domains, they are more likely to get picked up by Google
Google will pick up on it alright. But probably not the way you'd like them to pick up on it. Google is clear about their policies - deliberately creating duplicate content is not cool. This ends up being (in my opinion) a form of spamming. The search engine algorithms are far too advanced to risk this - they will find you!

What other options do you have?

To start: focus on content. A website that goes stale and is never updated will usually not do as well in the rankings anyways. Make it a goal of yours to update your website 4-5x per week - even if it's just a paragraph or two. If you put the same amount of energy into updating your site as you would into brainstorming, purchasing, and pointing 100 domains to your existing websites, you should see better results anyways.

I'll cover specific instructions to improve your search engine rankings in future posts so you have detailed alternatives. For now, avoid pointing all those domains to your site. It could actually end up hurting your rankings.

One last note: There are certain instances where a few domains wouldn't actually hurt you. If you own example.com - pointing example.net there probably isn't going to be too detrimental. The search engines are smarter than penalizing you for this. The other instance is if you are using the various domains for marketing campaigns - but I would definitely encourage building out separate sites with unique content rather than pointing them all to once place.