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13 Ways to Get More Out of Your Website

You've got a website on which you've already spent loads of time and money. Below you will find 13 ways to recoup that investment. Managing Editor Eileen Shulock and I compiled dozens of tips, but these below are our cream of the crop. Enjoy.

1. Ask for Optional Info: Conventional wisdom says to make the process for an email subscription or product checkout as brief as possible. However, asking for optional information at the point of purchase or subscription is an outstanding way to segment an audience. Even if you don't do anything with the info right away, it's an opportunity for future segmented marketing. For example, WDFM's Managing Editor Eileen Shulock is by day the ecommerce creative director for a hip retailer. 40% of the people who subscribe to her Lust List email update hand over cell phone numbers at signup, even though it's an optional field. This gives her company the option to do some mobile marketing to a highly involved audience in the future.

2. Talk to People On Their Wavelength: Some people primarily process and interact with the outside world visually, some kinetically (think "tactile") and some through the audio channel. "I see what you mean," "I feel your pain," or "I hear what you're saying" are the phrases (respectively) you might hear each type say. In her training session at Search Engine Strategies New York, SEO blog/RSS guru Amanda Watlington suggested you communicate to each type on their own terms. Sure, a website is visual, which is just fine for the visual folks. But a podcast would speak better to the audio people. WDFM Managing Editor Eileen Shulock is what you would call a "kinetic" person. She loves clicking on all the buttons, taking quizzes, fiddling with calculators, changing the colors and all that jazz.

3. Word Up: One of the tactical suggestions that your humble publisher (that's me) heard repeatedly at Search Engine Strategies New York was to try testing responsiveness when you up the font size on your website, especially if the website is aimed at folks over 40.

4. Find Out What People Are Searching For: Watch what people search for (and the words they use) on your site. People arrive there with different intentions. Some are lookie-loos, some are ready to buy, some are in the wrong place. Many might be comparison shoppers, assuming you have an etail site. One of the best ways to get a bead on what people are looking for is to closely observe the keywords they put into your search tool. You do have a search tool on your site, right? In this way, you can watch trends and make your site more relevant. You might find seasonal patterns or frequent misspellings that you'll want to include in your metatags or product descriptions. If you find a heavy emphasis on certain content or products, you might want to feature them more prominently on your site.

5. Segment, Segment, Segment: You often hear the word "segmentation" used when talking about email lists and direct mail. But there's also good reason to segment the users of your website. In his training session at Search Engine Strategies New York, SiteLogic's Matt Bailey suggested you segment your traffic by inbound links, by keyword phrases used at search engines to find your site and by those who buy and those who don't. You're apt to find that people who use certain keywords are more likely to buy from you than others. Both in the offline and online marketing universes, it's really all about segmentation. Remember, there are audiences within audiences and it's your job to identify each one. Examine their intentions and your desired outcomes.

6. Expose All the Details: One of the main reasons for shopping cart abandonment is that it isn't made clear how much the item being purchased will cost to ship until after you pull the trigger. It seems like a majorly obvious thing to do, but many companies have a purchase process that hides this important detail.

7. Ask For More: "Upselling", or the art of asking for more, is a favorite retail tactic. A good example is Amazon's offer to gift wrap your purchase or to sell you a gift certificate during the checkout process.

This doesn't only apply to etailers, of course. Co-registration programs asking folks to subscribe to another email newsletter are an example from the publishing world, ie., "If you like this newsletter you'll simply adore the five newsletters below." Once someone has taken an action on your site, the chances of them taking another action are pretty good.

8. Add RSS Distribution: You've heard all about RSS, but maybe it's time you start using it (if you haven't all ready).

Build a pool of RSS subscribers and you can send them instant alerts when new content is added to your site. Or you can let them know when new products are available or offer a discount on "hot" or clearance items. Your RSS feed and alerts can be added to RSS directories and external feeds, which increases your site's visibility. Be sure to measure the results of each feed. In an RSS session at Search Engine Strategies New York, Feedburner's VP of Publisher Services Rick Klau pointed out that his company is now sending out 60 million feeds daily. He wryly observed that there are not 60 million early adopters on the planet, so we can now easily consider RSS to be a mainstream channel. This is an impressive figure to me, and at the end of the day it doesn't much matter whether people realize they're reading RSS feeds or not. It's sort of like driving a car and not understanding exactly what your catalytic convertor is doing under the hood, but that's OK.

9. Lure Links With a Blog: These days, "Where's your blog?" is just as popular a question as "What's your email address?" was ten years ago. You may not want to invest the extra time to accept outside comments on your blog. However, Netconcept's CEO Stephan Spencer made a very good case for doing exactly that. He says acceptance help build "link juice" because you're inviting interactivity, and therefore more inbound links come your way. In turn, the search engines hold you in higher regard. If you do elect to accept comments on your blog, do be sure to filter them before they're posted, as there's a lot of link sp0m out there. Also, some comments that aren't sp0m would still be inappropriate for posting on your site.

Also, let's face it. There's a lot of noise out there. If you want your blog to be effective, you're going to have to publish something that gets above the noise level if you want people to come back day after day.

10. Analyze Wisely: Many of us fall prey to "analysis paralysis" and either spend too much time pondering arcane site analytics or getting overwhelmed by the deluge of information and not analyzing anything at all. Look, there's the day-to-day package of stats you need to know if you're going to keep your finger on the pulse of things. Then there's the bigger picture. For example, I know Mondays are typically the highest traffic days for the Web Digest For Marketers website, because that's when we publish the newsletter. If we see a spike on another day, we look for the reason why in our referrer logs. This is sometimes how we discover that another media outlet has quoted or mentioned us.

11. Create a Useful Press Section: It's astonishing to realize how useless many company's online press sections are. You're not going to get press, get quoted or be included in an article if your company information is as impenetrable as a Rubik's cube. Press releases optimized for SEO and for news engines and selected press coverage are no-brainers. Other good things to offer from an editor/writer perspective are:

1. High and low res versions of your logo
2. A succinct explanation of what your company does
3. A brief outline of business segments or products in easy-to-understand language
4. Quotes from a CEO or high-level spokesperson
5. Brief bios of key officers along with photos, if possible
6. Contact forms that send email requests to real, important people
7. An outline of "goodies" to be found at your site, such as tools, a resource center, current white papers for download, etc.

The bottom line - please don't make us search for press-worthy stuff in your website, wait for a response from a PR person or rely on Google for information about your company. And for heaven's sakes, post your phone number. We can't count the hundreds of times we've gone to a given website in order to call someone only to find there is no phone number. "Oh," you might say, "Some of these are pretty basic and obvious tips." Then why is it we experience this frustration on a weekly if not daily basis?

12. Submit Your Site Map: If you're a big company then don't read this tip, because you probably have a department that handles the site map submission and other SEO issues. Mid-size to small firms are less likely to pay attention to the submission of site maps to search engines each and every time they update their sites. Lots of companies don't have blogs and don't publish to their sites on a regular basis. Therefore it's not part of their routine to send a site map when an update happens, but it should be.

13. Help Your Own Page Reputation: Instead of labeling the hyperlink to the next page with the word "Next" on your website or saying "Page 2 of 4", do yourself a favor and write keyword-rich navigational hyperlink tags instead.

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