Neither will putting keywords and PPC marketing, or SEO, before persuasive web design. The challenge every website faces is a return on investment (ROI). Funnily, and annoyingly enough, paying for
Putting The Keyword Before The Horse Will Not Make Him Drink
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Great stuff Kim! Thanks!
Comment by Grumpus — March 22, 2004 @ 12:57 pm
Yes - as always, great post.
Comment by rustybrick — March 22, 2004 @ 1:26 pm
There is a great deal of brainstorming and testing that can be done along all stages of building a site.
It is important to go through a web site, and make certain that it does carefully and clearly make it easy for a casual browser to become a concerned visitor and then a happy customer.
I know a lot of people who jump into business, and jump through the steps of building a web site without writing any ideas down. They know what they want to do, and have clearly defined goals, in their heads, and they are unwilling, for one reason or another to put all of those ideas on paper. In my mind, this is a failure.
I say that because it’s too easy to forget good ideas if you don’t bother to write them down. It’s too easy to overlook possible selling points, and potential classes of customers because a sentence or two that might have referred to those folks wasn’t committed to print, and was given a lessor priority.
Kim has some nice lists in her post above. They are what you should be asking yourself as you map how different visitors to your site will travel through it. A first time visitor sees a site with different eyes than a returning visitor. Are there things of interest to both? A site may have multiple goals. Can it get those across without confusing people? Does the naviagtion offer easy to follow paths for visitors?
How do you test your site to make sure that your intelligently crafted paths through the site are both easy for people to follow, and tempting to follow?
I will add here that there is a point early on where you figure out what words your visitors would expect to see upon the site, and will use to find the site. They are words that should be on the pages, and in page titles, navigation, and headlines. They are words that will be amongst the keywords for your site.
Comment by Bill — March 23, 2004 @ 4:37 am
Bill,
You asked how to you make sure that the paths you crafted for your user to take are being followed. This is one thing that I try to track with Web analytical tools.
In my most recent article, I wrote a review on Urchin 5.5. They have gone a long way in measuring “goals” throughout the click path of a user. One thing they are currently working on is the concept of funnel based goal analysis. To measure a user’s click path in terms of a goal as they go deeper and deeper into your site.
There are of course ways to get at this data in Urchin, in fact there are some very easy to read reports on this. But the Campaign Tracking Module they have is not fully supportive of multiple “goals”.
I touched on what I would like to see from Urchin on this concept at [URL=http://www.rustybrick.com/seo_articles_8d.php]http://www.rustybrick.com/seo_articles_8d.php[/url]
It was towards the end of the article, so I hope it reads well.
Comment by rustybrick — March 23, 2004 @ 4:47 am
Good points, Barry
The notion that there are multiple goals is the breakthrough. Being able to track them is icing on top of that.
Analytic tools are helpful, but they come late in the process, after you already have people visiting pages. The scenerios that Kim mentioned, where there is a decision to review a site, and see why it isn’t performing as well as expected would benefit from the analytic tools you would like to see.
Being aware that there are multiple goals is important right at the very beginning.
Comment by Bill — March 23, 2004 @ 2:17 pm