Designed by Krista
Web Design

It surprises me how often companies overlook this basic marketing component: responding quickly to customer inquiries. You will make your company stand out among your competitors if you respond to customer emails the same day or the next business day. In fact, you will stand out if you answer your email at all!

I did a website redesign for a client a while back and I was checking the status of their “information” email box – they had an email from a potential client that was 15 months old that they had never even opened. I had another client who called me for a consultation – he said that he had phoned over 30 web designers and I was one of 3 who returned his call. With a simple phone call, I immediately put myself in the top 10% of web designers! However, keeping on top of your email takes time – here are 6 tips for keeping pace with email and phone messages.

1. Know your limits: Most people have a preference for email or phone – figure out which one you prefer and publicize that method more strongly. For my client with the unread message, I chose to post only phone contact information, because no email is better than ignored email. For myself, I play down my phone contact information because I respond more quickly to email messages.
2. Reduce Spam: It will be easier to respond to valuable email messages if you reduce the number of messages you have to work with. See what your web-hosting provider offers – for my BlueHost clients, I recommend SPAM Assassin (set to a SPAM score of “3″) in combination with Account Level Filtering.
3. Call people at the end of their workday: If you phone people near the end of their workday, you will tend to get their voicemail, in which case you can leave them a quick, informative message. Alternately, if they do answer their phone, they will be motivated to keep the conversation short so they can get home.
4. Keep email replies short: This will take you less time to type, and your customers will appreciate it, because it will take them less time to read. Furthermore, people will tend to reply in kind with a short and sweet message.
5. Use copy and paste: If you have already replied to a similar question before, don’t recreate the wheel. Just copy the text from your previous response and alter the text as needed for this particular situation.
6. Answer frequent queries on your website: Prevent unnecessary calls and emails by posting the answer to questions on your website. This is actually better customer service, because it saves your customer a call or email to you. When they do contact you, the call will be better qualified, because they will have answered their basic questions by reading your website.

Put these tips in use today, and put your business in the top 10% of your field!

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a key part of any successful website because most internet users will find your site via a search engine. It’s a good idea to check your site to see if there are any areas you could easily improve in order to maximize your search engine rankings.

There are two tools I like to use, both free, shown below. It is unlikely that you will get a perfect score, so don’t fret if your score is low the first time. Some factors that impact your score are out of your control, such as inbound links, retweets, etc. The key is to improve as much as you reasonably can.

In each case, the tool will grade your site based on criteria that are important for high search results. From that, you can make a to-do list of improvements. I suggest working on the “low-hanging fruit” first – if there are any easy changes, do those right away. Then, you can consider the more difficult tasks and weigh out their relative importance for your particular site.

I’ve shown some examples below for my own site. In each case, I spent about an hour making small improvements, but there were also several things that I don’t plan to do, or can’t reasonably do. For example, I don’t plan to list myself in Yahoo!Directory because I do not need the additional marketing boost, so my $299 could be better spent elsewhere.

So, take a moment to grade your site and see where you can make easy changes – every little bit helps!

Website Grader

Before: 78
Interim: 81 (domain name renewal not included)

SEO Warnings:

• The domain for this website is set to expire in less than a year [Fixed]
• Permanent Redirect Not Found for designedbykrista.com to www.designedbykrista.com [Fixed]
• designedbykrista is not listed in the Yahoo! Directory. [Um, yeah - like that's gonna' happen at $299 a pop...]
• We could not find a Twitter account associated with your website. [Fixed]
• The web page does not seem to contain any type of signup form where visitors can subscribe to a newsletter or future updates. [Imagine Dana Carvey saying, "Not gonna' do it..."]

SenSEO Firefox Addon

Before: 85
After: 93

SEO Warnings:

• Meta Keywords: use only keywords found in content of page [Fixed]
• Too many meta keywords – keep it to 10 or less [Fixed]
• Use Robots declarations to control Search-Engine access. [Fixed]
• Use H2 and H3 tags. [Fixed]
• Domain should include all keywords. [Don't I wish...]

ReclaimPrivacy.org will automatically review all of your Facebook settings and tell you if you have any areas of concern. I am pretty fanatical about locking down my account, but I still had two things to change. If you have any issues, the page has a link to the appropriate Facebook pages so you can change it easily and quickly. Well worth a visit!

Today, I had a “what not to do on your website” moment. I’ll note the lessons I learned, and then you can read on for the whole sordid tale.

Usability Lessons:

1. Don’t make your newsletter subscribers login to unsubscribe – they just want to be free!
2. Place login tips very close to login error message. This gives the user the information they need (how to troubleshoot login issues) when they need it (they have a failed login attempt).
3. Make your login prominent. Ideally, it should be in a standard location, typically a “Login” link or a userid/password box in the upper right corner.

Sordid Tale:

I was trying to unsubscribe from the email newsletter of a reputable company. I clicked the unsubscribe link and was taken to a login screen. I’m already a little bummed out, because I want unsubcribing to be just one or two clicks, without having to remember my  userid and password. It asked for my email address and password. I typed my email address and password and I got an error. I tried a couple other password variations, and I still got an error.

I tried clicked the “forgot password” link, thinking, “This is really becoming a hassle!” I typed my email address in the forgot password form. I got the following error: That email address is not on file.

Um… what? I mean, the only reason I came to the site is to unsubscribe from an email newsletter – I know that they have my email address. I was mystified.

I thought maybe I could login through the home page and went to the home page. I could not find the login on the home page. Really -  you can look for yourself, to the right. Note: It is not the “Account Access” link in the upper right – that’s only for event organizers, and I am not one.

Giving up on that, I went back to the email and clicked the unsubscribe link. I finally noticed a link “I can’t login” at the bottom of that form. I clicked on it to find out that they have converted their login system and I needed to update my account. “Whew!” I thought, “At least I know what’s going on.”

I converted my account, at the end of which process it asked me to login. I clicked continue and was taken back to the home page… and I still couldn’t find the login link! I finally went back to the email newsletter, clicked the unsubscribe link and was taken back to the login form. I logged in and saw the “manage your subscriptions” page. I think I heard angels singing in the background….

Although, I still don’t know where login is.

Web usability expert Jared Spool recommends that you make your hyperlinks 7 – 12 words long for optimum usability. Now, I would have thought links that long would be too hard for users to scan easily, but his research has shown that users are more likely to find what they want on your site if you have just a few more words within your links. Why?

Success Rates are best if Hyperlinks are between 7 - 12 words, Source: User Interface Engineering

Users will come to your site looking for something – let’s say it’s a woman looking for a shirt to wear on a beach vacation. She will have some term in mind for this item – maybe “beach wear” – and she’ll be looking for that word on your webpage. We refer to this as her “trigger” word.

What are the chances that you will happen to name your women’s shirt section “beachwear”? Well, if you are only using 1 – 6 words in your link, such as “Ladies Shirts” the chances are low! However, if you are naming things a little more specifically, such as “Women’s Wear for Beach, Lounging, and Casual Day at the Office” – there is a much bigger chance that any given user will spot their trigger word in that link.

However, my initial reaction (short links are more scannable) was not completely off-base – it turns out that links which contain 13 or more words tend to be overlooked, because they are now too long to be scanned quickly.

What the heck is a long tail keyword … and why should you care, right? Internet users, like you and me, type a word or phrase into a search engine, like Google or Yahoo!, and these are generally referred to as keywords. A “long tail” keyword indicates that the searcher typed in a phrase – not just one word, but maybe half a dozen words to search for.

In order for you, the website owner, to have your page show up first in the search results, you need to have those words strategically place on your web site. However, there is a lot of competition for the most common keywords on any given topic – the most common keywords are on so many sites that it’s hard for any one site to pop up first on search engine results.

The good news is that if you begin to focus on the longer, more descriptive terms – a.k.a. long tail keywords – you can achieve some great results because these longer phrases account for 94.3% of website traffic! For example, if you focus on the keyword “books,” you’ll have a very difficult time competing with Amazon.com. If you change the focus of your pages to “books for preschoolers” or “books about curing depression,” you have a far better chance to placing highly on search results.

Chance are that your site is already set up to optimize pages by the title of the page. So, consider your titles carefully – can you add more description to your blog post title? Subject of your forum post? Name of products in your store? Category or tag names in your store or blog? If you get stuck, you can start typing your keyword in Google, and then choose a name from the list of search suggestions that Google gives you.

Why Long Tail Keyword are so valuable. Source: www.wordtracker.com

The article 13 small things to simplify your workday came through my email box last week and I finally read it today. Like most working mothers, I sometimes feel like I’m drowning in task lists and demands on my time: I crave simplicity! There are 13 tips on this list, and you can find a couple that you can apply to see progress right away. Here are three that I am planning to use:

Batch distractions. Set a time to do all the things that distract me: typically email, phone calls, twitter, facebook, and blog. He recommends 3 – 4 pm, because that is usually a less productive time of day. I often get my best work done at that hour, so I may try this other approach: do them for 10 minutes at the end of each hour — but stick to that 10-minute limit!

Write shorter emails. Wow – what a concept! Limit myself to 3 – 4 sentences per email, which takes less time to write. Then, you tend to get shorter replies, which take less time to read and reply to. This may be a tough one for me, but so much better than taking 2 hours to answer one email, right? (Yes, true story)

Take breathing breaks. Every 15-20 minutes, get up from your desk, and take a breathing break. I’ll be honest: I hate this one. Once I’m in “the zone,” I don’t want to get out of it for something so trivial as breathing. And yet… taking a short stretch break helps reduce eye strain, cope with stress, prevent repetitive stress injuries (e.g. carpal tunnel), and may fix my lower back pain. I really must do this.