After all your work hard and marketing efforts enticing prospects to visit your website, it can be frustrating to see high bounce rates. Bounce rate is an Internet marketing term that represents the percentage of visitors who enter your website and bounce — or leave the site — rather than continuing to view other pages within your site or complete a desired action.
Here are a few common website mistakes that are often responsible for driving away potential customers:

• The basics. An unattractive design, spelling errors, broken links, images that take forever to load, and other annoyances will quickly cause visitors to lose trust and confidence in your business.

• Poor navigation. If visitors can’t tell where they are, where to click next, or how to get back to your homepage, they will likely just exit.

• Complicated, lengthy web pages. Instead, provide information that is brief and organized with headlines and sub-headings, bulleted lists, and short paragraphs.

• Too many distractions. Popup ads, flashing information, and similar devices can easily frustrate or lead visitors away from your site.

• Dated content. How will visitors know if anything is the latest and greatest information if you don’t take the time to update key areas on your website?

• Music or sound effects. These are not only annoying, but also embarrassing for visitors viewing your site from a public place. Users will likely close out of your site as quickly as possible.

• No contact information. While a “contact us” form is helpful, your website should also include your telephone number and physical address. The more contact information you include, the more visitors will be reassured you are legit.
• Asking too many questions. Requiring too much information from visitors may scare some away. Make it easy for visitors to request additional information by simply asking for their name and basic contact information. Also provide quick turnaround in response to show you respect their time.

Our creative team would love to help you develop outstanding marketing materials to supplement your website. Give us a call today!  We are here to help!

Recently I came across a great article written by William Higareda, a social media consulant and marketer from Seattle WA, it was posted in  BIZNIK, a social media network.   There are many opinions out there regarding SEO, but I thought this might be an interesting one to share with our web customers.  We do offer SEO search and Adwords for our customers and every website we implement Google Analytics that give you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. We also believe in having a social media presence. Social media is not for every business, however, it is a great place to see what the conversation is out there in the market place, what people are saying about your business. We also feel that you are missing out, if you have not at least give Social Media a chance, watch this video, and I promise you your views will change.

Below I re-posted the article from William Higareda, for those who are not on BIZNIK!

9 useless SEO strategies!

by William Higareda
Social Media Consultant & Marketer
Seattle, Washington
As many of you know, or should know. SEO is dead. SEO is obsolete for marketing your businesses in and of itself. Now, the search engines prefer socially driven content. As the internet becomes more of a socially driven entity. The era of SEO is passing away almost as quickly as it was born. These days if you are relying solely on SEO as the principle internet marketing driver to your business, that is like owning a vacuum tube TV and expecting to have a quality HD picture.
For those that have been following SEO over the years, many of you know that the search engines have changed their guidelines many times. With Google being the primary innovator with their advanced algorithms to keep the search results fresh and relevant. Most business owners that attempt to do their own SEO often times are unable to stay up to date with the latest search engine requirements.
There are 9 SEO strategies that are useless in today’s internet. Some of them have recently become obsolete and others have been obsolete for some time now.
    1.    Keyword Stuffing: If you think that stuffing your keyword metatag full of keywords and phrases is going to get you a first page search engine ranking. THINK AGAIN! The search engines caught on to that trick years ago. In fact, the keyword metatag was so over used that the search engines (Google, Bing, and Yahoo) ignore it completely today.
    2.    Search Engine Submissions: If you’ve hired an SEO company and they are charging you for submissions. FIRE THEM IMMEDIATELY! They are ripping you off. The search engines these days have such advanced algorithms that capture fresh content as soon as it goes live. The only thing that you need to submit is an XML sitemap, which provides the search engines with a table of contents to crawl your site.
    3.    Automated Submission Tools: Again, submissions are useless these days. If you’re submitting your site to a bunch of unused search engines hoping build links back to your website, please stop. Google, Yahoo, and Bing consider such techniques to be “spamming”.
    4.    Reciprocal Links: The days of creating a bunch of random links to your website and getting good rankings are over. The search engines caught on to that one too. Sorry. If you own a salon and you link your site to your friend’s site, who owns a hardware store, that doesn’t count. If you do link, you must link to someone who has relevant content and preferably a site that has a well established blog and social media presence.
    5.    Article press releases: Writing a bunch of articles and publishing them on a bunch of different sites is a recently bygone strategy. Like keyword stuffing, this too was abused to the point that search engines devalued excessive article publishing. If you want to write articles, it is best to establish your own business blog.
    6.    Blog commenting with your URL: It doesn’t work any more. So stop it! Besides the fact, that it annoys bloggers and people enjoying a good thread, Google has devalued forum links (unless the comment is relevant). They even consider it “spamming” these days.
    7.    Duplicate content: The days of copy/pasting content to improve rankings are over too, my friend. Sorry. The search engines caught on to this tactic too. Google penalizes websites for duplicate content, even re-worded content. BE ORIGINAL!
    8.    Improving pagerank: In case you didn’t know, Google had removed “pagerank” from their webmaster guidelines some time ago. As the internet became more socially driven, pagerank had become less relevant to websites as a metric.
    9.    Footer linking: Again, the search engines caught onto this one and ignore it. It looks too much like spam. Google and Yahoo have devauled footer links altogether. Footer links can also devalue some of the quality, relevant links that you have on your site.
Avoid these 9 things and your SEO will improve, but whether or not your rankings improve is another story. To improve rankings it is imperitive that you move your business into the Social Media sphere.