10 Tools for Usability Testing

You alone can never assume that your website carries all the goodness and professionalism, unless your visitors said it so. Developing a site does not circulate with only one opinion, thus, it needs different feedback in order to get properly optimized. This is where usability testing comes in.

Like in everything we do, we cannot expect to have a “close to perfection” results at the first time. Of course, we need to do it over and over again just to make ourselves satisfied. In the part of your website, it needs testing as well. Web developers and designers, although skilled and talented, cannot produce the best web pages without knowing the side of their users. Indeed, getting and implementing a user's feedback is vital in building a strong business. There are many great options to perform quick and easy usability tests using a variety of online tools. Here are ten of them:

1. USERTESTING.COM – With UserTesting.com, users, speaking their thoughts as they browse, will have their screens and voices recorded. The resulting videos will immediately be made available online for the website owners to watch.

2. FEEDBACK ARMY – a usability testing tool that is guaranteed cheap and simple. Feedback Army charges a flat $15 for 10 reviewers to answer 4-6 questions on a given URL. The difference of this tool from Usertesting.com is that you are not allowed to select your audience demographics, only simple text answers to your given questions.

3. USERFLY – Userfly.com allows you to watch videos of your real users. It records the user's visits and letting you play them back to see every mouse movements, click, and form interaction. You can replay the exact session they had on your site to better understand what they did and why they did it.

4. CONCEPT FEEDBACK – this tool makes usability testing easy in three steps. First, post your website. Second is to get feedback from the experts. And lastly, share your
   website evaluation with your team or client.

5. CLICKTALE – a usability testing tool that is similar to Userfly.com. It lets you watch the actual browsing behavior done by your visitor - from mouse movements to keystrokes.

6. CLIXPY - a web usability testing tool that is very easy to install. When users browse your website Clixpy traces everything they do and then plays it for you, giving you the opportunity to extract any information you may need.

7. CRAZY EGG – crazy egg is a tool for usability testing that lets you discover exactly how visitors are using your website – then optimize it to increase your conversion rate.

8. FENG-GUI – Feng Gui is probably the most interesting among all the tools. It “simulates human vision during the first 5 seconds of exposure to visuals, and creates heat maps based on an algorithm that predicts what a real human would be most likely to look at.”

9. FIVE SECOND TEST - Fivesecondtest works by enabling your testers to have five seconds in viewing your image and then must answer the questions you have set.

10. SILVER BACK - a program that records all on-screen actions performed by the user as well as video capture of the users’ face, which provides additional clues to user behavior.

Accelerating SEO strategies with Social Media

Social media does not only stand as a hobby for most Internet people, it also serves as a great standalone strategy for online marketing and even SEO. Let's just depend on the fact that social media marketing has been so widely adopted by those SEO experts due to the massive impact that social media has given directly on search engine listings.

There are actually 3 types of social media. The first one is the owned media, wherein the advertiser owns it to have a brand controlled, cost effective, and longevity strategy. Examples of this are your websites, Twitter accounts and Facebook accounts. The second type is the paid media where the advertiser pays a third party to use the channel. And the last type of social media is the earned media. As explained by Covario's Arnel Leyna, SEO and social media are the new "earned media." Earned media is most effective at the top of the funnel (for awareness, opinion and consideration), which supports and drives PPC media further down the funnel.

Making the most out of combining SEO strategies with social media marketing tactics can be a daunting yet overwhelming task. One should initially identify its target audience before performing the said agenda. After all, targeting your market will serve as a strategy that sets the stage for the tactics you’ll use to execute your game plan.  Read on to get a better understanding of how SEO and social media complement each other.

From a marketing standpoint, you can look at the benefits of SEO and social media two different ways. First, a social media marketing program cannot be implemented without an optimized content. This is a waste of  time and money. Perhaps useful social content such as blog, video, images, and audio, that cannot be discovered via search is a lost opportunity to reach an audience that is looking. Second, implementing SEO programs without leveraging the content distribution and linking benefits of social web participation makes link building for SEO a never-ending battle.  The nature of the social web encourages participation.

Although few people agrees that SEO and social media has different benefits, the two do have an impact on each other. As stated by Teddie Cowell, SEO director, "There is a very strong relationship between search engine marketing and social media. Anything that raises awareness of a brand or particular website, such that it encourages people to search specifically for the brand or website, or increases the probability that a searcher might select that brand or particular website over another within a search engine results page (SERP), is always good for search engine marketing”.

Social Media had really created a reason that made search engine optimization easy to apply. It's that, it just depends on how we will use it and what actions we will do to benefit from the two as a whole.

The Basics of Blogging

Have you heard that blogging acts as an effective marketing strategy for both website promotion and search engine optimization perspective? Blogging is arguably the simplest way to drive traffic to your website. In fact, it's a part of the marketing strategy used by most online entrepreneurs. Blogging is powerful yet easy to do. Whether you're familiar with blogs or not, do understand that they are the key factors in your online marketing.

A blog is an abbreviated version of "weblog," which is a term used to describe websites that maintain an ongoing chronicle of information. A blog features diary-type commentary and links to articles on other Web sites, usually presented as a list of entries in reverse chronological order. As defined in Blogger.com, "A blog is a personal diary. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A political soapbox. A breaking-news outlet. A collection of links. Your own private thoughts. Memos to the world."

One important factor to keep in mind when writing your own blog is to make sure that each individual posts can stand alone by offering valuable content.  This will help your SEO efforts in many, different ways. First, you'll be adding relevant, keyword-rich content to your blog. Secondly, people will be more inclined to link to your blog if it offers value. This will improve your link popularity, which in turn will boost your search engine rankings.

Blogging, as we all know, carries a wide array of benefits that may not only promote your online business but can add up to your SEO strategies also. Here are some of them:

Blogs can do many things that can help your website to earn high search engine ranking. In most cases, blogs can achieve solid ranking faster than regular websites. A blog is easier to publish than a regular website, so you can post content to it more often.

Blogging is a great way to keep in touch with your customers. People like to see new and updated content when they are looking into an opportunity or business.

Blogging is free! Thus, making it a very budget-friendly method when it comes to online marketing.

Blogs make a great contribution in link building.

It allows traffic from social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

A blog is ideal for long tail search terms and long tail rankings.

Fresh contents are needed for updating your blogs. That means your site will be crawled more often by search engines and your content will be seen as having a higher quality as well.

Comments and track backs in blogs encourage interaction.

Marketing your online business through blogging is not as easy as you think. It demands a little patience, time, and hard work.

Tips on How to Start Your Career on Web Designing

Isn't it time to learn some tips on how to make and start your career on creating a web design on your own?

In web designing, we all apperceive that Adobe’s Dreamweaver and Flash are some of the best  and most essential tools by abounding webmasters to productively make a different, attractive, easily accessible and functional website. There a lot of tools that most webmasters are using. Here, design is very important. Design is the action of selecting the appearance and the layout of a site. The focus is not only aloof on appearance, it’s additionally on function. You also have to choose appropriate colors and images in relation to the site's theme.When making a design consider these following tips:

• Make sure each page in your website has something valuable to offer. It must provide compelling content or something useful or interesting to visitors, If you don't have that then you should rectify the problem before worrying how  to present it.

• Don't divert your audience with blinking or scrolling text, animated GIFs, or auto-loading sounds. Having this makes a visitor annoyed and distracted. How can they concentrate reading your site when there are some flying objects around the page that bothers them?Another problem is that a reader can't read the scrolling text clearly if they don't have any freedom to scroll them on their own pace instead they are forced to read the text at whatever speed you assigned it. In that situation, your visitor will read only two sentences then leave. That is why always keep your visitor's interest in mind.

• Do not upset your audience with pop-up windows. Nobody likes pop-up. I don't like pop-up either since it really disturbs me when I'm busy working. The reason why site owners have pop-up is because of their own self interest but suddenly when an idea cross into my mind. I pause and think, what if the reader and site owner did switch situation? Do site owners or do readers have to do the same thing? That is why I realize, always remember to put ourselves in their place and try to be considerate to others.

• Image backgrounds yell incompetent, because only sloppy sites that used them. Another reason why backgrounds yell low quality is because sites that use them are frequently treating their user aggressively in many other ways as well and also having an image as a background makes a page to load slowly. That is why you must put good, easy to load background to attract users.

• Make it easy to find stuff like putting some thought of organization, minimizing the number of clicks, put a limitation to the page length for articles. Do not forget to put the home page on every page so that the user won't get lost and also include menus on every page of the site.

• Don't flood your websites with some flashy multimedia and uncompressed image files.

• Make sure that your site is graspable, easy to read and the links must be properly anchored or assigned.

Make sure that you have to place your contact information on your site so that the user can easily access you if they need assistance, or if they are having a problem with the navigation. Always assure that the design you made is working well online.

Website Optimization: The Key to High Rankings

Millions of companies, including yours, were creating their own websites online with the purpose of reaching the target market all over the world. And for you to achieve this goal, you must ensure that your website is fully optimized for the search engines.

Search engines tend to be a free source of targeted quality traffic, and understanding how they work should be a top priority for any marketer with a Web presence. You can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising, but the search engines can give your site massive amounts of traffic for free.

Optimization of your website solves your problem of making lot of efforts to invite potential customers on your website. Basically your website should adopt various SEO (Search Engine Optimzation) tactics in order for it to become more search engine friendly. Techniques such as marketing, link building, keyword optimization, content writing and traffic building.

HOW TO CAPTURE THE EYES OF SEARCH ENGINES

1.You must first create a well designed site and establish a unique marketing strategy. It would be best if the website is attractive and complementary to the company profile and it gives the audience the information that is targeted to the products, services the company provides.

2.Next, is to get your title tags right. Title tags should accurately describe the web page’s content; or if it is the homepage, then the title tag should describe what the site is all about. Title tags are very important, and factor greatly in the ranking of the websites in the search engines.

3.Another factor which is to be considered important is the content of the articles released on the website. To make your content work you should provide quality to your content for your online users. The content quality can be improvised with the support of experienced and skillful content writers. It is very much necessary for every website to update the content regularly so that the attention of the user does not move your website to any other website.

4.Optimize your website by choosing the proper keywords. Keywords are said to be the back bone for every website to gain high rated ranking on the search engine’s list as the online users prefer to navigate the websites which holds reputed rank. You should choose the keywords according to the methods of SEO.

5.There are also other techniques that were essential for optimizing a website. Such as, submitting articles with one-way links; reciprocal link exchanging; directory submissions; blog posting; RSS feeds submission; and particpation in forums and social media.

When you are running a Web development business, you need to at least have a basic understanding of search engine marketing and web optimization. And take in mind that there is no secret trick to achieve a high site ranking or success on the search engines - it takes patience, time, and hard work.

Improving the Customer Experience on Your Web Site

Search Engine optimization and web design alone were not enough if you want to successfully improve your website and make it more easier to navigate. In terms of enhancing your current web page, customer experience is one of the aspects in Web development that often gets lost somewhere between the HTML and the FTP.

For most web developers, retaining their costumers or visitors isn't an easy job. One must need to constantly prioritize and refocus the customer retention strategies. Based on a study conducted in 2007, only 50% of the study group of employees from different companies was loyal to brands marketed by the companies they were working for. Given this fact, it's not alarming to think that not many customers would stick to the same products either.

In a report, "Why Web Sites Fail," analyst group Forester Research said that every customer who has a bad experience on a Web site tells 10 other people about it. And according to consulting firm Creative Good, you can kiss frustrated customers goodbye. In one of its e-commerce surveys, Creative Good found that 62% of online shoppers have given up at least once while looking for products on a Web site. And 42% of those shoppers actually abandoned the Internet and made their purchases through traditional retail channels.

Of course, once visitors come to shop at your online business store, you want them to have that smooth, risk-free experience. Actually it's not the big issues that cause the problem; it's the little things that make or break their shopping experience. As we all know, the more you improve the overall customer experience on your Web site, the more you'll improve your order-conversion rate, the metric used to describe the rate at which Web-store visitors become paying customers.

As we'll notice, there are several factors that affects the costumer's experience. That is why we've provided few things that you can do to make your Web site more customer-friendly.

• Most visitors prefer using the search tool. That's why a good search tool is essential. A good search tool for ecommerce websites should include the capability to use Boolean search terms such as "blue and pillowcase" to match only blue pillowcases or "comforter or duvet" to match either comforter or duvet.

• Also, being able to search within a set of search results will also help a potential purchaser whittle down a large number of search results to something more manageable without having to perform a new search.

• In some cases bracketing prices and displaying products within ranges such as less than $10, $10-$20 and so on, works better.

• Try showing the number of user reviews, popularity, the star rating, by brand or sorting the products by name in alphabetical order ascending and descending. The more opportunity you give your customers to sort the data in the order that they're most interested in seeing, the better service you provide them.

• When displaying search and filtered results, it helps to provide options in the number of matching items that can be displayed per page.

• Don't limit your customers' options by categorizing products in just one way.

• Avoid having categories that result in only one or two results. Instead, opt to use broader categories that encompass a larger number of products so you give customers more results to choose from.

• Always provide a clickable breadcrumb trail that shows visitors exactly where they are in your site as they search for products.

• Give customers a detailed production descriptions, provide plenty of photographs and, if you're selling products where size is a factor, then give them information about sizing such as how generous or otherwise a size is.

• Also tell them if the product is available now and, if it is on backorder, when it should ship.

Simple changes to your website search, navigation, product descriptions and checkout process can increase conversion rates and result in customers who love your site rather than tolerate its inadequacies or worse, shop elsewhere.