The answer might well be; all of the above. This might spark the thought “uh oh, death by committee.” But in this case, we don’t mean to suggest a Web Committee be struck. Our work has found that companies who mix online elements of their operations with real-world elements, develop better strategies and usage policies when there is a multi-disciplinary team involved. End decisions should not be based on committee voting. A business is about making a profit and that means autocracy. But today, such decisions can be better made when a team can build concensus and make a viable recommendation to the senior manager who must then make the final decision.

I usually recommend that a company establish a team that mixes departments and various levels of experience. While many senior managers over 50 may feel the Web is the domain of youth, nothing makes up for seasoned business experience. Some rules may be different on the Web, but the fundamentals of good financial and corporate governance remain the same. Our experience has been that the best teams usually comprise of Marketing, Finance, HR and Legal. Through marketing, finance and HR’s participation, you’re able to address the multiple key audiences and stakeholders that will be impacted by your online operations. And good fiscal judgement is more likely to exercised. Additionally, the involvement of Finance will help them to better understand the costs associated with the online elements of the business.

By engaging a senior management person with key strategic decisions around the Web, you also build awareness at the executive level, which helps in times of crisis or when conducting strategic planning. A good team will develop over time and guidelines for areas of responsibilities should be established and reviewed annually. The team should change from time to time as well to keep ideas and objectives fresh.

Well, in reality all the above-mentioned things can only drive a lot of traffic to your blog/websites, but it will never improve the conversion rate. The most important aspect behind higher conversions is an SEO-friendly web design. We’re not talking about the on-page SEO and working on Meta tags (you must have done it already, if you’re getting high traffic), but rather about the importance of using the right fonts, ad placement, and user-friendliness of the website.

Working with User Friendly Design

Imagine if your “register” option for the new users is located at bottom right corner of the page, who’d really bother to scroll down all the way and click on it? Likewise, if the visitors see only ads instead of the info they came searching for, they won’t bother scrolling down or browsing through your web pages.

Apart from good informative unique content, you need –

• Appropriate graphics to go along with the text,
• Nice SEO-friendly layout,
• Thorough linking between pages,
• Proper Website Structure
• Media like photos and embedded videos to add attraction to the site

Optimizing Your Site Better

A well optimized SEO-friendly website design includes appropriate and attractive design elements, strategic linking, structure optimization, meta-tag optimization, specialized keyword choices, and most importantly alt tag optimization!

Remember, the alt tag shows up in the image results and this is where most of the people lose out on. Imagine if you run an auto blog and you’ve written the latest post on the 2010 BMW 520d, and someone searches for images of BMW 520d, your blog may not appear in the search results just because the alt tag was not optimized.

And, if something similar happens with 100s of other posts, just try to figure out how many visitors are you losing out on?

Optimizing for Common Typos

What’s more, it is also not a bad idea to optimize your site for some of the most common misspelled keywords, for instance, acomodate and acommodate along with the actual keyword accommodate. But, you must optimize your site carefully otherwise this may turn off the regular visitors (as they may feel that these are unintended typos from careless authors).

Homepage is not the Best Landing Page!

Lastly, you must ensure that you’ve a good landing page for your visitors. One of the biggest misconceptions is that homepage is the best landing page! This is 100% WRONG by all means! Remember, people click on your site/blog searching for something on Google and again asking them to search once again on your site to display the info of their interest doesn’t yield good results!

I also needed to re do the site since the launch of Intevix. This business is taking up more and more of my time as we continue to develop our products and consulting services. Actually a lot of what I did here is now being done via intevix and if we don’t offer a specific service or solution we have more than likely have am local partner to provide the professional services required by businesses.

Anyways thats all for now. I am working on my next great blog entry …. Gotta keep people on their feet!