avinash malla

You must have come across such situations in your website, where google has crawled some pages of your website, but later you moved that page somewhere. You might fear that u’re loosing the leads to your website. You must have seen your website showing 404 (”Page Not Found”) messages.

Well there are some simple things you can do in your Joomla website. You can either create a custom error page(404 page) and then redirect the 404 messages to the custom page or simply redirect it to the homepage.

1. htaccess redirection : You can simply add this code to your .htaccess file

ErrorDocument 404 index.php [to redirect it to your homepage]

ErrorDocument 404 /404.php [to redirect it to your custom error page named 404.php]

defined( ‘_JEXEC’ ) or die( ‘Restricted access’ );
header (”Location: /”); exit(); // add this line

Creating a great and targeted PPC (Pay per Click) campaign is only the beginning towards driving traffic, generating leads and increasing conversions. The initial seconds after someone has clicked your ad are the most important towards convincing the visitor that they should stay on your page and navigate through your site. Optimizing a landing page is not just about aesthetics; it also is about understanding the user, his reason for clicking your ad and, of course, relevance and functionality.

1- Identify Visitors:

Before deciding how to optimize your page you must consider what kind of people will be clicking on your page. Start with analyzing who will search for your product or service. Is it something geared towards a younger crowd or older crowd? Are you selling graphic tees or selling life insurance?

Other than a generational demographic consider decision-making styles. When selling fun items people might be more spontaneous in making choices; they don’t want to read a long description. If you’re selling life insurance, the person considering the plan will be more methodical in their choice; in this case, there should be a lot of good information displayed.

2- Create Conversion Paths:

Choosing keywords for a PPC campaign can be a challenge, but always choose keywords a potential customer will use to search for your product and not descriptive words.

Even if the keyword is targeted, it is hard to assume that everyone who typed in the same keyword in the search query want the same results. For example, if you sell mobile phones on your site, consider the common reasons why someone would search for this term. It could be because they want to purchase a phone or maybe they want information and later on wish to consider buying a new phone. If your main objective is to sell a phone, the main call-to-action should be directing the user to purchase a new phone; however, you should also add a secondary call to action that will let the visitor know where they can find more information about phones.

3- Page Functionality

Making visitors jump through hoops to reach the product is not a good idea when trying to optimize a page for functionality. The most ideal and successful option is showing the user what they were searching for on the actual landing page. This technique will increase conversion and reduce bounce rate.

White space and clear call-to-actions work well with most people. The use of white space is a more calming design that is simplified and allows the user to concentrate solely on the call-to-action or product.

To use up less space on the page, consider removing the navigation bar all together. This keeps the visitor focused on the targeted product. Offer the visitor a choice by adding one clean link to the rest of your site where they can see more products or choices.

4- Test, Test, Test:

Successful websites come in different styles, even if they sell the same products. There is no one solid winning formula; two websites can do very well even if they use two different approaches. To come up with your winning formula you must use analytics and testing. Analytics will help give you answers to what needs more adjustment and what already works. You can test everything on the landing page, but testing the call-to-action is a key starting point. Monitoring analytics and testing results closely is an essential ongoing element in any optimization process.

Source : Optimum7

I was looking for a good website that provides good website analysis. Then, as I was going through Daniweb for help, I came across a link that said “Free Website Analysis”.  I entered the details of the website I wanted to analyse – www.bestnepalpackage.com

These are the results, I recieved.

SCORE 81 OUT OF 100.

A website grade of 81/100 for bestnepalpackage.com means that of the hundreds of thousands of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 81% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data , website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.

The website bestnepalpackage.com ranks 340,748 of the 1,830,985 websites that have been
ranked so far.

The software gets constantly upgraded and the algorithm enhanced. The number of potential recommendations provided by the tool also increases frequently.

Now let me go through the criteria based on which it analyses the websites.

1. On Page SEO :  On-Page SEO is the process of placing your selected keywords in the right places on your web pages. On-page SEO involves changing page titles, headings, content, and URLs to improve search engine rankings.
   1. Metadata : Metadata tags allow you to tell the search engines what your web page is about.  Though the search engines don’t weigh keywords as heavily as they used to, they’re still important to get right. By using a high number of keywords, it is possible that you are diluting the effect of your most important keywords. Keeping the keywords to 10 or less is suggested.
   2. Heading Summary :  Similar to how newspapers and magazines use headings and sub-headings to help readers, websites can use special tags in their HTML. These tags not only help human readers read the content, they also help search engine spiders better understand the content on a page and what is most important. It is generally a good idea to use heading tags to help signal to the search engines, what the webpage is about.
   3. Image Summary :  Images are a great way to enhance a website from a user’s perspective. However, it is important to note that search engine crawlers cannot really “see” images. So, if you have lots of images that contain textual content within the image itself, this content will not be seen by the crawlers.
      HTML helps address this issue by providing a way to specify the textual content for an image using the “alt” attribute. The alt attribute allows web pages to assign specific text as the “alternative” content for images for those that cannot view the images themselves. This can be search engine crawlers or text-only web browsers.
   4. Interior Page Analysis : Optimum7 looks at a few other pages on your website to see how well they are optimized. This sort of
      interior page analysis can reveal exciting opportunities for you to target specific keywords or visitors.  You can then create landing pages optimized towards converting those visitors into customers.
   5. Readability Level : This score measures the approximate level of education necessary to read and understand the web page content. In most cases, the content should be made to be simple so that a majority of the target audience can understand it.
2. Off-Page Seo : Off-Page SEO includes all the things you do to promote your website outside the design of the website itself. Getting more inbound links to your site, registering with directories relevant to your industry, and getting more pages into the search engine indexes are all parts of Off-Page SEO.
   1. Domain Info :  Most experts agree that you should register your domain for a long time, because search engines factor domain “stability” when looking at your pages. Google and other search engines may penalize websites with domains that are set to expire soon. The reason for this is that many spam sites are often registered for short periods of time. Most registrars support paying upfront for several years and the cost is usually only about $10-$20 per year, so it is generally worth it.
   2. Google Page Rank : “Google PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves important weigh more heavily and help to make other pages important.” – From Google
   3. Google Indexed Pages :  www.bestnepalpackage.com scored 476 on this one. This number is the approximate number of pages on bestnepalpackage.com that have been stored in the Google index. The Google web crawler will visit the website periodically and look for new content for its index. Generally, the more pages your site has within the Google cache, the better.
   4. Last Google Crawl Date : Google will periodically crawl websites looking for new and updated content. In general, you want
      Google to crawl your site as often as possible, so your new content shows up in Google search results immediately.
   5. Traffic Rank : Alexa is an online service that measures traffic for millions of sites on the Internet in a similar way to
      Nielsen television show ratings.  www.bestnepalpackage.com has an Alexa rank of 626,387 which is in the top 2.014 % of all websites.
   6. Inbound Links : One of the most important measures for a website is how many other sites link to it. The more links the better. Having links to your website from authoritative resources on the Internet helps you rank higher in search engines since these links are an indication that your website is trustworthy and contains good content.
   7. DMOZ Directory : DMOZ, The Open Directory Project, is the largest and most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.
   8. Yahoo! Directory : The Yahoo! Directory is a web directory which rivals the DMOZ Open Directory Project in size. It is  recommended that every business have a listing in the Yahoo! Directory.
3. Blogosphere : Blogging makes sense from a marketing perspective. You’ll be leveraging the shift from outbound to inbound marketing and interacting with your customers in new ways. A blog lets you meet your customers more directly than sending out brochures or an
   email campaign. It changes your website from a brochure that most people look at once to something that people interact with and come back to.
   1. Blog Analysis : Blogging is a great way to reach your target audience with your thoughts, opinions, and offerings on relevant topics.
4. Social Mediasphere : Making sure that your company has an extensive web presence outside of your own website is important. It increases the chances that your prospects will find your company when they are online since there are more web pages that contain information about your company.
   1. del.icio.us bookmarks : del.icio.us is a web-based bookmarking site. Delicious users save their bookmarks on the website so they can access them from any browser. A website that has many users bookmarking it is generally popular and will get more traffic.
   2. Digg.com Submission Summary : Digg is a social media site where anyone can submit articles, and viewers can vote for articles they like. Very popular articles can make it to the front page of Digg, resulting in more traffic to your website.
5. Converting Qualiflied Visitors to Leads : Visitors to your site are nice, but you probably want to convert qualified, interested visitors into actual customers. There are a number of ways to increase your conversion efficiency, turning more qualified visitors into prospects, leads, and eventually customers.
   1. RSS Feed : The feed link should be correctly setup so that it can be auto-detected by feed readers and contemporary browsers.
   2. Conversion Forms : Forms should be created for users to easily input their requirements. A simple feedback form is good to start with.

Optimum7 uses these techniques to analyse the websites. The free analysis is available now….!! You can get it from here