In addition to this, live tracking tools allow site owners to monitor site visitors, cost per conversion and click-through rates to their site with a click of a button.

It is true that in a world where everything has become “instant”, there is a new reality that people do not have the patience to wait for results anymore. We have become used to and are expecting to see immediate results. This expectancy has shifted over to online advertising. Website owners not only want instant visitors by using the quickest methods possible, but they want to see results and conversions and they want to also track the effectiveness of their campaigns, all at the same time.

For this very reason, they seldom look at long-term solutions and never think of the value that copywritten content or optimised website pages offer them for the long term. Search engine optimisation is probably one of the least thought-of methods to use for online marketing. It is a very effective, proven way of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Even though it takes more patience it will deliver the desired results.

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Layout

The Cuil homepage is a study in simplicity, with a black background, the Cuil logo, and the search box as its only major design elements. The search form is supposed to return typing suggestions, but this didn’t work for us on any browser we tested. Maybe Cuil turned this off for the time being to take some load of its servers.

Cuil takes a very different approach to displaying its results. Instead of a list, it displays results in three columns (though you can switch to a two-column view as well). Intuitively, it would seem that the most important results would be in the top left corner, but Cuil does not make this explicit. The top right spot is reserved for related searches, which usually displays either five or ten main suggestions and then, on mouse-over, slides open and reveals a more detailed selection.

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This is the second article in the Building Effective Websites series, covering key design and content issues that will draw customers into your site.

The three articles are:

1. How to be found

2. How to be read (this article)

3. How to be bookmarked.

This article will cover the Section 2 of these three crucial design elements with loads of suggestions and tools for improvement. 

These articles will give you the tools to analyze your site and talk intelligently with your web designers to improve it.
 
Section 2: How To Be Read (How to Help Visitors Explore Your Site)

If you followed the suggestions listed in Section 1, you should be experiencing increased traffic to your site. Now the question becomes, how do you draw site visitors in? How do you encourage them to explore around to find all the wonderful content you are offering? Or, in other words, how can you get them to read what you have?

Content is King
People seek solid content when surfing the Web. Your site should be a source of solid, helpful content if you wish to draw people in. Uniquely define this content, your service and/or your product in terms that people will be searching for is the first step in drawing people in.

Content will almost always be more important for traffic than style.

Finding the Content
A significant challenge with many web sites, however, is that it is difficult to find the content. There are several things to consider in assisting site visitors to do so.

State your unique selling proposition in the opening paragraph of your home page. Many sites are not clear about their purpose. If you force to visitor to search around to find what you are offering, many will not stay around to find it. Pictures are nice, but they serve to add to or reinforce the content you must have.
For example, the first line of the first paragraph of the www.corbinball.com web site is: “Meetings Technology Headquarters –  the world’s most comprehensive site about meeting planning and events technology.”  It is very clear about what you will find there, defining it with key words that people use to find this information.

In other words, answer within seconds the question “What’s in it for me (the site visitor)?” This same question should be answered for every significant content page on your site as well.

Navigation
A poor navigation scheme is probably the biggest hindrance to people finding the site content you are offering. I recommend the following to help:

• Navigation bar consistency: Keep your navigation scheme the same on every page and place it as a bar on the top of the page or on the left side.  Many sites move or change the navigation elements from page to page making it difficult for visitors to figure out where to go.
• The 3-Click Rule: One part of your web site should not be more than 3 clicks (or 4 clicks maximum) from any other part of your site. Make sure a link back to home is included on every page to help with this.
• No more than seven primary navigation items recommend:  The human mind on average does not remember more than seven items easily. More than seven navigation items (nine maximum) will cause confusion, and, therefore, will not explore your site as thoroughly.

• Avoid splash pages:  Splash pages (often animated) are commonly seen as you enter a site. Not only do they add load time and serve as a hindrance for the visitor to see your content, they typically do not have a navigation scheme, breaking the above recommendation about navigation bar consistency.
• Don’t hot-link the current page in the navigation scheme.  If you are on your home page, the “home” button should appear selected (a different color usually) and nothing should happen if you click on it. This is a very common error which hinders site ease of use.

Design
Web site building involves an interesting mixture of art and technology.  Many web design firms do not balance these “right-brain vs. left brain”  functions well.

The content and navigation mechanics involve the “left-brain” technology side. This must be balanced with the “right-brain” artistic side. 

An attractive design portrays you corporate image, establishes a “feel” to your site and should be carefully considered. Recommendations:

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There’s no point throwing dollars at developing a website for your business if none of your potential clients ever find it.

Almost 90 per cent of all online traffic is directed through the various search engines Google, Yahoo or NineMSN.

With millions and millions of businesses out there, big and small, trying to attract the same customers as you to their online sales pitch, knowing how to properly market your business through search engine optimisation (SEO) is virtually the only way to be found on the net.

Optimising your website for these search engines can significantly boost the flow of traffic to your site and thereby helps you create a level playing field between your small business and its competitors, no matter what size they may be.

Keith Paulin, Group General Manager of SEOWorks.com outlines what he considers the three most important elements that make websites work to give you a measurable return on your investment (ROI):

1. Have the right technical structure to begin with.

2. Write quality, original, rich content which tells a good, honest story and is passionate about your business.

3. Have incoming links to your site.

‘’Get these three things right and you can have very measurable ROI,'’ he says.

When it comes to writing your website’s rich content and assessing which key words and metatags you will use behind your public site to attract the attention of the search engine’s web crawlers, you will need to have a very clear idea of what your business sells and who your target market is.

Finding your niche by understanding your target market is, more than anything, your most valuable SEO strategy, says Andrew Thornberry, MD of website design, IT and marketing group, Yuranga.com.

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How is your website doing compared with competitors? There are a variety of tools to assess its performance. Unfortunately, you’re also likely to get a variety of results

If your company has any kind of consumer-facing Web presence–and most companies do–or you’re an entrepreneur with your own website, chances are that you’ve run into one of the biggest grey areas on the Internet: How do you compare your website’s performance to that of your competitors? In other words, how do you figure out whether your site is just a collection of words and pretty pictures, or whether it’s actually reaching your customers?

Measuring how many people come to your website isn’t that hard–most web servers can run tools such as AWStats, which tell you how many visitors and page views you get a month, where viewers came from and how many pages they checked out on each visit. Google offers such a suite of tools for free. The tools, called Google Analytics, require you to add a small piece of code to your pages.

So, now you’ve got all kinds of information about your website. But how do you know whether your stats measure up to other companies in your industry? The simple answer is that you don’t. That’s because your competitors probably don’t publicize their own internal figures for traffic and "conversion" rates (how many visitors actually wind up clicking a link to buy something or find out more information).

In the absence of that data, you have to use the services of a traffic-measurement company, which tries to arrive at those numbers through external means. There are several of these companies, including comScore (which acquired Media Metrix last year and recently acquired M:Mobile, a mobile measurement company); Nielsen (the TV, radio and newspaper measurement company, which built a web business by acquiring NetRatings); and several web-only businesses such as Compete.com, Hitwise and Quantcast.

Each of these companies uses one or more of the following methods for measuring web traffic: software that is (voluntarily) installed by surfers and tracks their behaviour; software that sits on an Internet host’s servers; a piece of code installed on websites; and web or phone surveys that ask users which sites they visit. The problem is that each firm comes up with different numbers, and there’s no way of knowing which one is more reliable.

In some cases, figures from comScore have shown traffic decreasing at a popular website over a period of months, while numbers from Nielsen or Hitwise have shown just the opposite. In other cases, there’s a massive gap between the figures from a rating firm and those from a site’s own server logs. For example, in the case of MLB.com, the major-league baseball site, Nielsen reported that it had 6.2 million unique visitors in December, while the site showed that it had 19.4 million.

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Jamie Poston, media director for Cactus, said the Denver agency’s clients spent about 15 percent of their ad budgets online in 2007.

This year, he said that will almost double. "There’s a lot of money moving over to the Internet, depending on the client, their goals," he said.

Part of the reason is that clients often can track results, thanks to sophisticated software programs offered by search engines such as Google.

"Clients love that," Poston said. "They can tell you on a daily basis what (search) terms are working and what terms aren’t."

Internet advertising has tripled from $7 billion in 2003 to $21 billion last year, fueled in large part by the text ads above and beside Internet search results.

More than 40 percent of all online advertising is spent with search engines, according to a Pricewaterhouse Coopers study sponsored by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Google controls roughly 60 percent of that market, according to ComScore.

By contrast, only about 20 percent of online ad dollars is spent on display advertising, the banner ads placed on Web sites. Other categories, such as classified advertising and e-mail marketing, make up the remainder.

Given the dichotomy between search and display, many wonder when, if ever, advertising will be able to support the content delivered on the Internet.

Liberty Media Chairman John Malone recently chimed in on the topic with CNBC’s David Farber.

"Everybody talks about the Internet and the huge amount of advertising," Malone said. But he said it looks mostly like Google, and to him that isn’t advertising.

"That’s search. That’s direct marketing."

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Matt Warman looks at the services offered by the world’s largest search engine, including its new online universe

In Google’s new "Lively" service, the search engine giant invites users to create a computer character to represent them, an "avatar", and then to roam through a series of virtual "rooms", talking to other people, examining their furniture and watching their movies.

While the idea is not particularly new, and it’s certainly not going to revolutionise the web tomorrow, Lively demonstrates one key thing about Google: when it comes to the internet, this $23 billion California company really does have a finger in every pie.

The idea, as with the company’s popular email service Gmail, was born out of employees’ "20 per cent time". Under this policy, Google workers are required to spend a day a week working on projects outside their normal job that they find interesting. The key to much of the company’s success is that there’s often a commercial application, too. Indeed, it’s commerce that has made Google so vast in size: roughly 1.2 billion searches are made every day, and for each one Google picks up on the words you use and provides adverts next to the search results. That means if you search for New York, you’re presented with a map, sites packed with information, and also links to travel companies, each promising you the time of your life. Every time you click through to a new site from an advertiser’s link, Google makes a few cents.

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How to get the most out of google

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 17/07/2008

Matt Warman looks at the services offered by the world’s largest search engine, including its new online universe In Google’s new "Lively" service, the search engine giant invites users to create a computer character to represent them, an "avatar", and then to roam through a series of virtual "rooms", talking to other people, examining their furniture and watching their movies. Make the most of maps: Google.maps can make any A-Z almost completely redundant While the idea is not particularly new, and it’s certainly not going to revolutionise the web tomorrow, Lively demonstrates one key thing about Google: when it comes to the internet, this $23 billion California company really does have a finger in every pie. The idea, as with the company’s popular email service Gmail, was born out of employees’ "20 per cent time". Under this policy, Google workers are required to spend a day a week working on projects outside their normal job that they find interesting. The key to much of the company’s success is that there’s often a commercial application, too. Indeed, it’s commerce that has made Google so vast in size: roughly 1.2 billion searches are made every day, and for each one Google picks up on the words you use and provides adverts next to the search results. That means if you search for New York, you’re presented with a map, sites packed with information, and also links to travel companies, each promising you the time of your life. Every time you click through to a new site from an advertiser’s link, Google makes a few cents. And that, probably, is why we might see a lot more of Lively in the future, too. Sure, every amateur blogger and teenager will want a "room" of their own if the service catches on (it’s , testing officially only in the US but is accessible worldwide), but it’s commercial companies that will make or break it. As you can put picture frames on the wall and choose their contents, for instance, the possibilities for advertising are almost endless. All businesses have to do is entice you in - and it might not be long before pointing to a chair in, say, Ikea’s "room" is just a click away from buying it.

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Makeovers aren’t restricted to people wanting to change their looks or to make a house easier to sell.

Established businesses also can benefit from image updates through the process known as branding.

"Branding positions the personality and identity of a company or product among the competition," explains marketing professor Francine Jones from Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business. "It sends out a message of a company’s purpose in the market."

Jones, whose expertise includes brand management and corporate identity, said businesses sometimes simply want a fresh start or to expand their market with a whole new line or brand.

That’s where companies like Montreal marketing and communications firm Precision come in.

President Glen Eisenberg said he targets local medium-size independent businesses with national and international dealings making $10 million to $50 million in annual revenues that need a more marketing-driven approach to sales. Then he "forces the clients to find their comfort level for marketing activities."

 That starts with "asking hard questions of our clients’ competition, strengths and weaknesses, then making recommendations and introducing elements and programs to drive the clients’ businesses and meet their objectives."

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The Google-Yahoo partnership has theoretical implications for the search market and, by consequence, for the whole advertising market.

It’s reasonable to speculate that a successful test will lead to a growing role for Google in delivering advertising in response to Yahoo search queries. In the event this transpires, there will be a de facto consolidation in U.S. search.

Conventional wisdom asserts that there is an inherent commercial democracy in paid search. The party who bids highest and who achieves the highest quality score, comprised of price, relevance and likelihood to click, wins. And in a competitive market the price is capped by the incremental cost of the click to the advertiser in search engine A vs. search engines B, C or D and the total volume of clicks that the advertiser wants, needs or can afford.

In the world that existed before search engines, the "cost per" world was dominated by direct-response print, TV, mail and telesales channels, which offered abundant competitive choice and price/volume equations generated by that choice.

For many advertisers search is the best value in the market and made relatively better as audiences, and attention to other channels, fragment and the use of do-not-call and other commercial blockers rise. This explains the rise of search and the re-allocation of budgets from other channels.

Inevitably, the per-click price of search will continue to rise if other channels deliver less volume and efficiency, and, if not capped by internal competition in the market, they will rise to a fraction below the costs of non-search channels.

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While I am on holiday this week, through the magic of Internet time and custom tubes, my column isn’t. During this time off I’ll be taking time out for rest, reflection, and especially, a hiatus from one of my several jobs: Designated Undercompensated Google Ad Salesman.

What, you say? Google ads sell themselves? $14 billion in annual revenues would seem to suggest that yes, they do.

But recall that about half of those revenues come from non-search inventory: the contextual ads Google facilitates in partnership with tens of thousands of online publishers. Because—yes—the search ads by and large sell themselves, Google has put a ton of effort into moving the contextual inventory. And unbeknownst to skeptics, they’ve done much to improve it for advertisers. Although the financial breakdowns in annual reports are a bit difficult to interpret, a rough reading of the financials suggests that the share of overall revenues accounted for by the "Google Network" dropped again in fiscal 2007, to around 36%, from a high water mark four years ago near 50%. Google’s revenue growth overall has been driven primarily by the core: ads showing on Google Search and a few other Google-owned properties.

The first revenue growth hit Google took in this vein was largely based on smart pricing (an actuarial-type formula that paid low quality advertisers less per click) and stricter policies designed to weed the low-quality and nonconverting inventory out of the network. What was left gave a much higher-quality click to advertisers for any given click; even so, not all advertisers have been able to make the best of it.

Content-phobia is very real among Google advertisers. In spite of the many improvements in the platform and years of online advertising experience among clients, many a prospective client still comes to me with the casual comment that "we shut the network off - we found it just didn’t perform."

Here I’ll look at good reasons for advertisers to have taken just this action, and then some reasons they should consider updating their thinking. Finally, I’ll offer some quick tips on how to get back on the contextual advertising horse.

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