I review websites every day. The flaws that I find are almost always the same. So I decided that it would be a good idea to write an article on the most common usability flaws and how to avoid them.

Lack of Funnel Planning
It’s a fact: people won’t do anything unless you ask them to, which means that you need to use calls to action on your site. But you also need to plan the process your visitors will go through to complete the desired action.

Let’s say that you sell t-shirts and your desired action is for your visitors to place an order. Let’s assume that you sell red and blue t-shirts. You should use the home page to get people’s attention and tell them why your t-shirts are so great. Then, at the end of the home page, invite them to visit you red t-shirts page or your blue t-shirts page. They will click on either one and then tell them about your red t-shirts and their benefits. At the end of that page, invite them to add the item to the shopping cart. In the shopping cart page invite them to start the checkout process.

Always take your visitors to the next step, don’t just have the information on your site and hope that people will find it. Plan the process and have appropriate calls to action.

Less is More
The first thing I do when I review a website is looking for elements that I can remove. The more I get rid of, the better the website looks. If you have a feature that 0.01% of your visitors use, get rid of it; it’s confusing the other 99.99% of your visitors.

Start taking things away until you only have the essentials. Resist the temptation of having a lot of stuff in your pages.

Group Similar Sections Together
Organize the information on your site in a way that you only have a few sections and several sub-sections. This is called vertical architecture and it’s the opposite of horizontal architecture (which allows you to access pretty much every page on the site from the home page).

Make Text Easy to Read
Use every-day words for your website. Impress your visitors with your content, not with fancy words. Use short sentences and short paragraphs. Get your point across with as few words as you can.

Use bullet-points, bold text and subheads to make the text easier to read.

Easy-to-read text is the difference between a successful website and a failure.

Say What You Offer Right Away
Every day I see websites that fail at telling their visitors what they are about in less than 30 seconds. Why are these companies putting their visitors through this kind of torture? If you are McDonalds, you don’t really need to explain that you sell burgers. But if your brand isn’t that popular, use a tag line or a headline to let your visitors know what they can find on your website. This is a great way to express your competitive advantage. If you sell dresses and what makes your company unique is that they are imported from Italy, make your tag line “Luxury Italian Dresses”.

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I posted an article on StartupNation.com about the best WordPress plugins. It’s a great list: http://www.startupnation.com/articles/9407/1/wordpress-plugins-superpower-your-blog.htm

To be really successful at Pay per Click (PPC) marketing, you need to optimize your campaigns all the time. Every week would be ideal. If you can’t, try to do it at least every two weeks.

When we optimize our clients’ Pay per Click (PPC) campaigns, there are three main things that we do for them.

Ad Position Optimization
People don’t go to the fourth page of PPC ads to find what they’re looking for. If your ads don’t show within the first positions of the first page, very few people will click on them. However, ads in the first position always get a lot of unqualified clicks because people tend to click before they read. For that reason, advertisers in the first positions end up paying for a lot of junk traffic.

Try to get your ad between positions 2 and 6. On Google AdWords there are two ways you can increase your ad position: by raising the bid amounts and by making the ad more relevant –or a combination of both. On Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter, ad relevancy is not an influential factor; they only care about bid amounts.

There is one case where it really makes sense to be number 1. Google can sometimes put your ad above the organic results instead of on the right side of the screen. If your ad is very relevant and your bid is high enough, you’ll get there eventually. Ads at the top get much more traffic than ads on the right side.

Ad Copy
You should always be running split-tests. They are free, setting up the test will take you less than a minute and most of the time a tiny change can boost your Click-Through Rate (CTR). Last week we replaced the word “amazing” with the word “great” for one of our clients and CTR went up 46%. That’s a huge improvement and all it took was a tiny change. Unless you constantly test, you won’t know what works and what doesn’t.

Use PPC as a market research tool for the real world. You can run two ads; one featuring your low prices and another one featuring your high quality. Then you can figure out if online buyers in your industry are more price-driven or quality-driven.

Conversion Rate
The conversion rate optimization is the most important component of a PPC campaign optimization. You need to figure out what keywords convert very well and which ones convert poorly or don’t convert at all. Then there are a few things that you should do about non-converting keywords: get rid of them, add negative keywords to your campaign (if people are searching for “free widgets” and you sell widgets, add “free” to the list of negative keywords) and/or lower the bids for these keywords. If you have keywords that convert very well, this is what you need to do: perform more keyword research and add similar keywords to your campaign, create an ad group for these specific keywords so you can keep a closer eye on them, increase the bid value and use these keywords to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or PPC using other search engines. Yahoo!, Ask and MSN won’t send you as much traffic as Google, but they can send you a fair amount of traffic that might convert better than Google AdWords’.

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I wrote an article on Time Management. Check it out here: http://startup.partnerup.com/2009/04/14/time-management-tips-get-things-done-and-boost-your-productivity/

Google is “Yellow Pages on Steroids”. Several businesses that used to be tiny are now 10 times bigger because of Google. Some of them hired SEO firms and others ranked their own websites. Some people even ranked first by accident. They created a website a long time ago, published some great information and time did the rest of the work.

Today I will share 5 SEO secrets that we use with our clients from all over the world. These secrets won’t rank you first by themselves; there is a lot more that you need to do, but these tips will definitely make a huge difference.

Forget About Meta Keywords and Submitting Your Site to Google
2002 is long gone; rules have changed. Meta keywords won’t help you at all and you don’t need to submit your website to Google; they will find it.

Avoid Over-Optimization
If your idea of SEO is writing a page and putting your keyword in it 50 times, forget it. If all the links pointing to your site have the same anchor text, that will affect you too. Make your content and backlinks look natural. Write for your visitors, not the search engines. A great website with outstanding information will get a lot more links than an over-optimized site.

Target Several Keywords on One Page
Choose a main keyword and then think of 5-10 keyword modifiers. For example, if your main keyword is “cowhide rugs”, add words before and after to go after secondary keywords as well. Some of these keywords could be “buy cowhide rugs”, “cowhide rugs store”, “black cowhide rugs”, etc. Notice that all these keywords have the main keyword in them.

Get Links from Social Media Sites
The advantage of social media sites is that most of them have a lot of authority and trust. Links from these sites will be worth a lot. On the downside, anybody can get links from these social media sites, but they can still help you a lot.

Some of these sites are Squidoo, HubPages, NewsVine, BizHeat, KillerStartups and Twitter (links in the bio section aren’t “nofollow”). SEOmoz has, in my opinion, the best list of social media sites you can easily get links from. You can find it here: http://www.seomoz.org/social-directory

Don’t Overlook the Holy Grail of Link Sources
I can’t believe how many people skip this step. The best place to start looking for links is people that you know and you have relationships with. We all have friends and relatives with blogs or websites. I am sure that your company has vendors; ask these people to link to you as their client. Ask your clients to link to you. Ask the organizations you belong to. How about the chamber of commerce in your city? How about local universities, libraries and community colleges?

Here’s something to keep in mind: people love linking to great content. They don’t link to commercial sites as much. So create great content and become THE place people want to go to find information about the kind of product you sell. If your information is useful, many people in your industry will love to list you on their lists of useful resources.

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In case you didn’t know this, I am a guest blogger for StartupNation, PartnerUp and TPE. These are some of the last posts I wrote for StartupNation and PartnerUp:

Facebook Marketing

Social Media Success Tips

Social Bookmark Marketing

Twitter Marketing

LinkedIn Marketing

Web Metrics

Link Building Techniques

And Entrepreneur.com has honored me by choosing me to be one of their experts. They have an amazing Q&A system that allows entrepreneurs to ask questions to specialists in different fields. My profile can be found here: http://www.entrepreneur.com/ask/expert15038.html

I wrote an article for the Toilet Paper Entrepreneur’s blog about viral marketing. Check it out here: http://www.toiletpaperentrepreneur.com/blog/viral-marketing-how-to-use-viral-content-to-get-people-talking-about-you

You’ve heard many times how important Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is. However, as a smart business person, you should be asking yourself why it is so important and how much money a first position is worth. Unless you know this, you won’t have a clue as of whether or not investing in SEO makes sense to your business.

Step 1: Calculate Total Traffic
You can use Google’s Keyword Tool to get an idea of the number of searches a certain keyword has. Let’s say that you want to rank for “hormone replacement therapy”. According to Google there are 74,000 people searching for that term every month.

Step 2: Calculate Your Traffic
According to SeoResearcher.com, the first position of Google gets 56% of the clicks. That means that if you are first on Google for “hormone replacement therapy” your site will get 41,440 visits from Google alone.

Step 3: Figure Out Your Conversion Rate
Based on your current stats, how many paying customers do you get for every 100 people that visit your site? For this example, let’s say that your conversion rate is 0.5%, which means that out of the 41,440 people that will visit your website, 207 will become paying customers of your hormone replacement center.

Step 4: Figure Out Your Net Profit per Customer
Let’s say that you make $300 from each of your customers. Multiply that by 207 and you can see that your first ranking is worth to you $62,100 per month!

It Gets Even Better
There are a few ways that you can benefit even more from SEO. First of all, if you rank first for “hormone replacement therapy”, you’re very likely to have top 5 positions for maybe 10 related keywords with similar search volumes. This can easily multiply your profits by three.

Also, don’t forget that these numbers are just for Google. Add Yahoo, MSN and Ask and your profit will be between 30% and 40% larger.

The conversion rate used here (0.5%) is really low. In most cases, more than 1 out of 200 of a website’s visitors become paying customers.

You need to take into consideration the lifetime value of your customers. People might find you through the search engines the first time and they might stay with you forever. They might also tell all their friends and family members about your company.

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If you have a website and you’re promoting it, you need to start tracking your stats. If you don’t, you have no idea if you are doing things right or not. You don’t know what campaigns are working, which ones aren’t and you don’t have a clue as of why people aren’t buying from you as much as you’d like them to.

Google Analytics is a great tracking tool. The best free one in my opinion. What I love about Google Analytics is that you can get very advanced segmented reports if you are a pro, but you can also get very basic reports that anybody can understand.

The way I use Google Analytics revolves around conversion rates. There are many metrics that I care about, but conversion rate is always first. Why? Well, a conversion is your ultimate goal and if you understand what kind of traffic converts, then you can focus on that segment and get more of it.

Let’s take a look at the stats of one of our clients. Visits is the total number of visits a website gets. Unique Visitors, on the other hand, is the number of people that visit your site. If one person visits your site 4 times, that is accounted as 4 visits and 1 unique visitor.

Page views is the total number of pages viewed by all your visitors.

Time on site is pretty self-explanatory.

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave your website right after they arrived. In the case of this client the bounce rate is high because most people go to their site to read one piece of content. Although a high bounce rate is usually bad, it not always is.

New Visits refers to the percentage of visitors that are on your site for the first time.

If you click on Map Overlay and then Conversion Rate you will see a screen like this one.

In this chart we can see that the conversion rate is 1.49% for the US and 0% for Canada. The funny thing is that the CEO of this company called me last week and he told me that he thought that his products would sell really well in Canada. After I showed him this, he changed his mind.

Stats are a great way to stay informed and make smart decisions. If you get a lot of information and you don’t do anything with it, you might as well not get the information.

Now, let’s take a look at new and returning visitors.

We can see how returning visitors covert twice as much as new visitors. This helped us decide that we wanted to start a new blog on the site to keep people engaged and coming as often as possible. Remember, it’s not the data that counts, it’s what you do with it.

Let’s take a look at one of my favorite reports: Traffic Sources.

We can see that direct traffic converts fairly well -for this industry is actually a great conversion rate. Google’s organic traffic is decent (0.37%). StartupNation.com is a lot better and LinkedIn and YoungEntrepreneur.com are converting at a 0% rate. The conversion rate for LinkedIn the previous month was 2% and now it’s 0%. Last month we decided to change the kind of articles we were publishing for this client. Now we know it wasn’t such a good idea and we are going back to the original topics. Are you starting to see how powerful this could be?

Another report I really like is the keyword report. In this report you can see what keywords convert well and what keywords convert poorly. That way you can figure out what kind of search queries bring you money and you can optimize your site for those keywords. I also spend some time looking at the most viewed content to get an idea of the kind of content that attracts people so we can create more of it.

Remember: learn from your traffic and give your visitors what they want. Discover your most profitable segments; then work on getting more out of them.