Archive for category: Extima Blog

When you spend the time and money on creating a stellar website design and shopping cart, it’s essential to find ways to keep your customers engaged. That way, they will come back to your site time and time again, and hopefully, buy more products or retain more services. With a little creativity and some interactive features, you can make visiting your eCommerce website a more enjoyable experience for both your current and potential customers.

1. Personalization. When you personalize features on your site, this allows you to target customers specifically and use their personal information to convert. A user creates a profile on your site that includes their age, gender and other information, and your website combines that info with data such as their referring pages, search keywords and browsing behavior to help you find what they are looking for and target their needs specifically.

2. Polls. Another excellent way to find out exactly what your customers are looking for is through conducting polls and surveys on your site. Studies show that customers enjoy being asked for feedback, so take advantage of that and find out how your site is doing or how you can expand your product base.

3. Blogging. A blog is a great way to position your company as an expert, offer tips and share information about other products. Use videos and compelling imagery to make your posts stand out, include links to other posts or products they may be interested in and ask for feedback.

4. Create newsletters and eBlasts. eMail newsletters and eBlasts provide excellent ways to share tips and info, highlight new products and services, offer promotional discounts and increase overall interest in your website.

5. Provide Live Chat. Offering customer service via live chat is the perfect way to instantly provides users with answers to their questions and solutions to their problems. Customers love immediate responses, and often times, it can help prevent issues from escalating.

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SEO is a constantly evolving industry—and just when you think you’re savvy about all the terminology, more terms get added into the mix. If you’re having difficulty understanding your SEO reports or want to be able to have an intelligent conversation about the effectiveness of your online marketing campaign, here are a few terms that are essential to know. Some of these are staples that you may have hear about for years, while others are newer to the mix. We will blog about terms on a regular basis, so you can stay in the loop when it comes to your SEO services.

1. Above-the-Fold. This term describes all the contents of a webpage that you can see before scrolling down. It can also refer to search engine results—all the results that appear on the first page, without you having to scroll to view them.

2. Algorithms. An algorithm is what the search engines use to determine how websites and pages should be organized and ranked on the web. It is essentially a set of rules used to rank websites.

3. Analytics. This refers to the analysis of all of the data regarding your website, specifically the behaviors of its visitors. Evaluating your site’s analytics lets you know where your traffic is coming from, how many pages each visitor looks at, how long they stay on each page, bounce rates, etc. Google Analytics is what we use to garner this information for our clients.

4. Anchor Text. This is the clickable, visible text that is connected to a hyperlink that opens to a target web page.

5. External link. Also known as an “outbound link,” this is a hyperlink on your website that points to a page on a different website.

6. Google Panda and Penguin. These terms refer to the major algorithm updates that Google makes from time to time to ensure the best, most relevant search results possible. These updates definitely affect where websites rank, which may prompt modifications to your SEO strategy. Panda is when Google makes a change that affects content, while Penguin refers to changes made to fight spam.

7. Internal Link. This is a hyperlink on your website that points to another page also located on your site.

8. Keyword Density. This refers to the number of times your target keyword or keyphrase appears on a web page. It is typically measured by percentage and is used by search engines to determining how relevant your web page is to your keyword or keyphrase.

9. Link Juice. This has to do with the power that a link may have on your site. For example, having a link to your site from The Wall Street Journal or Forbes is going to yield a positive effect on your results because these are such credible, popular sites. You can think of link juice as a recommendation for your site.

10. Traffic. This refers to the amount of visits your website receives and the number of pages that are visited.

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Social media

We bet you thought keywords were only for website SEO efforts and just an online marketing strategy —but they’re not. If you want to boost exposure of your social media profiles and pages among potential customers and clients, keywords can play a very handy role. In fact, if you’re not optimizing your profiles and fan pages correctly, you’re most likely losing the opportunity for customers to find you on the social networks.

There are several ways to optimize your social pages and profiles with your target keyword phrase. For starters, on Facebook pages, you can insert your keywords into both your page’s short and long descriptions, as well as in the category your business falls into. You can access these sections with the “About” tab. For both Instagram and Twitter, you can insert your target keyword phrase into the “Bio” section. On Pinterest, you can add it in the “About You” section of your profile.

In Google+, add your target keyword phrase to your tagline, as well as the “introduction,” “skills,” “category” and “occupation” sections. On LinkedIn, you can add your phrase to the “description,” “specialties” and “industry” areas of your company page. For individual profiles, it can be inserted in a variety of places, including your summary, skills, professional headline and job title.

Keep in mind that, just like with your web content, you want to add these phrases in a natural way that makes sense while avoiding overstuffing your profiles. The last thing you want a potential customer or client to do is assume you’re a spammer and leave you in the dust.

Another way to optimize your social media pages and profiles is to optimize your updates. Again, you want to do this in an organic way that doesn’t appear like you’re just throwing in a keyword. For best results, do this as close to the start of your update as possible. With this tactic, you will gain exposure within the network you are posting in, and may even get your updates seen by Google search.

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One of the best ways to drive traffic and stock your website with fresh topics is to curate quality content. It’s fundamental digital marketing practice for attracting more links to your site and boosting your SEO efforts, while generating fresh content on a regular basis.

Content curation consists of sorting through and selecting content from the web that you think will engage your audience, and then presenting it in a thoughtful, cohesive manner, typically based around a theme. While it’s important to regularly create original and compelling content, it can get very time-consuming—curating content from other sources is the perfect way to diversify your content footprint and increase the volume of your posts with less effort.

Here are 3 tips for optimizing your curated content.

1. Don’t mass dump. While it’s essential to increase the volume of content you post, you want to choose carefully. This is about quality, not quantity. Select a grouping of the most relevant and highest quality posts possible about the topic you choose and present it in a way that’s easy to navigate and engaging—and strive to make it fun for your audience as well.

2. Be relevant and timely. Fresh, original content is what Google places the highest value on when ranking your website. So when your site is rich in original content, it will experience stronger organic rankings. Even though you’re curating content from other sources, culling them and presenting them in a unique and cohesive manner on a single page will help deepen your content footprint. As a “middleman,” strive to find the most timely and relevant content possible so that readers get the most from your page as opposed to poring over tons of links produced by a Google search.

3. Be creative with your presentation. Curating is an art form—don’t just collect content and throw together a list. Once you’ve vetted and handpicked an array of awesome content, present it in an aesthetically pleasing way that will appeal to your audience. Try using infographics, create “Top 10” and “Best of” lists and polls, news roundups, blog series and even content surrounding daily themes, such as the ever popular Motivation Mondays, Wisdom Wednesdays, WayBack Wednesdays and others that make for good hashtags for sharing on social media and social bookmarking.

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