Orange County Internet Marketing Advice by Darby Works, Inc.: SEO: Focus, Focus; Not Hocus, Pocus

By Courtney Heard, Abalone Designs

Anyone who knows me, knows that my biggest pet peeves are loud eaters, auto-loading music on web sites and my next door neighbor. Today we can safely add to this list web sites that are so ambiguous, it could be argued they are part of some cryptic conspiratorial code.

My company offers a free service analyzing web sites from a search engine marketing perspective. At least once daily, we are sent the link to a web site with no clear and apparent focus. It's so bad that we don't know what keyword exactly to talk to the web site owner about in their analysis. I always tell these people, their biggest problem is not search engine optimization (or lack thereof), it's focus!

The most important aspect of any web site in any industry, anywhere in the world is user friendliness. There is no straying from this. Your web site can be optimized for the most competitive keyword in the world, it can rank number one across the board and you can even have your URL flashed across the posing torso of America's Next Top Model on CNN and it will do absolutely nothing whatsoever for your business if your web site is not user-friendly.

Visitors need to come to your site and know immediately what it is about. You have literally just a few seconds to capture their attention. If they don't see what they are looking for, quickly, they will leave.

Some tips to help you make sure your web site visitors stick around and understand what your web site is all about are as follows:

1. Find out the language your target audience is using to find your site, refer to your product or refer to your service. More often than not, professionals in an industry refer to things differently than the layman. If you are using too much jargon on your web site, you will lose your visitor's interest.

2. Avoid start pages, flash intros, or extra steps before getting to your sites info. In this day and age, we've all been spoiled by instant gratification and we all know how to get what we want within seconds. If your site doesn't offer answers as fast as it possibly can, you've already lost customers. Flash intros and welcome pages are pretty and sparkly and fun, but pretty, sparkly and fun doesn't make money. Visitors do.

3. Do not, under any circumstances, ever have auto-loading music or sound on your web site. A vast majority of computer users listen to mp3s while using their computers, and now their mobile phones with built-in mp3 players. If they're listening to the new Jimmy Eat World record or singing along to The Cult, the very last thing they want is to have some cheesy sales pitch interrupt the chorus. The first thing I do when I hit a site with any sort of sound or music, including the web sites of my favorite bands, I leave. I immediately leave, no questions asked. They could probably pay me to stick around for a bit, but cold hard cash is about the only thing that would keep me around and being as the purpose of your site is to make you money, paying people to visit it isn't necessarily the most cost-effective route to take.

4. Use nice, clean, professional looking graphics AND text. Most web users tend not to read. They skim and usually will only go that far if prompted by something graphic that strikes their interest. As is the case with storefronts in the real world, what draws people into a store they've only just seen or heard of for the first time, is looks and what it's selling. Think about it. If you're looking for antiques and you walked up to a store called "Joe's Emporium" and the entire thing had tinted windows so you couldn't see in, would you bother going in when the store right next door says "Betty's Antiques" and has a beautiful display of some the prettiest old stuff you ever saw? No. Joe would be out of business in no time.

Your site needs to be clean, professional and enticing. Cut the bells and whistles, stop beating around the bush and give it to them straight. No one wants their time wasted or their intelligence insulted and no one wants to be chasing white rabbits around trying to make sense of your web site. Give them the goods, give it to them fast and give it to them with class. When you've done that, then focus on search engine optimization and you will find that your numbers in traffic will reflect nice and proportionately, your numbers of enquiries.