The benefits of video testimonials on your website

It is obvious that the referred customer is the best customer. They have a reputable person that they trust sending them to purchase a product or service from a worthy company. The trusted friend has saved them time by doing the research and was satisfied with their purchasing experience. This leads to an easy sale. This concept can be translated to the web via video testimonials.

The fact is that there are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners. Understanding these different methods of learning is important to how video testimonials can educate almost every type visitor that comes to your site.

The visual learner retains information that is seen rather than heard or spoken, the auditory learner listens to learn, and the kinesthetic learner connects emotionally with an experience to learn. (For more information on this topic visit http://www.usd.edu/trio/tut/ts/style.html )

Video appears to be the most universal way to communicate with and educate your web site visitors no matter what learning style. Written testimonials are good however, will only capture a small portion of your visitors. The main idea is to turn your visitors into customers. Video testimonials will accomplish this by capturing the attention of a much larger portion of your audience.

Stay tuned to this blog for examples of clients that have used the Magnetiks Video Testimonials Service to turn their website visitors into customers.

Are your visitors Viewers, Readers, or Users?

Do you know the profile of your website visitors? Regular website statistics can provide a lot of information in regard to who is visiting your site. Unfortunately business owners do not have time to give these statistics a proper analysis. This is an essential part of determining exactly who is on your site and how to profit from it. Not knowing can cost you big dollars. It is absolutely critical to have a professional give a true evaluation and determine which way to shift or change the website based on the stats. With all of this taken into consideration it is apparent that hiring a professional web analytics company to gain true perspective on your visitors is a must for any serious business.

Below I have given some insight as to the three categories of web visitors. The dollar signs represent what type of revenue you can expect from each visitor type:

Type 1: The Viewer $ - The viewer type is primarily on the web to be entertained. They like Flash elements, animations, shiny colors, and overall graphic and audio driven sites as appose to text. The viewer type make the fewest online purchases.

Type 2: The Reader $$ - The reader type is more only online to read blogs, articles, forums, and magazine or book like sites. In other words they are using it for free reading material. Reader type visitors do have a higher online purchase rate than the viewer type however, it is unlikely that their purchases will cover your business costs.

Type 3: The User $$$ - The user type should be any business's target market. These users prefer mostly text based, fast loading, direct to the point sites. They want to move through a linear purchase process and find there desired information, product, or service quickly and easily. Any distracting Flash, graphics, unwanted ads, and such will drive this user from your site in an instant and they will never return.

It is possible with traditional web statistics and a professional evaluation of them to develop a primarily user type of visitor profile or audience on your website. For more information call Magnetiks @ (281)362-9855 or visit us at our main site: Magnetiks Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine Friendly Flash???

For myself, Flash is a great tool. I am more the "viewer" catagory of website visitor. I love the intensive graphically enhanced sites that have the wow factor integrated. Cool intros, visually stunning headers with slick motion graphics and so on.The big problem with these Flash elements is that currently there are only a few solid ways to have Flash movies indexed by the search engines. Eveything that would normally be indexable is "locked away" in the Flash movie.

There are a few tricks that are emerging that can help solve this problem. While doing some research on this topic I came across a neat way to incorporate seemingly search engine friendly Flash navigation into any webpage. I hope this is somewhat helpful for those who are Flash advocates and plan to continue using it for web projects. Here are some quick tips from for overall good SEO Flash Design.

Key Factors For SEO Flash Design:
+ Clean design
+ Search Engine Optimization
+ Accessibility for a wide variety of browsers, including screen readers and mobile phones
+ Code validation and standards compliance
+ Correct functionality with IE

Follow the link below on tips for SEO friendly Flash:

CLICK HERE FOR SEO FRIENDLY FLASH TIPS

SEO Tool You Can’t Live Without - Ranking Manager

In order to manage how the Search Engines are ranking your main keyword phrases you need a tool that will spider the search engines you are interested in and determine your rank or position on the page or pages.  In order to accomplish this task we use a tool called Ranking Manager 6.0 at http://www.websitemanagementtools.com/

Just to summarize this seo tool  it will allow you to:

1. Analyze yourself and your competition urls with different keyword sets
2. Analysis can be stored in MySql database
3. Deliver customized reports on position, ranking and engine in different formats ( html, csv, png & xml )
4. Schedule all the reports to be sent by email or saved or even ftp'ed automatically

Just so you can see what a report looks like I pasting a snippet of the position summary for AOL:

This software is very powerful becaue it give you the ability to tell if your keyword phrase has gone up or down month to month or even disappeared all together.

But what I really like the most is that once you figure out how to use Windows Scheduled Task command then you can set the reports to automatically run while you are sleeping at different intervals ( usually every 3 to 4 hours is how I set mine up ).

Of course like all things that you hope work perfectly out the box, this tool did not work the first 5 or 6 times I used their xml script modified for my settings to work.  But being the hard headed person I am I tried different variables and scripts until I finally got it to run without a hitch.

Here is the script in the user manual and here is the script I use.

The things you will need to do:

1. Make sure the in the <_Name> tag you use 1000 instead of 2000
2. When using format 'html' add a parameter for filename and use htm instead of html because it was the only way to make sure it was attached in the email.
3. Also for the format 'chart' add a parameter for filname and use jpg as the extension instead of png.

This should save you a lot of time because I had to go through trial and error to get them attached in the email.  But all in all it was well worth it.  I have successfully setup over 27 scripts that use Windows Scheduled Task command to run the ranking manager once a month for each of them at different times during the day ( 6am, 6pm, 11pm ) and email me the reports.  What a time saver.

Hope that helps someone out there.

Using the Hub Detector to Find Relevant Links

So my question boils down to is it better to be submitted to 300 free directories or one directory that is considered an authority.

To the client, the wow factor is of course that 300 is always better than 1 but to the SEO professional is not about quantity but about quality.

For example, we use http://www.linkhounds.com/hub-finder/hubfinder.php created by www.seobook.com

With the hub detector which is what I like to call it, I searched for a specific keyword phrase. The hub detector then goes out to the search engine of your choice and finds out who is linked to them which pulls the data together to give you a report of the top sites that have web sites that are linked to them as well as the other top sites.

I did a basic search for "personal injury lawyer" using Yahoo & Google API for www.texastriallaywers.com and this is what it returned.

1: www.yourlawyer.com
2: www.lawyers.com
3: www.lipsig.com
4: www.totalinjury.com
5: en.wikipedia.org
6: www.marylandinjurylawyerblog.com
7: www.californiainjurylawyerblog.com
8: onward.justia.com

From the list above you tell that numbers 1 through 8 correspond to the websites listed above. Now you can determine that sites 4,6,8 have the top 3 links in common because of X.  Of course the hub detector can find you more accurate results by changing the search parameters,  but this gives you a great starting point to find out who you need to have linked to your web site that your competitors also have.

Like all things you will still need use common sense.  All because it is linked to them does not mean this is final factor in determining if you would like them to link to you.  You still need to go to the directory and make sure it is legitimate by making sure it is relevant to the search term you were investigating.  And another good check is to make sure their directory pages have pagerank and I also check their alexa rating too.

Most directories you will find will probably be paid but you can still pick up a free gem of a website also.

Happy hunting for relevant links.

Networking Your Web Site with Other Sites

In order to grow one must meet people.  These people become their network of business associates that they recommend to others and others recommend to you.  

The same concept applies with web sites.  As your web site grows so should network of other sites that you would recommend that would recommend you also.   There is one big difference: you want web sites that are similar in topic to your site and that are considered authorities on your topic.  This way you do not confuse the search engines by having plumbing sites link to your site and your site has nothing to do with plumbing. 

Also make sure the text link that links to your site is not the exact same everytime or it does not look natural.  ( ie Each person that you meet would not say the exact same thing about you, therefore it would not look right if every web site that links to you did. )

As search engines advance, you must starting thinking that they are not just dumb spiders that crawl the web.  But information gatherers that formulate ideals about you from others.  As soon as you think that spiders are more like people gathering information about you the sooner you give the search engines the right ideal of who and what your web site is all about.

Welcome to Magnetiks SEO Blog

Our first blog is just a tease to let you know that we will be taking indepth look into SEO as well as sharing tips and techniques we use to achieve high rankings in the top search engines.