The Power of Bounce Rate

What is a Bounce Rate?

It essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who "bounce" away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site. A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. There is no industry-standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur. Rather, this is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software.

The Google Analytics is one of the best and free services offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that the product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew.



How Bounce Rate helps your site's niche?

Bounce rates can be used to help determine the effectiveness or performance of an entry page. An entry page with a low bounce rate means that the page effectively causes visitors to view more pages and continue on deeper into the web site.

Google.com analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik has stated:

"It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying."

On an ecommerce site, where the sole aim may be to sell products online, the bounce rate is a primary concern and useful measurement. Information sources and sites which drive the customer to make contact via email or phone may see much higher bounce rates. This may not be a bad thing as they are only viewing one page of the site.

How can you decrease your Bounce Rate?

While Bounce Rate helps you to study the success of your site, you and your site, on the otherhand, can affect the rate of bounce your visitors do. Below are some rules to decrease your site's bounce rate:

1. Make your blog user friendly. Your blog should be clean, orderly and appealing to the visitors. The text should be readable and the downloading should be fast. If you have an idea of what Web 2.0 means, you should be craving to minimize the use of high-weighing elements(flash animations, images, and applets) on your site/blog.
2. Write Quality and Relevant Contents. The articles published at your blog should be interesting and useful. Give your visitors the reason to stay longer at your blog.
3. Inter- linking articles. Offer your visitors more articles to read that are relevant to the landing page. This can be done by: linking to the other articles by using the relevant keywords within the article; and listing few related articles at the bottom of the article.
4. Proper SEO. In optimizing your blog or every pages of your blog for the search engines, you need to target the keywords that are relevant to the page being optimized.
   

For example, if you're targeting a specific keyword, “Pinay Scandal” on this case, make sure that the landing page(Learn Landing Page Optimization) contains relevant content because if the content is not related to the keywords used to find a page of your blog, most likely your visitors will immediately click the “Back” button of the browser to check for another websites.

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Basic Understanding of CSS Frameworks

You don’t have to write the same CSS-code or (X)HTML-Markup over and over again. Whatever project you’re starting to work with, at some point you have to define classes and IDs you’ve already defined in your previous web-projects. To avoid unnecessary mistakes you might want to start not from a blank file, but from an almost “perfect” scratch. The latter might contain some basic definitions you’d write in your code anyway. However, once you’ve decided to create such a scratch, you need to make sure it is really bulletproof — besides, if the stylesheet also sets up optimal typographic rules and basic form styling you manage to kill two birds with one stone.

And this is where CSS Frameworks and CSS Reset are becoming important. Using them, you can get yourself a perfect default-stylesheet and markup, save your time and ensure the best quality of your code from the very beginning. But what are CSS Frameworks? And why do you need the Reset for?

So What is a CSS Framework?




A framework is a basic (usually abstract) conceptual structure which you can use as a “scratch” for your web-projects. For instance, instead of defining global reset, consistent baseline, typographic rules or basic styles for forms over and over again — every time you work on a new project — you can prepare a default-style once and reuse it in all your future projects. This is what you call a CSS Framework.

CSS frameworks don’t have to be complex or large, they may contain a set of simple CSS-styles such as

1. typography.css for basic typographic rules,
2. grid.css for grid-based layouts or
3. layout.css for general layouts,
4. form.css for basic form styling,
5. general.css for further general rules

and so on. In your code segmentation you can also go further, for instance: structure, typography, design presentation, specialist sections (e.g. menus, navigation), print, mobile web, tweaks (mostly old style browser hacks), browser specific workarounds (via IE conditional statement).

List of CSS Frameworks Available on the Web

1. The Blueprint CSS framework, created by Norwegian tech student Olav Frihagen Bjørkøy, is a very promising foundation for developing typographic grids using CSS. The framework offers an easily customizable grid, sensible typography, a typographic baseline and a stylesheet for printing. It also uses relative font-sizes, provides a CSS reset and is supposed to be cleaned of code bloats. The latter isn’t always true.

2. YAML is based on web standards and supports every modern web browser. All Internet Explorer’s major rendering bugs are countered. YAML fully supports all IE versions from 5.x/Win to 7.0.
   
   Apart from a number of standard-conform layouts the framework also offers a debugging stylesheet, print stylesheet as well as various robust tools for web-development in YAML. All CSS components of the framework as well as the various layout methods are thoroughly documented in both English and German, supplemented by numerous examples.

That's it for now. On my future post i will discuss about CSS Resets. If you have any suggestions comment below. Meanwhile, for additional topic relating to Web Design and Web Development you might consider reading What is really Web 2.0 and Mashup means?

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What exactly is landing page optimization?

For most search marketers, optimizing landing pages means A/B testing and multivariate testing (MVT). It means using tools such as Google Website Optimizer to experiment with different arrangements of a page – or different variations in the content of a page – to maximize its conversion rate.

We may ask questions about many different elements of a page. Which headline works best? Is the offer button better with “complimentary shipping” or “free shipping”? Does a picture of the product compel more people than an image of a friendly customer service representative, or the other way around? What about a blue color scheme versus a green one?

This is landing page optimization as most people know it. And for what it does, it is a good approach. Let’s call it content optimization – finding the best presentation of content on a particular landing page.

But content optimization is not the only way to optimize landing pages. In fact, when it comes to boosting your conversion rate, it may not even be the most effective method.




Segment optimization offers a new approach

Segment optimization is about determining how many different landing pages are optimal for a given campaign, and determining how each should be different from the other.

Instead of stretching one page to try to please everyone, which is quite hard to do – segment optimization breaks out several specialized landing pages that each focus on pleasing a particular segment of your audience.

For example, say you’re marketing language learning software. Although everyone who clicks on your ads wants to learn a language, there are different motivations among them. Students hope for better grades in their classes. Vacationers crave more authentic trips. Business travelers are most concerned about efficiency.

It would be difficult to have one page that speaks passionately to all of those distinct audience segments simultaneously.

Just consider the headline. If you were deploying one page to fit everyone, you might try lots of variations (content optimization) to discover that “Learning French is easy!” is the best headline (on average) for all respondents. Let’s say it achieves a 5% conversion rate, not bad, but not earth-shattering either.

But if you had three different landing pages, one for each of these segments – you might find that “Ace your French exams!” works best for students, “Experience France as only a French speaker can!” works best for vacationers, and “Business French in 10 minutes per day!” works best for business people. These might achieve conversion rates of 12%, 11%, and 14% respectively for each segment, a tremendous success that more than doubles your overall conversion rate.

You could never achieve this using one page for everyone. “Ace your French exams!” would perform disastrously for vacationers and business people. If you tried that headline for all respondents, content optimization would throw it out as suboptimal because 2/3 of the audience would think it was awful. But when it’s presented to students (and only students) – it is the indisputable champion.

In that example, segment optimization was achieved by deploying three different pages instead of just one. Content optimization was then used to determine which headline was most effective for each separate segment.

How can you begin using segment optimization in your campaigns?

Start by making a list of possible segments within your audience. Who are the different types of people who look for you online – and why? Don’t restrict yourself to the way you may have segmented people in your database or your business plan. Brainstorm what’s important and relevant from the respondent’s point-of-view, by considering any or all of the following issues:

the specific “problem” the respondent wants to solve
the demographic/psychographic “persona” of the respondent
the respondent’s stage in the buying process
the role of the respondent in their organization
the respondent’s geographic location
the respondent’s industry or the size of their organization

These are your initial buckets into which respondents could be segmented. Don’t worry if there’s overlap between buckets, as these won’t necessarily be either/or choices.

Next, review the keywords and ad creatives you’re running in your search marketing campaigns. For each keyword/creative pair, ask yourself – is there a particular segment that its respondents would clearly belong to? If the answer is yes, add it to that bucket along with the number of clicks per month it generates. If there answer is no, leave a question mark next to it – perhaps with a handful of segments it might appeal to.

For instance, in our example above, the keyword phrases “french exam” and “college french” are obvious candidates for the student segment. Phrases like “business french” and “executive french” fall into the business traveler bucket. But “learn french” can’t be segmented just from the keyword.

Now, look over your segment buckets and see which ones have the most number of clicks per month. These are your best targets for segment optimization.

For each one, create a dedicated landing page that is focused on the needs, wants, and characteristics of that particular segment. Here you can use content optimization such as A/B testing or MVT to find the best headline, imagery, layout, etc. for each page.

You can almost be guaranteed that these segment-specific landing pages will outperform your more generic ones. With your first few big segment wins in place you can move further down The Long Tail, to less popular, but still easily identifiable keywords to meet each segment.

What about keywords that you can’t automatically associate with a particular segment? In those scenarios, you can use techniques such as multi-step landing pages and “directed behavioral segmentation”. But that’s an article for another day.


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Top Up Your Website With These 5 Tips

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, it means optimizing ones website in such way that the search engine will deem its contents more relevant than other websites towards a particular keywords searched by users. It demonstrates the links from other websites & analyzes the keywords to fit properly in a page that complement to each other in order to getting top ranking position.

There are following 5 tips which can help you to get your website ranked on the top position:-

1) Domain Name
Registration of a domain name is the first step one takes towards having a website. When you start thinking of having a website for your business, you must understand the importance of SEO from that stage only. Many people take domain names related to their corporate identity and others prefer to have shorter domain names. Search Engine give a lot of importance to domain names, hence you should include the main keyword in your domain name. For example, if you sell flowers in india and your company name is ABC florist private limited, I suggest you to take a domain like abcflowersindia.com. Or abcfloristindia.com. You can go for other TLDs as well if .com is not available.

2) Make your website Content Rich
While designing your website, most people focus more on graphics and animation and lesser on content. You can hire a content writer or if you can do it at your own, make your website content rich. As search engines are content hungry and also more content mean more number of keywords. Try to use text instead of images where ever possible and also use ALT tags for your images and give considerable importance to naming of your webpages, images and folders. You should name them including your keywords. For example, if there is a image of Tulip, instead giving it a name like a1.jpg, name it tulip.jpg, similarly your webpages names should include the keywords instead abc.html or a1.html etc.

Also organize your website into different pages avoid stuffing all the keywords and phrases into one page. Also attempt to avoid the use of tables, flash, frames & java script & commented text in your webpage.

3) Meta Tags
Meta tags are also an important section of your web pages, they describe what the web page is all about. Be very careful while defining them. Leaving them empty or keyword stuffing both is harmful for your webpages. Following are most important meta tags -

a) Title Tag
Instead of having a title like welcome to ABC Florist Pvt. Ltd., you should have title like Send Flowers to India, New Delhi, Mumbai, Banglore. Try to include your main keywords within your title tag.

b) Description
Description tag is the text which is displayed under the title on result page. Write here a nice description of your webpage, so that a user can have an idea about your website while searching it in the search engines.

c) Keywords
keyword Meta tag is very important but be very careful while defining them. Keywords should be relevant to the webpage and there should not keyword stuffing in the webpage.

4) Create a site map
It improves the efficiency of the web pages by searching its content easily. It provides relevant result by getting their index quickly. It helps in navigation of all pages includes in the website. With the help of site map search bots can easily crawl link pages. Also generate a google and yahoo site maps and submit them.

5) Increase your Links
Link popularity is measured by both the quantity and quality of sites that link to your website. The ranking of your website is based on the quality of links. Once your site is complete and running, Focus on getting links from other websites. You can easily generated links using the following :-

1. Directory submission increases in the link popularity. It is fast and affordable way to get one-way links.
2. Article submission is a powerful method to gaining quality one way incoming links to your website.
3. Blogging is also good way to popularize your website and getting back links.
4. Social book marking is a method to store, manage, search, and organize bookmarks of web page on the internet with the help of metadata.
5. Reciprocal link building is exchanging links with the theme based website. It help you increasing your PR and back links.Make sure that the site you are exchanging has good ranking area & major search engines.

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Online Bash Shell For Beginners

If you want to learn Linux bash shell commands in a fun way this is the place for you.

This website provides Unix-like virtual online bash shell command line interface where you can try out bash commands easily online in a web browser without the fear of installing Linux.

Once you gets your hands over bash shell commands you can easily move on to Linux because the knowledge of bash shell commands are essential for operating any Linux distro to its full potential.

Online Bash Shell

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What is really Web 2.0 and Mashup means?

Andy Gutmans, Zend co-founder, will going to talk about what is really Web 2.0 means. Furthermore, the executive editor of ZDNet, David Berlin, will discuss the mashup.



What is a mashup?





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