SEO

Sarah Worsham / Oct 31, 2008

Google Now Indexes Scanned Documents

Google has announced that it will now begin including scanned documents in its search results – a feat that requires an immense amount of processing power and advanced image recognition technology. Unlike standard text documents, scanned files don’t contain any text data that Google’s spiders can index. Instead, Google has employed Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, converting photos of words into digital text files. – TechCrunch – Google Now Indexes Scanned Documents

The implications of this on search engine optimization (SEO) are fairly huge. In order for PDFs to be indexed by google, they had to be saved in text format (instead of image format), which counted out millions of older documents and documents from sources not aware of this caveat. There is a wealth of information online in the form of scientific papers and technical documents that could not previously be included in search results.

For business owners, stop worrying about whether documents on your website will be included in search results. Instead, shift your concerns to more important issues such as content, usability and increasing sales.

Sarah Worsham / Oct 20, 2008

Increasing Pageviews per Visitor

As we’ve been discussing, sometimes businesses get caught up in the need to increase traffic to their website. This “traffic” often equates to the number of visitors to a website or the number of total pageviews. But, as Traffikd discusses, there often is an opportunity to increase the time on the site and the number of pageviews per visitor. This obviously will increase the number of total pageviews, but it also means that visitors are spending more time on your site – which gives you more time to sell to them.

For bloggers and social media marketers, the desire to increase numbers of unique visitors to a site often overshadows an effort to increase the average number of pageviews per visitor… In reality, the blogger and the designer do have some influence on visitors in terms of encouraging extended visits, and even a small increase in average pageviews per visitor can result in significant gains in overall pageviews. – Traffikd – Increasing Pageviews Per Visitor

Sarah Worsham / Oct 9, 2008

Just Increasing Traffic May Not Increase Sales on Your Business Website

Many business owners get caught up with the need to increase traffic to their business website in order to increase sales and/or revenue. Increasing traffic to your website may or may not help increase sales depending on who the traffic is (whether they are potential customers).

Sales from a website are based on the number of potential customers who come to the website (a lead) and the percentage that actually purchase something (a conversion). To increase sales from a website, there are three options:

increase the number of potential customers coming to the site (leads)
increase the number of actual sales on the website (conversions)
both #1 and #2.

While increasing traffic can help, it will only help if the traffic includes more potential customers (leads). Just increasing traffic, if none of the people are interested in making a purchase, does nothing to help sales. So it is very important to increase the number of potential customers (leads), which is sometimes called qualified traffic.

Sometimes sales are not happening because information on your website is not clear or potential customers are not sure how to make a purchase. Increasing the number of potential customers who actually make a purchase (conversions) is another way to increase sales from your website. Taking a look at where people may be leaving the site, as well as whether marketing information entices a purchase can help increase conversions. Advertising should take potential customers right to an “action” page where they have all the information they need and can make a purchase.

Just increasing traffic to a website without increasing the number of potential customers and/or conversions will probably not increase your sales, leaving you wondering why your efforts are not working.

(photo by Burning Image @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: seo, search engine optimization, internet strategy, internet marketing, internet consulting

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My sweet spot is at the intersection between technology and business. I love to manage and develop products, market them, and deep dive into technical issues when needed. Leveraging strategic and creative thinking to problem solving is when I thrive. I have developed and marketed products for a variety of industries and companies, including manufacturing, eCommerce, retail, software, publishing, media, law, accounting, medical, construction, & marketing.