There’s an article in the Ecommerce Times today about how small businesses are using SEO (and paid search engine advertising) to attract customers to their web sites.

Many of my clients and prospective clients ask if they should only optimize for search engines or only pay for search engine advertising. My response is usually to consider paid search and SEO part of the marketing mix, the important word here being “mix.” While you can optimize your site for a handful of terms, you can pay for placement for an unlimited number of keywords. Some keywords, such as those including your brand name or business name, are just too valuable not to bid on and optimize for. I recently wrote a counter-argument to those that say SEO by itself is enough. To learn more about this, read my article about the search engine marketing mix.

The Times story also highlights that most businesses need assistance in selecting the right keywords. In my experience, most business owners choose very broad terms when they pay for search engine advertising or optimize their web sites. There’s a very small chance that a small real estate brokerage will rank highly for the term “real estate.” Enter the trained professional who can find out what real web searchers are searching for and who can roll up their sleeves and do competitive research.

A key search engine statistic to remember is that an estimated 62% of web searchers click on a result on the first page returned after their search. Whether it’s a paid search engine advertisement or a natural listing gained through SEO, your web site better be on that first page.

The Nielsen/Norman Group released more evidence today that a majority of Internet users avoid banner ads. The research adds that text-based advertising is more often viewed.

“Banner blindness” is the tendency for web site users to focus on page content/copy and ignore the advertising banners on the screen. The researchers found that users especially ignore bright, flashing advertisements.

The most effective use of ads on a site remains to be text-based ads that are integrated into the overall look and feel of the web site.

I recently read some advice from a fellow website effectiveness consultant that recommended the use of pop-up windows to advertise sales or generate email newsletter subscriptions. While most designers detest these, they are very effective. The common argument you’ll hear executives and designers make is that most people block pop-up windows. In fact, research shows that less than 10% of web users block pop-up windows.

Pop-up windows are great tools to have in your marketing arsenal since they are so effective and inexpensive to implement. Pop-ups can be used to bring attention to sales/promotions, recover abandoned shopping carts, lure users back after they exit your web site, generate leads/email newsletter subscribers and much more.

Why not test them on your site? I will be providing a case study on pop-ups in the coming week or two. I’ll be running a test on a client site, the goal of which will be to collect email addresses for the email newsletter list. After the test is complete, I will report the method, process and results of the test.

During the Refresh Richmond meeting last night, there was a presentation and discussion regarding search engine optimization. The presenter mentioned that it takes new sites roughly 8 months - one year to appear in Google’s search results. I’ve found this to be true lately. So what if your web site is brand new and you still want to attract web traffic?

Enter paid search engine marketing. The presenter did not recommend paid search results since it could be costly. I respectfully disagree with the presenter, and I want to make a case for paid search marketing. What follows are four reasons to pay for search engine marketing.

Search engine optimization takes time, while pay-per-click search engine marketing generates instant results. It takes time for site changes to affect your search engine ranking. Sometimes it takes days for established sites while it can take months for new sites. Do you want to go months with little site traffic? Pay a dime per click for search engine advertising and you can get qualified visitors instantly.

You can quantify success with paid search engine marketing. When you pay an SEO company hundreds of dollars per month, how do you directly attribute your traffic increase to SEO efforts? You can make an educated guess if you have a good web analytics package in place. With paid search marketing, you know exactly how many visitors came to your site, you know how much you paid for it, and with conversion tracking, you can calculate the return on investment. Try asking your SEO company to calculate an ROI and you’ll get a blank look or they’ll reply with how they’ve doubled or tripled your traffic.

Paid search engine marketing lets you specify the message you want to convey. Unlike pure natural search results that pull text from your web site and display it how the search engine wants to display it, you can write your own paid search engine advertisement any way you wish. If I’m running a one-day or one-week sale or promotion, SEO is virtually useless as it takes search engines days or weeks to spider your content. With paid search engine advertising, you can put up an ad about your sale or promotion and direct the ad to the right page to convert visitors. You can also perform copy tests on paid search engine ads to see what headline and body copy generates the most interest.

Unlike search engine optimization, paid search marketing doesn’t require changes to your site. Many SEO companies will require that you change server settings, re-code your pages or site templates, and more. Some companies don’t have the resources to do this, so a paid search advertising approach is best.

Don’t get me wrong, optimizing your site for search engines is critical to your company’s success online. SEO takes time, money and lots of effort though. I find that the right solution for my clients is to build a site that is search engine friendly and supplement this with paid search engine advertising.

With a good web analytics plan in place, you can measure natural search traffic versus paid search traffic and adjust the online marketing mix accordingly.

There’s a new story out this morning on Ecommerce Times that discusses why websites fail to be effective for their users. The article states,

“Many commercial Web sites fail to pass even basic tests for usefulness and usability largely because their architects use faulty reasoning to justify defective decisions.”

I’d like to offer up two situations I’ve experienced that cause bad decision making when it comes to web design:

1. The designer is focused on winning design awards, not user experience. One reason designers make poor decisions is that they are more concerned with how many design awards their work wins rather than how effective the website is for the customer to use. These design awards focus on cutting-edge technology use and high design, which is often not the most usable solution. Designers in this scenario use false assumptions to justify poor design decisions.

2. Management gets involved in design minutiae rather than effectively communicating an objective to their designer. Another situation I’ve seen quite often is when management forces a designer to design a page/site a certain way thinking that it will solve a corporate problem. The attempt by management to solve the problem often falls on its face since while they have an understanding of the problem, they don’t how to execute a solution. The designer should always be given an opportunity to devise and present a solution. In this case, I would hope that the company has adequate web analytics tools and agreed-upon metrics in place to determine the success or failure of the solution.

The article also mentions the importance of information architecture:

Information architecture — where information appears on a page — is very important in arresting eyeballs, according to Derek Olson, a project manager with Foraker Design in Boulder, Colo.

“Even in a small Web site, right up front, you want to clearly delineate the buckets you’re going to put information into, and make sure you’re not going to make your user scratch their head right off the bat when they get to your site,” he told the E-Commerce Times.

“The best design is the design you don’t notice,” added Flanders, of WebPagesThatSuck. “You shouldn’t have to think about where things are.”

I use a two-step design process in my consulting work that forces me to think about user experience first and design second. My early prototypes are black-and-white line sketches meant to organize information. I then apply color and photos to these sketches after the client has signed off on the sketch. The end product is better because the client focuses on information and how the page/site addresses a business goal rather than color and photography.

Last night, a group of about 40 web designers and web professionals gathered at C3 in downtown Richmond to hear Phil Hertzler talk about the design of his award-winning AIGA Richmond site. He discussed how it was conceived, designed and produced using a content management system.

It was refreshing (pun intended) to see so many faces at the event last night. Unfortunately, I only knew about five people there, so I look forward to meeting many more designers in the coming months. I had no idea Richmond had such a large pool of web professionals.

For those that didn’t attend, I think Phil is going to post a video of the presentation on his site.

To those web designers here in Richmond that didn’t attend, please see the Refresh Richmond site for information about coming events. It’s a chance to learn from others’ experiences and a good opportunity to meet others like you. The next meeting will be on June 16(?) at C3. Special thanks to Sharif for putting this together!