As I showed you in my previous post, Expanding your Website: Make your Visitors Feel Home, innovation on your website is a must in order to keep ahead of your competitors.

Everybody knows that making your content findable is important. There are numerous websites dedicated to optimizing your website for the Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask. The term SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is commonly known and I am not going to talk about that!

In this article I am going to talk about improvements you can make to your website’s internal search engine. If your website does not contain a lot of content or the content is highly volatile this article might not be relevant for you.

However if your content is really specific, for example:

• Job offers
• Location based (company addresses, houses, appliances, etc.)
• Articles or Whitepapers about specific subjects

This article is a must read for you. First we will get through 2 cases I made to give you idea in what ways you can improve the user experience. Next we will talk about different technologies and selection criteria for search engines.

Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, let’s assume that your website is up and running, you have a steady visitor flow. Google, Yahoo, Ask and Bing know how to find your website and acknowledge you as a valuable source of information. You add new content on a daily basis and your content is valuable to your visitors as you can see in your statistics tool. Your banner positions are filled and revenue is coming in, time to sit back and let the money come to you right?

No, for one single reason: the competition will eventually catch up with you. You have to keep improving continuously to prevent competitors to catch up with you. How? Listen to the demands and wishes of your visitors! You have got to remember that they are in charge of your site, not you! Why? They are not loyal, they don’t love you and they have a choice to go to a new player on your market or an innovating competitor.

How can I learn what my visitors want, you ask yourself?

• Do not assume anything. Your visitors have a mind of their own.
• Analyze your statistics; understand what your users are doing on your website. It really pays off to take a course in Google Analytics (or any other statistics tool) or hire a consultant to do this job for you. For example: identify pages which cause visitors to leave (= loose potential income) your website, they might not live up to the expectations that your visitors have of your website.
• Ask them. Send them a questionnaire about your website in trade of a small gift. Maybe a subscription for a month to your commercial content or a free report. Remember: you have to give in order to receive!
• Analyze the website of your competitors, understand the strength and weaknesses of their websites and use that knowledge to improve your website. I am not suggesting that you should copy their websites, just learn from their successes and failures. Innovating is more important than providing the same functionality as your competitors.
• Ask the experts. Your website is most likely build by someone else than yourself, ask those guys for advice. Make sure those guys know what they are doing: their core business is developing and maintaining websites like your own. If you don’t think your supplier is up to that job, hire a consultant from a different company.

I am sure there are a lot more advices to give and I invite you to add your own to this list as well as comment on the current ones. I started this post with the idea of improving the internal search engine of websites but I didn’t have the time to do it yet. Don’t worry though; I will post a follow up about that subject as soon as I can.

In the mean while I hope this advice helps you to improve your website’s visitor count and your revenue!