Your web design is just a bunch of text

If you “view source” on your website you’ll see a bunch of text. That text is “the code” of your website. Your web browser (Firefox, Safari, IE, Chrome or whatever you use to surf the web) reads the code and then draws the website on your screen. Search engines and other computers also use this code to learn about your site. In fact, the search engines don’t look at what your site looks like at all, only what is written in that code. A search engine is only reading the code and doesn’t care how pretty your website looks.

A pretty web design could be the result of good or bad code. You need to view the source to be able to tell the difference.

There are many ways to write code and get the web browser to draw the same thing. Some of the ways to code the site are “bad” and some are “good.” And the only way to know if the code is bad or if it’s good is to look at the source. Your site may look pretty to you, but it may be miserable for other users or unreadable to search engines.

What does “bad” code look like?

Bad code can look like a lot of things. Unless you’re a web developer you’re going to get bored in a hurry if I go through all expressions of bad code. But I’ll give a quick way to tell if your code is really really bad.

Some key indicators of web code that might be hurting your internet marketing:

• If you see <table> in the code but there are no spreadsheet-like tables in your content.
• If there is almost nothing that makes sense to you when you read it and you see <object> and a bunch of other non-meaningful in the code.
• If you do not find <h1> in the code anywhere or if you can’t make sense of what comes right after it
• If almost all of your code involves <image src= followed by stuff that doesn’t make sense.

What makes “bad” code so bad?

Bad code is anything that doesn’t support your business objective. For the rest of this post I’m going to assume that your business objective involves internet marketing.

Here are two ways that bad code can get in the way of your internet marketing (I bet there’s more):

1. If your online marketing strategy involves using search engines, then bad code is anything that gets in the way of the search engines.
2. If your online marketing strategy is targeting visitors who are impatient with slow-loading websites, then bad code is anything that slows down your website.

Bad code derailing your search engine optimization efforts?

Bad code can be responsible for a web page that looks great to humans, but is completely unreadable to a search engine. If you can’t find anything in your code that makes sense, then the search engine can’t either. The search engine will treat it just a page full of random gunk. The more readable stuff in your web code, the more likely a search engine is going to find your page useful.

SEO efforts are harmed when the search engine spiders can’t read your code.

You will always need some sort of code to make the page work, but you want all that structural code to be as minimal as possible. Think of it like a percentage. You want a high percentage of stuff you can read compared to the stuff that is structural code. The search engine is always going to like sites that have the most useful content, they have to in order to remain relevant.

If another site has a better good code/bad code mix, then it will rank higher than yours.

Take Google, for example. If Google started returning all garbage pages that weren’t any good and some other service returned pages that were full of useful content, then more people would use the other service. And if more people used the other service then Google would make less money selling the ads they sprinkle around the margins of their search engine results page.

At the end of the day you’re marketing to humans and so are search engines. Both like lots of good content.

The search engine may be a machine, but it has to keep real humans happy. One way the machine determines whether people will be happy to see the page is by determining how much useful content that anyone can read is on the page compared to how much structural stuff that might be good or might not be so good.

Bad code frustrating your users?

Sometimes the way a web site is built can really slow it down. This is usually where people start talking about Flash and how evil it is. I won’t do that because there are ways to use Flash that don’t slow down a web site. All the same, make sure your site isn’t using too many graphics or a complicated layout that uses a bunch of the <table> things I noted above.

If your code is too complicated or includes a lot of images, it may be slow to load because the browser has to sort out the complicated code and then go fetch the images. Yes, seconds do matter to web visitors.

Bad code slows down your visitors, too. Bad for internet marketing.

Just because broadband is getting better penetration doesn’t mean we don’t have to worry about load time either. Because now we have a lot of cell phones and other mobile devices starting to browse the web and these little machines on their internet connections work faster when you have more good code.

I’ve got bad code! I’m firing my web designer!

A word of caution here. You might have bad code for a variety of reasons. Here are two things you should consider before getting too worked up:

• If your website is five or more years old, remember that your website may have been good when it launched. New good coding methods are always being developed.
• This second one might be hard to take. You might have made design requests that could only be accomplished with bad code. Like a gigantic full-page image of some sort, or a great big animation or video, or very very specific control over where every pixel is on the screen. Sometimes meeting client demands can result in bad code (though your designer should at least give you a warning that you’re going into bad code territory).

I don’t want to read all this, I just want to watch a video about internet marketing and code

Here you go. My favorite internet marketing musician, SEO Rapper brings you through everything you need to know to keep your code all good.

What the heck is performance optimization?

Performance optimization is the practice of observing your visitor traffic data, figuring out why they may or may not be completing the task for which your site was designed and making improvements (optimizations) to your site which help those visitors complete their task.

Here are the three reasons why I think you should be paying as much attention to performance optimization as you pay to search engine optimization.

1. People who are on your site have proven through their actions that they are interested in something about your site (or advertising content). performance optimization is used to help these higher quality leads.
2. If the visitors to your site are not completing their task, then increasing visitors (through better search engine rankings, for example) still won’t help your conversions.
3. You are in control of what is on your website. You have access to your visitor data. You can make your own improvements. Performance optimization is all about things which are within your control that you can do. (Read this one again, just because it feels really good)

Hold on, are you saying I shouldn’t do any SEO?!

Nope. I’m just saying that perhaps you need to do a little performance optimization first. That way, when you get that coveted number 1 slot in Google, all those people coming to your site will be able to accomplish their task instead of getting lost or frustrated.

Sometimes, someone shows me a site that is terrible to use and look at and asks “How can this possibly be number 1 in Google?!?!” (multiple punctuation is usually included in this question). I respond by saying “I wish I knew what their bounce rate was. I bet they are frustrating a lot of customers and damaging their brand.” Then we start working on the parts of our site that we can control in order to help the visitors we get complete their task.

The point is that yes, SEO is important. But if your site is not helping visitors complete their task all the SEO in the world won’t help your business. It will make you feel good about your site visitor number (until you calculate take-rate, that is).

SEO vs Performance Optimization: The recap

Typical goals for Search Engine Optimization:

• Getting attention for your brand
• Getting visitors to your site

Typical goals for Performance Optimization:

• Increasing interest in your service/product
• Increasing desire for your service/product
• Making it easy for visitors to complete their task

The rub: like a horse and carriage, you can’t have one without the other. It’s harder to do performance optimization with low traffic and it’s hard to stay in business when droves of people are visiting your site but not converting.

Getting Started in Performance Optimization

I have a series on performance optimization to help get you started.

To stretch this metaphor a bit more, retail stores often have someone on staff that is tasked specifically with setting up the store so that people can find things they are looking for, discover things they weren’t looking for but might like and conduct a transaction. These staff members watch the store in person or via video to understand traffic patterns.

For your site, your web analytics is what you have to observe traffic. And making changes to the structure of your site (either by rearranging, adding or removing content) can improve the entire user experience.

An article from the Wall Street Journal published last month describes how several online retailers are using this customer experience data to improve their sales. Sometimes making small discoveries (like using the number zero in a coupon code can cause user failure because they don’t know if it’s the letter O or a zero) that have dramatic impact.

According to the article “trade group Shop.org and Forrester found that online retailers are allocating 21% of their total 2008 marketing budgets to online customer retention.” Another great data point from the study: “32% of Web shoppers have been online for seven years.” These folks have high expectations.

So dig a little deeper, get beyond the total number of visits coming to your site and start asking questions about what they do when they get there. Put that information in context, make a decision about how you can improve life for your online customer based on that information and move forward.

Why Benchmark?

The goal of a benchmark study is to figure out how your site is performing before you do anything at all. If done well, it should give you a good base from which to try and test different site changes (optimizations, hopefully). So you’re going to get two things from your benchmark study:

• A ruler by which to measure performance of your website (so you know if that big increase really is great or if it’s pretty typical)
• Some general insight into the patterns of use on your site (what pages are people going to often? what search terms are they using to find your site? Are they converting from search terms? How many visits to your site is typical? Whatever KPIs you are using).

Doing your Benchmark

This part can be a bit dreary but hopefully it will generate some good insights. You can, of course, hire out your benchmark study (nudge nudge).

Determine how often you will be making improvements to your site, let this be the period (length of time between measurements) you measure. If you aren’t sure, go with a week or two weeks. You will be setting aside time each period to run these data-gathering exercises, so resist the temptation to do it every day.

1. Locate the reports in your analytics package that relate to the KPIs you determined back in Part 2.
2. Open a spreadsheet program and make a series of columns, one for each KPI.
3. Then make rows be periods (for example: week ending, month ending).
4. Start at the oldest period for which your analytics package has data and start filling in the rows and columns. Don’t worry if you just installed your analytics and don’t have any historical data, just start now and go for a month or so before making any changes to the site.
5. If you want to get fancy, you can run averages or medians on the data so you can figure out what is “typical,” what is “average,” and more importantly what is outside of the usual range. Anything you can do that provides context for all of your data gathering efforts is worthwhile.

To help make this a little less painful I made a very rudimentary benchmark spreadsheet over in Google Docs. Since every business has different goals and objectives (different KPIs) and different amounts of resources (length of period) it would be hard to do much more than a super-generic one that sends you down the right path. But the spreadsheet should get you started.

One thing I encourage is that while you’re frantically trying to do all that data gathering keep an eye out for anything that looks informative. Notice which pages are getting lots of visits. Which pages have low or high bounce rates. Even if these aren’t part of your KPI set, doing the benchmark might help you refine your choices for KPIs. Listen to your intuition in these instances, then track it. Stick to your KPIs but make a note of which other metrics you may want to track in the future.

I entered all the benchmark data, now what?

Well you’ve survived one of the largest barriers to getting into a process of improving your website, so you should feel pretty good about that. Once you’re done feeling good about that, notice two distinct benefits of all that arduous labor:

1. When one of your KPIs is reported, you have a way of knowing if the result is out of the ordinary or not (and maybe even how much out of the ordinary). You have context for your data based on past-performance.
2. You have a clearer understanding of how visitors use your site, maybe this is leading you to add some metrics to your KPI list.

With these two pieces of information, your future analysis will be more informed and your insights will be more valuable.

Quick tips to help you survive your benchmark study

• Identify the reports that matter to you (your KPI reports) and add them to the Dashboard. This will save lots of hunting.
• Save your benchmark spreadsheet somewhere that you don’t lose it, this is valuable and potentially sensitive information.
• Go period-by-period (rows), filling in each KPI for the time period. Do not go KPI by KPI (columns). You want to become aware of the relationships of your KPIs to one another and this will happen by entering them in relation to their time period. Also, switching the date range will take up a lot more time if you go by columns.

Next time in the ongoing series of real estate site optimization:

Observe and Orient: Preparing for optimization

Too often, home pages end up getting fractured and fragmented due to a lack of focus. These tips should help you get focused.

Here’s a quick list of simple things you can do to make your real estate home page more effective. To be honest, several of these tips could work for any business site with a little tweaking.

1. Have one main headline that tells users what can be done on your site. Resist the urge to use the generic “Welcome to my homepage” stuff. People aren’t on your homepage to feel welcome, they are there to accomplish a task. You can’t make them feel welcome by saying “Welcome.” You can, however, make them feel welcome by making it easier for them to accomplish their task (like buy or sell a property).
2. Have a page title (the text at the very top of the browser) that relates to your headline and contains the search term you want most. This will help in two ways: it will help your search ranking and will improve the usability of your listing in the search engine result page.
3. Include a clear call-to-action. You probably have a desired outcome for people who come to your site. Know what that outcome is and make it easy for your site visitors do what you would like them to do.
4. Include a visual and direct link to the thing you want to sell most, like a featured property listing, a page with your listings on it, a page with listings that you like to represent, whatever it is that you do best. Some of your site visitors know exactly what they are looking for and will likely skip over your offer. But other visitors will appreciate your suggestion to get them started down the path to do business with you.

What are some other things you can do to make your home page better?

It’s called “Three KPIs for Real Estate Websites.”

Determine the objective

For most real estate sites, the objective is to increase qualified leads (the people who are looking for the kind of property you like to sell or selling the kind of property you like to buy). Maybe there are other objectives as well. Think about this as you begin your process. Maybe sometime in the future your goals and objectives will change, that’s fine. The important thing is to know what your goals are so that you can track them.

Track your progress

Once your objectives are determined, it’s time to figure out what metrics you’re going to use to track your progress. The TLA (three letter acronym) used to describe the metrics that connect to your objective is KPI (key performance indicator). It’s very important to remember that every KPI is a metric but not every metric is a KPI. There are hundreds of reports a decent analytics package will produce for you. Not all of them relate to your objective. An excellent rundown of what makes a metric into a KPI can be found on Dennis Mortensen’s VisualRevenue blog:

7 KPI characteristics

1. a KPI echoes organizational goals
2. a KPI is decided by management
3. a KPI provides context
4. a KPI creates meaning on all organizational levels
5. a KPI is based on legitimate data
6. a KPI is easy to understand
7. a KPI leads to action!

I know it’s easy to let your eyes glaze over as you read that handy list. But resist the urge. Note a couple important items like #2: a KPI is decided by management. That means you. Your analyst (me) can make some good suggestions but ultimately you’ve got to decide that it’s relevant. If you don’t, then everyone will just be spinning their wheels. Take the time to understand why your analyst is suggesting a specific KPI and make it a conversation.

Another great one is #5: a KPI based on legitimate data. You need to understand your analytics package and establish your degree of confidence in it. You also need to understand what your analyst is doing with the numbers outside of the analytics package (yes, we’re making spreadsheets and trying to provide more context–Google Analytics has some pretty graphs, but we need more).

Number 7 is the most important of all: a KPI leads to action. If you can’t do anything with the data, if you can’t base a business decision on it, then it isn’t worth tracking. It may be interesting. Entertainment is interesting. Analysis needs to inform action.

For some examples of KPIs for real estate sites, check out my guest post over at MyTechOpinion.com: Three KPIs for Real Estate Websites.

Now what?

Take a deep breath. If you’ve come this far chances are good that you’ve done more than your competition: you know what you want to do and you know how you will measure your progress. And you are committed to making improvements to speed your progress. You’ve done the thinking and now it’s time for acting.

Next time we’re going to cover setting up a benchmark study (so we can see if any of our decisions and actions are helping or hurting).

Constantly redesigning a website can’t be cost-effective, can it?

This is the kick-off for a series on Performance Optimization for Real Estate. The goal of this series is to help real estate site owners optimize the performance of their website whether going it alone or using Union Street Media’s site optimization and analytics services (or some combination of the two).

What is Performance Optimization?

You’ve probably already heard of search engine optimization (SEO) and maybe even search engine marketing (SEM). That’s the practice of trying to get your website to rank higher on a search engine like Google or Yahoo. Performance optimization is something different.

The objective of performance optimization is to convert more of the visitors who are already visiting your site. Perhaps you have a lot of traffic already, but you aren’t generating many leads. If that’s the case, performance optimization is something to consider.

An Overview of an Ongoing Process

Performance optimization is a process, something in which a business engages continuously over time. Luckily, the process can be fairly simple and painless. Here’s the outline:

1. Observe what is happening in your business, measure your results.
2. Analyze your observations, orient your data to current conditions.
3. Decide what changes to make, based on your analysis.
4. Act on your decisions.
5. Start at the beginning again.

Basic Tools of Performance Optimization

Luckily, there are a variety of tools and concepts to help us in our tasks.

Observation and Measuring tools

Website analytics packages allow us to track visitor behavior on your site. This will be a very powerful tool that helps us improve the site over time. It’s the eyes of our optimization process. We may employ some surveys too, in order to hear our customers’ voices in their own words.

Analysis tools

Our biggest analysis tool is inside our skulls. But beyond that, some charting and math tools either built into our website analytics package or built into a custom spreadsheet will be useful.

Tools for decision-making

Testing will be the primary tool here. After you have looked at the data and given it some thought, you might have an idea of some way to improve your results. That’s the time to start testing. There are a lot of different testing tools and methods that I will discuss in a future installment. It’s my favorite part.

You also might need some communication tools at this stage. Presentation tools are great, but learning how to present the right information at the right time to the right person is more important than any drowsy Power-Point presentation could ever be.

Starting-at-the-beginning tools

This step, though it seems like a throw-away, is important. If you don’t continue to observe, analyze, decide and act then you won’t be continuously improving.

Bonus for anyone who recognizes the OODA loop in this.

Next time: Getting Started in Performance Optimization for Real Estate

Now that we’ve got the broad view, we can start to dig in a little. Please feel free to post questions or thoughts in the comments field and I’ll try to answer them as we go along. What do you want to know about website optimization? Was this post helpful?