Web Site Optimization

(work in progress)

About Analytics and Monitoring

Visited Pages - shows how many users visited which pages and how frequently

Unique visitor - someone with a unique IP address who is entering a Web site for the first time that day

Referrals - shows where our visitors came in from

Browsers - shows what browsers are used to visit our web site

Operating Systems - shows what basic computer configurations our visitors have

Countries - should where in the world our visitors are coming in from

Search Terms - this shows what terms and phrases our visitors used to try to locate things on our site

Example of some current Search Terms for our homepage (from Alexa):

Search Engines - shows the search engines that were used to bring users to the site

Example of more common Search Engines:

  • Google
  • DMOZ
  • Bing
  • Yahoo
  • Lycos

Bounce Rate - this is calculated using percentage of visitors who view the site page and exit your site without navigating to other pages.

Bounce Target:
40% for normal sites with pages related to only services
60% to 70% for sites with pages related to services, resources, tutorials, promotional articles and downloads

Recommendations to reduce bounce rate:

  • Improve the site load speed
  • Improve all content relevance
  • Improve design
  • Improve navigation
  • Add a 'top page' or 'popular topics'  listing
  • Add a 'related content' listing
  • Avoid auto play video or sound
  • Use sitemaps and search features
  • Use HTML constructs such as header tag properly
  • Highlight important sections in content
  • Surveys and polls to vote and users to be around the pages
  • Use infographics and data visualizion such as tag clouds 

Web Page Optimization

In order to have a web site that is easy to use for our human visitors and for the automated tools, web spiders, and search engine bots, we need to be vigilant about optimizing the web pages on our sites. The WCMS has been built to allow every content manager to edit and manage these important elements and edit the meta data for each web page. This access will provide optimal agility for the rapidly changing 'SEO' world, but also places responsibility on the Content Managers to be diligent in their efforts.

The following is a list of the priorities for our 2009 redesign cycle with regard to optimizing the web pages.

  • Architecture Optimizations for accessibility and W3C compliance
  • Full google tools are embedded for analytics on all domains
  • Use of keywords and phrases should be honed to the specific results desired on a per page basis
  • Targeting should focus on the 'long tail' keywords
  • Selection of only 2 or 3 keywords per page
  • Use keywords in the page content repeatedly but within efficacy limits
  • Use keyword in the top level header tags
  • Use keyword in Meta data title
  • Use keyword in Meta data keywords
  • Use keyword in Meta data description
  • Use keyword in alt tags for images
  • ** keyword in url or filename where practical

All 'GOOD' Web site content meets the following basic criteria:

  • it is timely
  • it is accurate
  • it is written for the web
  • it is interesting and/or useful to our visitors

Note - Web Services has been tracking and analyzing the data for existing sites, along with researching in public domain data repositories for suitable interest levels. We are preparing reports that outline our recommendations regarding search terms and focused keywords for each of the various web site regions.

Microformatting

We are using H-card Microformatting for contact blocks. See http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard for more info.

Required H-card Properties (note - an H-card is an evolution of the v-card):

  • fn
  • n1 (family-name, given-name, additional-name, honorific-prefix, honorific-suffix)

Optional properties:

  • adr (post-office-box, extended-address, street-address, locality, region, postal-code, country-name, type, value)
  • agent
  • bday
  • category
  • class
  • email (type, value)
  • geo (latitude, longitude)
  • key
  • label
  • logo
  • mailer
  • nickname
  • note
  • org (organization-name, organization-unit)
  • photo
  • rev
  • role
  • sort-string
  • sound
  • tel2 (type, value)
  • title
  • tz
  • uid
  • url