• Are You a Spider Slayer?
• The Best Kind of Shoppers
• Unhappy Customers Like to
  Chat (But Not With You!)

Archived Issues

Are You A “Spider Slayer”?

How do Search Engines gather information about web sites? By using automated “spiders” to read through the html code of your web site. When a Search Engine spider visits your web site, it begins reading the html code on your home page. However, the html code on your site must be readable by these little spiders, or else they will just give up and go find another web site to read. Don’t let this happen to you…don’t be a spider slayer!

Spiders can find your home page just fine on their own; but once they are on your site it’s up to you to make sure they can travel freely among all of the pages of your web site. Spiders must have links to follow, which means that in order to find all of the pages on your site, you must include links on your home page that lead to the rest of your site. Although there are many different types of links, not all links are equal in the eyes of a search engine spider.

Links
Many web sites use graphics for home page menus, which unfortunately cannot be read by search engine spiders. Spiders cannot read a “picture” (graphic), so they can’t use the graphics to find the other pages on the site. You can easily get around this, however, by including text links at the bottom of the home page. This way, you can still have beautiful graphics and menus, and the spiders can still find the other pages through the text links.

Site Maps
Another good way to be spider friendly is to include a site map with links to each of your site’s pages. You can organize the page any way that makes sense to you, just make sure it has working links to the other pages. A site map makes it easy for the search engine spiders to discover all of the pages on your site, all from one place. Make sure you include a link to the site map right on the home page of your site.

Keywords & Meta Tags
There is often a lot of confusion about how to use meta data and keywords in html code. When search engines first began, they used keywords as the main criterion for ranking web sites on their results pages. Unfortunately, keywords began to be mis-used (mostly by spammers), which forced the search engines to come up with other ways to rank web sites. Today, the major search engines don’t even look at meta keywords in the html code. Instead, they use a sophisticated combination of text links, site content, inbound links, and other criteria to determine how high to rank a site. Some meta data does still matter, though, including meta tags for title (the text that displays at the top of your browser window) and description (the text listed under the link on a search engine results page).

Flash & Frames
Web sites that are designed in Flash are typically very cool to look at, but they are not very spider friendly. Search engine spiders have difficulty reading sites that are Flash-based, which means they may not be able to follow links or index information about a site. The same is true for web sites that use Frames. Spiders often have trouble reading Frames-based web sites, so the site is basically invisible to the search engines. If you want to be included in the search engines, you should probably avoid Flash and Frames when developing your site.

The goal of a search engine spider is to gather as much information about your site as possible. But this can only be done if the spiders are able to correctly read and index the information on your site. Be sure to make your web site as spider friendly as possible, and provide the spiders with a clear path of links to follow. The more information that the spiders gather, the better your chances of top rankings on the search results pages.

The Best Kind of Shoppers

Today’s consumers are shopping on the web, and converting these shoppers to buyers may be easier than you think. Studies show that offering online coupons, whether you actually sell products on your web site or not, is an effective tool in reaching the best kind of shoppers – the ones who are ready to buy!

But are coupons really popular with consumers? A recent study from data analytics firm Prospectiv found that 95.5% of people clip or print coupons, with 62.2% of them saving coupons as often as once a week. More than half of these people redeem the coupons they save, making online coupons a very effective tool for reaching customers who are ready to make purchases.

Companies that sell products are obvious candidates for online coupons, but companies that offer services can also take advantage of this simple strategy for bringing in more business. Try out a few different offers, such as a free consultation or a percentage-off a specific service, and see which strategy your customers respond to. One benefit of using online coupons is that you can track and measure each coupon offer that you try by using a unique coupon code for each. This makes it easy to adjust your offers based on what works and what doesn’t.

Once you have published your coupons online, don’t forget to let your customers know about them. Send out an email announcement describing your current offers, mention your coupons in your company newsletter, or send out a press release announcing that you now offer online coupons as a convenience for your customers. Online coupons are a great way to build loyalty in current customers, but will also help your business attract new customers as well.

Unhappy Customers Like to Chat (But Not With You!)

It’s just a fact of doing business that sometimes, your customers will be unhappy or have a complaint. And although your customer service might be top notch, studies show that customers who have a complaint will rarely tell you about it. So who do they tell? Unfortunately for you, they tell their friends, family, co-workers, and anyone else who will listen!

According to The Customer Dissatisfaction Study 2006 (conducted by the Wharton School and The Verde Group), only 6% of the customers who experienced a problem actually told the company about it. But 31% ended up telling others about the problem, which of course led to the story being spread to others, and getting embellished along the way. The study said that if 100 people have a complaint, a business can lose between 32 and 36 new or current customers. That’s not the kind of word-of-mouth advertising that any business wants!

As part of your customer service efforts, make sure you find out not only what makes your customers satisfied, but also what makes them dissatisfied. Try to get your customers to share problems or issues with your staff, instead of their friends and family. By knowing what upsets your customers, you can better head-off potential problems before they happen.

Companies that are responsive and friendly have a good chance of smoothing over customer complaints before they turn into negative stories. Make sure your staff is courteous and friendly, and encourage them to get management involved if necessary. Pay special attention to the people in your business that are on the front-lines with customers; make sure they have the training they need to not only make the sale, but also to keep the customers happy.

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Copyright 2006 Five Sparrows, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
3889 Hartland Hills, Hartland, MI 48353
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