Jangro.com Social Media, Affiliate Marketing, etc. Heavy on the etc.

I’m presenting this week at Commission Junction’s CJU in a session titled, “Site Lab: Designing Effective Landing Pages”. I’m actually co-presenting with Pedro Sostre. Pedro, being the creative designer type, and I being a geek an engineer/developer, we split our presentation along those lines. We’ll be looking at actual ordinary websites and giving some real advice about how we might make some improvements. Pedro will be looking from the design angle, and I the Search Engine Marketing perspective.

For my portion of the presentation, I’ll be using some tools to help dissect the websites we’re reviewing. For website developers and search engine marketers, Firefox can be a very valuable tool as there are some plug-ins developed to help do the exact tasks that I’m doing in this site review.

When reviewing a website for landing-page effectiveness, we look at some on-page SEO factors like keywords, meta data, and effective use of html to help demonstrate to a search engine index algorithm what a page is about.

To look at these factors, you can simply dig into the HTML, but that can get tedious, especially when reviewing HTML code that you didn’t design yourself. Here are a few tools that I use.

Firefox - you know, the web browser.

Web Developer Extension - this adds a toolbar to firefox with a number of functions that are useful for webmasters. The feature I use in the presentation is the “Add user CSS”, which allows me to choose a CSS file that will be added to the webpage’s CSS allowing me to make some important page elements more visible, specifically some links and header tags.

In order to use this, you need to create a CSS file to load. I’m using one something like this.


h1 {
border: 3px solid red;
}

a[rel="nofollow"]
{
background-color: red !important;
color: white !important;
font-weight: bold !important;
text-decoration: none !important;
}


Put the above code in a file called user.css (or whatever) in an easy to find place like your desktop.
In the web developer toolbar click the CSS button and “Add user style sheet…”. Choose the above file that you just created.

the first two entries allow me to quickly spot the H1, H2, and H3 tags, as they’re frequently customized. The last entry isn’t related to the presentation, but is a common tool that people use to spot links that have the rel=”nofollow” attribute, and don’t pass PageRank in Google’s eyes.

SearchStatus Extension - this adds some functionality geared for search engine marketers, automating some of the search-engine lookups to see indexed pages and backlinks. It also shows you Google PR and Alexa rankings. The features I’m using in the presentation, however, are the keyword and tag display tools. It has a nice quick keyword density analysis as well as a meta-tag viewer.

And in the “one of the coolest web applications I’ve ever seen” department, check out CrazyEgg. It’s a briliantly simple yet effective landing page testing application. You set up test for a single web page, in which you put in a bit of tracking code. It’ll monitor your traffic for the duration of the test and show you where your visitors are clicking with a few different views. What’s really nice is that they’ll show you a heatmap of your page so you can see exactly where people are clicking most often. You can check it out for free.

If you’re reading this having attended the CJU session, I hope you took away some interesting information and I’d love to hear from you. If you have any questions or feedback, please comment here or contact me via email.

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