If I see a site plan that has pages 5 and 6 levels deep, I’m going to propose making the site more flat and explain exactly why. It’s a lot easier to do this on paper than it is once the site has been built, even if it’s still in early construction stages. Of course content is critically important, and should be considered for SEO purposes well in advance. I’m also always very concerned about the site’s navigation and URL structure. These all need to be planned before any design work starts.

There are also items that will be taken care of shortly before launch. My checklist always includes setting up the necessaril redirects, getting the robots.txt ready, and ensuring a page to URL ratio of 1:1 (no duplicate content).

Next time you consider an extreme website makeover, do yourself a favor and hire an SEO consultant to join the process. Your boss will thank you later.

1. Show more gratitude to my clients. I’m straight up terrible at this – I didn’t even send Christmas cards this year. I’m really not a grinch, and next year I’m going to aim to be more thankful and communicate that better.
2. Attract two medium-to-large web projects (e-com, real estate, etc.) in the course of the year.
3. Finally find a reliable web design contractor. I really don’t like web design, although with enough blood, sweat and tears, I can usually put something together that doesn’t seer the iris. I’d much rather concentrate on functionality, marketing and analytics. That requires outside help, but so far my attemps to partner with designers have failed miserably.
4. Blog more! Ahhh….!!!

There…only four – that’s not intimidating. Here’s comes 2008!

Name: Joe Smith
Phone: 555-555-5555
email: joe@email.com
Notes: I’m interested in your product or service, please call me ASAP.
Visitor Source: Google search for ‘dallas widget maker’

Sure, you can always tell from the Google Analytics reports the conversion rate of each medium and source, but this allows to you tie each individual lead or contact form to a source. Why is this better? Well, all leads are not equal in value. If you do high volume on the Internet, you should probably know that 30% of your PPC leads turn into customers, but only 15% of your email leads do. Attaching this kind of tracking will enable you to make this next step calculation that would have otherwise been impossible.

So again, great job Justin! We went back and forth a few times in the comments about some ideas for improving the code (incidently, I had written the exact same program for my employer last week, but hadn’t published it). I definitely suggest implementing this on your lead forms if you use Google Analytics.

There comes a point where there just isn’t much more traffic to be had – either with SEO or PPC. Yes, a site can max out. The question becomes, how do I get more people searching for my brand or product? Where as before we simply had to reach the traffic that was already available, in this new stage, more web traffic must be created in order to continue to show increases. This is the traffic creation stage.

It really isn’t an easy thing moving from traffic gathering to traffic creation – the later stage is much more difficult and gets to the heart of how a business operates and markets itself. I’ll admit, for a while I was strictly a traffic gatherer myself. It was fun to work for large businesses and perform traffic gathering services like search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising and see their satisfaction when website traffic increased 300%. But I’m learning that I can’t be satisfied as an online marketing if I simply grab the low-hanging fruit.  Traffic creation involves techniques that are creative, out-of-the-ordinary, socially cool (that’s hard for me!) and cutting edge.

As I gain more experience with all kinds of customers, I’m learning that online marketing is less about magic code and symbols and more about defining a strategy and executing. Sometimes my strategy doesn’t work as well as I’d hoped, but that’s OK. The great thing about the new web is you can be adventurous and try new things quickly and with minimal risk.

So – here we are. This is where I’ll be blogging about business-related items, and my personal blog will be just that, personal. You might see posts on here about online strategies, business models, agency life, interpreting web analytics, SEO techniques, usability, etc.