What Downtime Costs You...
mkLINK Internet Marketing Tips(07 Feb 2007)

What if Your Site Goes Down?

Assuming your website is important to your business, then it makes good
sense to regularly monitor it and make sure that it's on track. I shall
be returning to this topic again and again as I get further into website
analytics, but for now, let's just keep an eye on the very basics so that
you know what to look out for.

Firstly - is Your Website Online?
Sounds obvious - but the first thing to ensure is that your website
is actually 'online' 100% of the time!

Let's say your website generates business of £10,000 per month from selling
business to business. So, assuming that people are looking at it during a
normal working day, that's 9 am to 5 pm, 5 days a week, four and a half weeks in
a month.

That's 8 x 5 x 4.5 = 180 hours per month to generate £10,000 pounds

Therefore, your site generates roughly £56 per hour !!!

You'll appreciate then that your site needs to be up 100% of the time.
Even 1 tenth of that is like paying someone a basic wage
- for every hour your site's down

Other things to monitor are missing pages, dead links, incomplete images etc.
Anything missing ultimately costs you money in some way, down the road.

Needless to say - if your site is down - you need to know ASAP!

If you'd like details of web monitoring services - contact me
...01454 852414 or visit mklink.com/contact2.php?source=newsletter

Sales / Leads
Here you should keep a record of total transactions and transaction amounts so
that you can keep an eye on conversion rates. You can also try to increase
the average transactional value as well(via price increases, upselling, bundling etc)

Page Load times
You've heard me rattle on before that you've got 8 seconds to get your
visitor hooked. Keep images small where possible - remove un-necessary files,
movies and clutter that doesn't improve the visitor experience.

Bandwidth
Ultimately, you're paying for this. What is it? It's the amount of information
your server pumps out over any given unit of time. Your ISP gets charged for
bandwidth and so you will probably have limits on your account. If you haven't
- it's likely you've got a cheap(slow) hosting account. Keep bandwidth down
by offering to cache files, keep images optimized and smaller where possible.

Time on Site
If you have access to decent stats or log files - knowing the average time on site
is a great way of getting a rough idea of the quality of your traffic. If a visitor
is there less than a second - he's probably a robot! Higher visit times equate to
higher conversion rates. Keeping an eye on this index and looking to increase it is
another way of making your website more 'sticky'

Visits
I shall save a lengthier discussion here - suffice to say the more unique visitors
you have - the more chances you'll have of selling. Of course that's a function of
how good the quality of your traffic is - and whether they're repeat visitors or not.
I'll need to spend a whole email on this really - I'll leave this for now.

Search Engine Positioning
In order to find your site - 85% of people will probably have used a search engine.
I shalln't rattle on about how important this is. A quick way of keeping an eye
on your position is to choose (say) a dozen key phrases that you're interested in
being found for, then updating a spreadsheet monthly that tells you(numerically)
which positions you rank for these given key phrases, within the major search
engines. Over time, you can see if your positions are going up, down
... or remaining neutral.

Google Page Rank
This ranges from 0 to 10. Google's algorithm for calculating this is a function of
inbound links from other sites, including their page rank, website content and other
stuff. Suffice to say the higher the number the better. A Page rank of 4 or more is
considered quite good. You can get the Pagerank Toolbar direct from Google.
(If you have a page rank of 7 or above - you should be writing this!)

Alexa Page Rank
This is similar to Google Page rank - in reverse and multiplied by 1,000,0000 !
Essentially, the lower number the better. It is calculated by how many Alexa users
are visiting your website. If your Alexa number is less than 100,000 you're doing
quite well.

Inbound Links
You can measure these from Google, MSN, Ask Jeeves, Alta Vista etc.
Google is probably the most important - for reasons of page rank.
To find it out - go to www.google.co.uk and type :
link:http://www._your_website_address/

e.g. link:http://www.newcastle.co.uk/

Again - keep the result on a spreadsheet and monitor these over time.

Lastly...
The idea of this email is not really a primer on website analytics - as I said,
I shall be emailing a series on that - but at least if you spend just a few
minutes each month putting this information on a spreadsheet - you'll build up a
picture of how healthy your site is - so that any changes are noticeable and just
as importantly - if anything is wrong - you'll quickly know.

We're launching a new service in March 07 that covers this stuff
- and a lot more besides...

- checkout http://www.mklink.com/consult

'till next time,

Mike Knight.

Want to know More?
Simply reply to this email, call me on 01454 852414 or visit my site :