Getting others to link to your website

Most people know that its good to get other websites to link to theirs. If you are marketing goods or services, these links can expose your goods and services to wider markets, without advertising.

But how can you get others to link to you?

Sometimes it can be simple, although time-consuming. I spend at least one day a month sending emails asking other webmasters to link to various pages on my site.

For example, GSA has free small business classes on “How to get a GSA Schedule” every month. There are several small business organizations that could help their clients out by offering them this information via a link on their site. So every month I send out emails to local Chambers of Commerce, city and county small business asking them to link to GSA’s small business events page.

The format of the email is something like this:

Dear ………

I found your webpage on www.—-.—/— and found it very informative. Could I ask that you consider linking to GSA’s Events page, at www.gsa.gov/ncrnews, so that your clients could easily find information on free classes that GSA offers on “How To Obtain a Federal Supply Schedule Contract.?” If you have any questions, please contact me at ……

Thanks!
===============

This is a website housekeeping task that I do once a month, generally when I’m also cleaning up broken links, or poring through webtrends to determine what pages users are going to on GSA’s site, and how they are finding these pages.

Over time, adding just one link a month can really increase the traffic to your website.

Eyetracking and your website

What is eyetracking? Why should you care?

Yesterday I found out what, and why. I went to a Eyetracking Demonstration led by Dr. Kathryn Summers, University of Balitmore & Michael Summmers, Summers Consulting, Inc., in collaboration with Nick Boswell, Tobii Technology.

During the presentation, Michael Summers showed how eyetracking – measuring exactly where user’s eyeballs go on a page – can be vital for website creators. Users tend to look at websites in a letter “Z” or “F” format. They do not watch animated images, but instead gravitate towards content in text form. This was born out by user eyetracking data gathered from large corporate websites - users did not dwell on, and often did not look at all, at expensive custom graphics that changed from one image to another. Content is still king. Spending money on expensive custom graphics is probably unnecessary – from your user’s point of view.

Eyetracking involves following a user’s eyes as they try to accomplish a specific task on your website. During the eyetracking demonstration, we watched users try to find the phone number for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on USA.gov. We the audience could see from eyetracking data – represented as red lines and dots - that users were scanning furiously to complete the task. All accomplished this task, but only with difficulty. Their difficulty suggested that the site could be optimized for people who are looking for disaster-related information.

Heatmaps are a method of demonstrating what areas of the website were viewed most, and where user’s eyes lingered the longest (indicating areas of most interest).

 I asked the presenters if there was current eyetracking data to coincide with shopping cart abandonment. It seems that much of this research is strictly proprietary – imagine if you could convert more of your online users to buyers – you would be quite in demand. Jakob Hencke, of Tobii Technology, said that a good place to look for that information is the  Tobii forum.