How do you engage your website users? What exactly constitutes the different parts of a website’s content that will attract people and make the website an enjoyable experience for them and a profitable one for your business?

In the first of seven parts, I’ll take a look at what goes into creating an engaged website audience and an optimised site.

I have prioritised the list below in order of how an existing website owner my look at their site and assess how to get their audience more engaged.

1. Success metrics
2. Defining behaviours
3. Architecture for Optimisation
4. Developing a compelling message
5. Motivational calls to action
6. Enhancing interactive flow
7. Iterative testing and relevant reporting

Success metrics

First up its defining your success metrics but what has this to do with engagement?

Though it may not strike us immediately, any enterprise that has a successful business will have an audience that is engaged in some way with their product. There is no difference online, only that we have the means to define what success looks like as it appears in real time.

Success metrics feels a more emotive and emphatic term than key performance indicators. Semantics perhaps, but metrics (or KPIs) reflect the details of how you are succeeding or failing against a benchmark set by your business.

Every site has different success criteria. These metrics fall into four groups reflecting different purposes of a site. There are obviously other sites that may show characteristics of several types, but these four are clearly defined in their purpose and are unique enough to provide a good illustration.

E commerce

Site objective:
Persuade visitors to purchase products or services online. Web analytics allows you to ascribe a value per visitor, crucial in measuring the persuasive qualities of your site against actual revenue.

Metrics:
• Revenue
• Orders
• Profit
• Conversion Rate
• Revenue-per-visit
• Profit-per-visit
• Average Order Value

Content and display advertising

Site objective:
Attract repeat visitors who explore the site in depth. The more pages consumed the better here. This type of site relies on returning visitors as much as e-commerce sites.

Metrics:
•Page Views
•Visits and Unique Visitors (Reach)
•Average Page Views per Visit
•Conversion Rate (Actions/Visit)
•Subscriptions
•Registrations
•Logins
•Cancellations

Lead generation

Site objective:
Capture information about a visitor to use in future communications. Although shown here as a site, it is just as likely to be a landing page, specifically built to gather leads.

Metrics:
•Leads
•Cost-per-lead
•Conversion Rate
•Registrations
•Newsletter Sign-Ups
•Partner Referrals
•Price Quotes
•Demo Quotes
•Collateral Downloads

Customer support

Site objective:
Quickly and successfully answer customer questions and address customer problems online. Keeping the customer satisfied is a prerequisite for any business and effective online help is a major cost-saving for businesses.

Metrics:
•Visits, Unique Visitors
•Web Inquires
•Percentage of Successful Support Inquires
•Call Center Volume
(Unique Web number)
•Customer Satisfaction Index
(Offline)
•File downloads

Taking metrics to the next level

Aside from the metrics stated above there are also some others that are becoming more important as different audiences mature. The domain of digital marketing needs to have these metrics in mind as people become more vocal online within new communication arenas.

Customer reach (click through and open rates)
How far your message goes and being able to measure the reach is another useful aspect to analytics. Do people actually open what you send them? Do people click on to the next page?

Cost driven (cost per click, cost per keyword)
Analyse exactly how much investment you make in acquiring your visitors and then contrast with how much they are worth to your site. An engaged audience will return, and that cost of acquisition will go down in direct relation to their frequency of returning visits.

Consumer attitudes (brand awareness, frequency)
The amount of visitors coming to the site through search using the brand as a search term is an indication of how much your brand is known. Even a company strap line entered as a search term gives an idea of brand strength in the market place.

Cross-channel (customer lifetime value, return on marketing objectives)
How your audience arrives will often be a mixture of many different online and offline methods. Being aware of these paths into your site, and adjusting the user experience to suit, is an important factor to successfully converting users.

Ensure calls to action are relevant and clear. Synchronise off line activities (such as call centres) to be in tune with activity online.

Linking the overall experience, the essence of the service, will help build the message and the various mediums into a cohesive, and measurable marketing exercise.

Perceptions (sentiment online, levels of interaction, attitudes)
Monitor known channels of communication around your site’s subject area (blogs, forums, trade sites, news wires). Twitter is currently the  marketing darling, and well read blogs can be genuine authorities that are listened to.

If your site is perceived negatively the ‘noise’ will certainly be louder than positive comments and obviously more disruptive. Your reputation hinges on your user’s perceptions. Their perceptions colour how they view you, and if they are likely to recommend you to others.

Peer referral is a major force when the way of consuming your content is also a communication channel through which they can inform or broadcast their own views.

Defining success

So this post has been about success, and all sites crave a bit of that. Each site will have different criteria when it comes to what constitutes the winning formula but some common rules apply;

		Decide on business objectives and work out the actual metrics that will define success for your site and your business in achieving its goals.
		Always choose metrics that reflect the objectives directly – their values will have an impact on what constitutes success.
		Once understood, the site owners need to be aware of the key metrics and see reports regularly.

There are two parts to engagement; one is the building of a site that is optimised and doesn’t hinder a user’s discovery or use of the page. The other is ensuring the content is sufficiently attractive and desirable to rely on consistent repeat visits.

The two parts are very different and require different specialists to ensure the tasks are executed in the optimal way. Having these people in place will help define real success, not just the numeric kind.

Next, defining behaviours….

A year ago I was involved in a major restructure of 7 major websites. Each had a new taxonomy and controlled vocabulary created. A clear vision of the direction of each site was drawn up and site maps and wireframes produced. The one problem we had, was there wasn’t a generic metadata schema that was adhered to. It was a combination of ad hoc, legacy tags. Some originated from the SEO team and some from the developers and database administrators on each site.

The problem was, to enable users (internal staff and external consumers) to be able to find what they needed and to discover content serendipitously, the metadata needed to be rigorously structured and adhere to recognised standards.

Various kinds of metadata were important to the sharing and re-use of articles, and this post will highlight these areas and also illustrate how we incorporated these into the metadata schema.

The importance of metadata

The lack of metadata in a file, adversely affects search engine retrieval but also the working efficiency in collaborative teams. Data is lost, assets are not published and effort in creation is wasted. Ensuring effective metadata implementation in the documents we create and publish results in gaining competitive advantage in the search domain but also an increased efficiency in our working practice.

Without metadata management intellectual property rights become eroded, and liability increases. Files such as an image, PDF, video or audio all need to be tagged to provide the user or employee a method in finding valuable content.

A set of Metadata Standards should govern the implementation of consistent and uniform metadata architecture. Consistency in metadata is important to enable information sharing across an organisation and to make optimal use of document management tools which rely upon this.

For metadata to be effective, it must be incorporated into the workflow from creation to publication. This emphasises the importance of any content producer making a concerted effort to synchronise their information management.

There are significant contributors in metadata standards and after analysis the following organisation’s standards formed a basis for the metadata schema.

These are:

• Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI)
• International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC)
• Publishing Requirements for Industry Standards Metadata (PRISM)

These standards are evident in the following formats that create types of metadata:

• Adobe Software’s Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP)
• Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF)
• Resource Description Framework (RDF)

To aid in classification of file format types we used the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to give us a definitive list of file types. Its list, the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) covers various formats that were used and may be used in the future. All other taxonomical types of labels (countries, regions etc) we looked towards the ISO for their classifications.

There are four main areas of metadata in terms of semantic grouping.

These are:

• Descriptive metadata – Describes the contents of a file
• Administrative metadata – Data that can not be retrieved or inferred from the content and pertains to management of the content within a system
• Rights metadata – Asserts the ownership of the content, who owns it and who may distribute it and usually pertains to the usage of the document.
• Technical metadata – data about the physical properties of the content

All four areas have specific use for different reasons. The descriptive quality helps the item properties to be found either by search or by a user interface element on the page. This can be online and also offline in an application such as Adobe Bridge.

Drafting a schema

The schema was designed to incorporate the four main uses of metadata. These different facets to metadata result in different uses throughout the workflow of a publishing process.

These are revealed through tools the Adobe suite of applications and in the content of the websites where the ability to find our information is paramount to the quality of the user experience. The importance of classifying different aspects of our content is becoming increasingly important as new technologies based on the XML platform come into fruition.

The properties are unique and their use is dependent upon the content of the resource that is being tagged.

The list below outlines what we thought was of most use to be tagged from the moment content was created to the moment it became published.

The image below shows exactly how these fields are applied in practice.

Risks of not managing your metadata

Unless a unified metadata strategy is initiated there are risks that;

1. The data communication between enterprise applications will be flawed. Thereby negating any efficiency that may be gained through hardware upgrades, workflow will be inefficient, content will reside in silos .

1. The investment of designing taxonomies needs to be implemented at a technical level and this requires taxonomy management and data architecture. Not following up the investment of a metadata implementation by employing a data architect or someone responsible for metadata management is a critical weakness in the enterprise’s information management.

1. Little or no use can be made of existing content and it often presents a valuable commercial resource. As the file has substandard metadata we immediately lose our content but we need to profit from its creation and value. Without a way of implementing a schema, content is effectively lost as soon as it is created.

With so many content creators working daily, the management of this information is our most important challenge. The content needs to be found easily, both internally amongst colleagues and externally amongst users.

The future

Certain properties in the schema pave the way for future search technologies. For instance entity type (such as brand, product, location, event) are complex in their variety. However this label allows that complexity of context to be stated and clarified.

Perhaps its for this reason that I see metadata being the foundation of semantic search. Only with a rich metadata schema that incorporates several different facets will we start to enjoy highly advanced searches over content that has inherent relationships. The challenge for interaction  and interface designers is to design the interface to be intuitive and allow searching in a unique, non-text field way, that is more exploratory than is possible at present.

Tagging images at source enables a standard to be reached when all images are used during a production process, both for print and online. If they are tagged properly, valuable metadata can be captured inside the JPEG file that can be read by applications later, either on or off line.

Optimising images enables;

• · speedy retrieval of images from within an image archive
• · resource sharing across different departments or companies, allowing a greater library of images available to all
• · Metadata inclusion within the files themselves. Enabling a higher level of findability when the files are used online within websites

To ensure that this occurs, guidelines should be followed by the image creators and those who manage the administration of these images. As tagging images can be highly subjective the guidelines drawn up here are designed to be quick and simple to create within the Photoshop File info panel.There are four main fields that need descriptive information to ensure images hold metadata that will provide SEO benefit and enable the files to be found easily.The fields are;

• · OBJECT – What the image is of. Is it a person, animal, logo, building or machinery?
• · LOCATION – Where the photograph was taken, this is an entity type that helps searching for specific images around a subject area by specifying geographic place. For images such as graphics, this descriptor will not be necessary.
• · DATE – The date on which the image was created.
• · REASON – The purpose for the image being created and what the image illustrates (seen in the description field below). This is another entity type.
• · KEYWORDS – This enables searching for the image within an archive and externally

The image above has been taken for use in a magazine and online. As it is a generic image of food there is also a good chance that it could be searched for. Once the image has been downloaded from the camera it is here where the initial information needs to be added via an application, preferably Photoshop.Using the File Info command a box will appear like the example shown below. Within the first option, Description, all the metadata can be added that will aid SEO and will be maintained when taken into other applications such as Fotoware. The first option in the menu (description) uses the metadata to populate other areas, such as IPTC info areas further down the option list.

1. Document title field

This is effectively the OBJECT attribute mentioned earlier. It must be a concise description of the image contents in as few words as is possible. This will also form the JPG file name and for this reason has important SEO implications. In this example the image is called rhubarb_diced.jpg. The author’s information can also be added under this field.

2. Description field

This is the area that holds information about the LOCATION and REASON for the image’s existence. It also holds information regarding the DATE. The description should be targeted and concise. The description field should not be used as a further way to inform the art editors on the picture’s usage. This should be done in a separate document as all date within file info refers to metadata and will remain with the image after it has left the production desk.

3. Keywords field

For search engine optimisation and search through the Fotoware’s online interface – FotoWeb. These keywords are really important as they define the ease in which a user can find the appropriate image.

The image above shows a user searching for images that have been tagged ‘Langley Vale Farm’ and Fotoweb has returned 640 results. To narrow the search the categories list on the left hand side enables a user to drill down into results that have been put into relevant sections.

Clicking on ‘Land’ enables the user to see the 18 images that have the keywords associated to them. Clicking on a thumbnail allows the user to preview the image and also to examine the metadata. Here we can see that the term ‘Langley Vale’ has revealed the image of the farm on the Langley Vale estate.

4. Copyright field

It is important that the correct copyright information is displayed and Photoshop can help ratify if a copyright license agreement is in place. The © logo will appear next to the file name of the Photoshop file. The file info panel will allow the creator or the picture editor to establish what copyright information is in place.

Where possible, images should be tagged following the what (OBJECT), when (DATE), where (LOCATION) and why (REASON) of the image. Where images have rights management issues keywords and copyright information will help give a minimum standard to the tagging of images.If this data is within the JPEG of an image then there is a much higher chance of the images appearing in a search engine results page (SERP). Tagging images this way now, also helps in maintaining a standardised approach to tagging of images that will ensure placement in SERPs in the future as crawlers become more adept at reading metadata from different file types.