I recently took on a new title: Director of Internet Marketing for a local real estate firm. We worked out a deal where I get a portion of the revenue that is generated because of their website. Any lead that comes from the Internet is credited to me, and if it turns into a home sale, I get ca$h.

So it behooves me to do a few things:

• Make sure that their website is running in tip-top shape
• Modify their site to position them for the best rankings
• Start an offsite campaign which includes link building, listing their site on Yelp!, Mixx, etc
• Fine-tune the PPC campaign to produce highly targeted traffic
• and more

The biggest part of my mission in this case is to get people to the website. Once they are there, I can use tools like CrazyEgg to see just where they are clicking. I can watch them coming and going via Google Analytics. I can see what pages they landed on, and I can see at what point they abandoned the website.

Now, as someone who is only making money if they actually contact the real estate agency, I need to make uber sure that those leads are not only happening, but that I can track them. That’s where the fun starts.

Currently on most websites, there are a few ways you can contact the business: email, phone and online form. These are all fine tools, but there are a few problems.

Email

Since I took over this website in an already-functioning form, the email addresses listed on the page were there long before I came along. If a new visitor sees a home they like, they can click and send an email to the agent. They can ask to see the home, ask questions, whatever. They don’t, however, have to mention how they came up with the email address in the first place.

This causes a problem, because that email address can be on the signs in the home’s yard, business cards, flyers or whatever. There is no way to 100% be sure that that lead was generated from a visit to the website. So I’ve got to fix it.

There are a few things I can do here.

1. Change the email address
   Probably the easiest fix. Set up a forwarder that goes to the old email address, but shows that it came via website_lead@domain.com or whatever. Incidently, in this case I can’t set up a forwarder because the system that the real estate agent is set up on doesn’t allow new email addresses, and certainly not forwarders.
2. Add a subject line message to the link
   It wouldn’t be hard to add something like this to the code: <a href=”mailto:info@domain.com?subject=Website_Referral”>
   I’ve always found this a bit hokey. First, you have to assume that the visitor is actually going to click on the email link on the website. Second, you have to assume that their browser knows how to accurately handle the click and open their email program. Third, you have to assume that the visitor won’t just delete what you’ve stuck in there and write their own.
3. Remove the email address
   Well that’d be just plain silly. It’s an option, yes, but not one I’d do. Why take away a way for a potential customer to contact the client?

So what’s the best fix for my scenario? Number two, I guess. Hopefully it sticks. Got any other ideas?

Online forms

Forms. I love ‘em. Well, in most cases. Forms let us collect info from any visitor that cares to fill one out. They are widely used, particularly by those people who want to communicate only via online methods, who have a question, or who just don’t want to talk to someone face to face (or ear to ear).

If you have a decent amount of ‘control’ over the website server, you can write scripts to do all kinds of cool things with the forms. I’ve used Mootools to generate some fancy-looking popup forms, I’ve written fake form scripts (that look like they are searching a database, etc) and more. Forms are great as I said, unless the user won’t fill one out.

There’s a fine line you have to walk when using a form. You want to collect a bunch of information from the visitor, but at the same time you don’t want them to be turned off and click their BACK button. So you’ve got to collect just enough that you can get by, and hope they will give you more info if they are interested in your product/service.

But what happens if you don’t have ‘control’ over the server? Perhaps you use Yahoo!’s shopping cart, which lets you build a form, but doesn’t let you add custom fields (such as a CC: email address). People can fill out the form, contact your client, and you have no idea there was ever any contact made.

If you have a thank-you page of some type, you could set up a goal in Google Analytics for that page. You’d then know that someone made it that far, but that’s about all you’d know.

Ultimately, I think this one comes down to trust. You are going to have to trust that your client will credit those leads to you.

Phone calls

Ok this one is my new favorite.

In the past, a marketing company had no control over getting credit for phone calls that were generated because of their campaigns. Whether it was a billboard, direct mail, or whatever, there really was no way to track these phone calls without purchasing a second line and installing it in their clients office (expensive).

Along comes call tracking - a cool new service that lets you get as many virtually forwarded phone numbers as you’d like, at a very reasonable cost.

I’m not going to go into great detail about how the call tracking works, but let me just say I’ve used it now for several months for several clients, and there is no doubt where these leads are coming from.

Basically, I get a custom phone number just for a client’s website. It can be a local or toll free number, whatever. Same cost. When a visitor comes to my client’s website, they see the phone number and perhaps call it. The call is routed through the call tracking system directly to the clients office. They get the calls just as they did before, but the call is credited to the website - because that is the only place it is listed.

So the phone problem is solved. Leads are counted, and my pocketbook increases.

I’d love to hear other creative ways that you use to make sure those leads that you are generating actually count. As a part-time affiliate marketer, I know it’s tough sometimes to trust your end vendors - are they crediting you with all your leads, or just most of them? It’s good to know there are at least some ways that we can keep them honest (not that they aren’t - I’m just sayin’…)

Whether in haste or just laziness, many times the meta description tags are not added to a page. This happens a lot when a company pays a (cheap) web designer to build their site, but the designer has no clue about SEO. Not having a meta description tag isn’t a deal breaker, but if you want to rank, and you want people to click on your rankings, you need to have them.

If you’ve been hired to do some SEO for one of these clients, I’ve got a nice little script that you can use to help you identify the pages without descriptions.

Part One: Getting all the pages to display a description tag

If you’re lucky, the designer built the site in a way that the header is it’s own file, usually called something like header.inc or header.php. This file houses the top HTML tags, the title tag, any javascript, CSS links, and of course the meta tags. Having one header file is great if you’ve got a top nav menu that you want to be the same across an entire site, or if you just want easier ways to identify your files.

The problem with one header file is that you can’t really hard-code the meta description tag, because then it’ll be the same across the entire site. In reality, every page on your site needs its own unique description. So how can you do this with one header file? Easy. Turn the tag into a variable.

<meta name=”description” value=”We offer the best widgets in the entire St. Louis area…”>

becomes

<?php $pagedesc=”We offer the best widgets in the entire St. Louis area…”; ?>
<meta name=”description” value=”<?php echo $pagedesc; ?>“>

Now that we’ve changed the description to a variable, we can play around with it a bit. First, we need to open a page (lets call it services.php - our services page) and add it’s custom header.

(top of services.php)

<?php $pagedesc=”We offer widget repair services in our fully equipped widget shop…”;
include ‘header.php’; ?>

By putting the pagedesc before the include, it will already have it set for that particular page. Now all we have to do is make one more change to the header file and we’re set with the description tag for every page.

<?php if (!$pagedesc) { $pagedesc=”We offer the best widgets in the entire St. Louis area…”; } ?>
<meta name=”description” value=”<?php echo $pagedesc; ?>”>

Now if a page doesn’t have a description, we can give it one. Albeit generic, at least we’re moving in the right direction, and the search engines will be happier and display a little better description of our site.

Part Two: Setting an alert for your pages that don’t have a description

This can be a pain, particularly if you’re taking over someone elses work, and you are perhaps a bit cloudy on the entire site layout.

What we’re going to do is simply add a few more lines to the header that will email us every time someone visits a page that doesn’t have a description. The email will have the link to the page, and we can then go in and start to fix these pages as they are visited.

(header.php)

<?php if (!$pagedesc) {
$page=”http://www.domain.com”.$_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];
$message=”The following page is missing a description:
Page: $page\n”;
mail(”will@willhanke.com”, “Page missing Meta Description”, $message);
$pagedesc=”We offer the best widgets in the entire St. Louis area…”;
} ?>
<meta name=”description” value=”<?php echo $pagedesc; ?>”>

Now I know there are programs out there that can do some fancy searches and spit out a list of all pages in violation of the page description tag, but since it’s not a deal breaker for web ranking, I like this method. It emails you, and when you have time you can get in there and update the pages that are (at least) being visited.