Houston Search Engine Marketing and Optimization Services

11 Guidelines for Improved Website Usability

Patsy Rivera — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 16:18:30 +0000

What good is a website if visitors have trouble using it? An unusable website can kill your online presence and cost you customers. Here are 11 tips for improving the usability of your site.

Use easy-to-understand navigation—I have a simple rule when it comes to web design: Don’t make site visitors think. Your navigation should clearly describe the pages so visitors can find what they’re looking for easily.
Place navigation along the top or left— Web users are creatures of habit. They’ve come to expect to use the internet in a certain way. One of the things they’ve come to expect is that your site navigation will be placed either along the top of the page or down the left-hand side. Don’t change this up, as you’ll confuse them and cause them to abandon your site.
Have a benefit-driven headline on each page—The headline is usually the first thing a new visitor sees when landing on your website. Each page needs to have a benefit-driven headline that hooks the reader and forces him to keep reading. It needs to let the reader know what’s in it for him, and it should also encapsulate the main message of the page.
Ditch the huge banners—There’s a new trend in web design where websites have these huge banners along the top of the page. The banner takes up almost all of the space above the fold, making visitors scroll to get to the content. Banners are fine, but make sure they’re sized appropriately.
Put the most important information above the fold—Web users spend about 80% of their time looking at information above the fold of the page…information they don’t have to scroll down to see. This means it’s important that you feature your most important information above the fold of your website so you can be sure your visitors see it.
Get rid of the distractions—There’s something to be said for, “less is more.” Having too much on a page can overwhelm visitors, making it difficult for their eyes to focus on your main message. Take a step back and look at your website. Is there anything that can be eliminated?
Limit or eliminate the use of Flash—Not only is Flash bad for SEO, but it also slows loading time and creates viewing issues for some users. If you insist on using Flash, do so sparingly. Don’t build your entire site in Flash.
Optimize your website for the right keywords—Traffic isn’t your goal. Quality traffic is your goal. And to attract quality traffic, you have to make sure you’re targeting the right keywords that bring in buyers. Never guess what you think the right search phrases are. Do your research by using a good keyword suggestion tool.
Use images that enhance the message—Another trend in web design is to use stock photos. We’ve all seen them: the smiling family, the businessmen shaking hands, etc. The problem with stock photos is they rarely enhance the message, and they mostly just take up space. Images should add to your message. They should be more than placeholders.
Make sure your website loads quickly—Loading speed is important because web users are more impatient than ever before. If your site isn’t accessible as soon as they click your link, they’ll back out immediately.
Format content so it’s easy to scan—Online users don’t actually read content word-for-word. Instead, they scan over it quickly, looking to get the gist of the page. To make your content easier to scan, you should format it with short paragraphs, subheads, bullet points, and bolded phrases throughout.

Does your website meet all 11 points on this list?

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How Social Media Influences Consumer Behavior

David — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:44:54 +0000

Make no mistake. We’re in a new era. Thanks to social media, the consumer-company relationship has been totally turned on its head. In this new era, companies can no longer get by simply by shouting one-way messages at customers. And no longer do companies hold all the power while consumers struggle to get their voices heard.

Nope, today’s customer can be heard loud and clear. The customer’s voice can be heard everywhere, including review websites, blogs, YouTube videos, Tweets, Facebook updates, and other social media outlets. And companies have to pay attention because social media is changing the way customers do business. It’s influencing the entire buying process. If they don’t pay attention, they risk losing customers and getting upstaged by their once small and powerless competition.

The most obvious way that social media has changed consumer behavior is just by giving customers a bigger voice than they’ve ever had before. In a new study by Euro RSCG, 31.5% of U.S. social media users said they feel empowered to do things they’ve always wanted to do and 20% have lashed out against brands and companies online. In short, customers feel empowered to say the things they’ve always wanted to say but never had the outlet to do so. In short, the anonymity and safety provided by social media lets customers feel more confident in expressing their true feelings about the brands they interact with.

And all this noise does have an effect. According to a study performed by OTX Research, about 2/3 of customers use the information they find through social media to influence their buying decisions. 67% of customers are likely to pass this information on to others, and over 60% trust information they find through social media more than traditional advertisements.

In other words, customers are using social media outlets to research companies before doing business with them. So, if you run a company and the social media space is filled with a bunch of negative information about your brand, you’re probably losing a lot of customers.

How Companies Can Create a Strong Social Media Presence

Clearly, customers are being influenced by social media. And if you want them to be influenced positively to do business with your company, you need to build a strong social media presence. No, that doesn’t mean spamming a bunch of people to build your followers list. It also doesn’t mean going hot on Digg or ReddIt once or twice.

Building a strong social media presence requires consistency. It requires actually engaging with your target demographic, building relationships that help you earn their trust and their business. And it requires having actual goals and strategy for your social media campaign.

What kind of goals should you set for your social media campaign?

Improve search engine rankings
Increase brand awareness
Increase positive brand mentions online
Improve overall customer service and satisfaction ratings
Earn more sales

Once you’ve set your goals, you have to track your results. That’s pretty easy because you now have something to measure up against. For example, if you want to earn more sales through social media marketing, you can track your sales before and after your campaign. If you aren’t getting more sales, then maybe things aren’t working according to plan.

Of course, social media marketing does take time. You can’t scrap everything after just a few days without getting results. Social media marketing takes months. Consumers won’t alter their behavior overnight. So, you need to give your social media marketing efforts time to start working. But if after a reasonable period of time you aren’t seeing results, maybe it’s time to change your strategy.

What do you think? Does social media influence your buying behavior?

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4 Grammatical Mistakes That Can Enhance Your Copy

Eric Brantner — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:13:21 +0000

I spent 5 years as an elementary school teacher before I became a commercial freelance writer. Along the way, I think it’s safe to say that I became a bit of a grammar snob. Besides making me pretty annoying, this also made my transition into freelance writing more difficult.

Since getting into the business, I’ve learned to drop my grammar pride. It’s all fine and dandy for writing research papers, but when you’re writing marketing materials, the rules don’t always apply. Sure, you don’t want punctuation mistakes or misspellings, but there are some academic no-no’s that work great when writing sales materials. Here’s a few of them.

Fragments
While complex sentences impress the scholar, they only hurt your conversion rates. Fragments offer a way to cut down your average sentence length. Making your copy more readable by setting a rhythm. By the way, that was a fragment.
Starting with conjunctions
I remember getting points off on papers for beginning sentences with conjunctions. Well guess some what? Sometimes it just makes the transition flow more smoothly. And frankly, I like beginning sentences with “and.”
One sentence paragraphs
— Nothing draws attention to a key point like a one sentence paragraph. Here let me show you:

Often people define a paragraph as a block of text with a minimum of three sentences. Anything less and you need either need to expound on the paragraphs main idea or combine it with another paragraph. You wouldn’t want to break sacred grammar rules, would we?

If you’re a copywriter, you betcha!

So the main idea is set aside in its own paragraph, ensuring that the reader doesn’t miss it. Typically in copy, this one sentence paragraph will highlight a main benefit of the product or service.
Slang—You want a conversational tone for your copy. The reader needs to feel like they could sit down and exchange some words with you over a few beers. That said, now’s not the time to sound like a professor. So those rules about slang—throw them out the window. That includes contractions.

As always, remember your audience. You aren’t going to say “rock and roll, dude!” to someone looking to hire a lawyer. On the other hand, you might to a group of, well… rockers. And also, if you don’t know the correct slang, don’t use it. “Rock and roll, dude!” probably went out of style with the ninja turtles, so I wouldn’t really use it. If you can’t talk the talk, keep it simple and straight forward.
Remember, these “mistakes” don’t always work. Use your best judgment and use them as you see fit.

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Twitter Trifles: A Follower Conundrum

Gina Stark — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 08:38:19 +0000

So I’m thinking we need a secret code. Something to discretely notify someone that they’re not following you but they sure act like they think they are and engage with you! OK, I know this is petty…am I forgiven if I admit that straight out of the gate? I wrote about similar Twitter trifles once before, but now I’d like to address the sweet oblivious tweeter. You all have at least a few of them…people who retweet you, mention you, recommend you as someone to follow, and even send you hugs and smooches! And yet…they’re not even following you. How embarrassing! How to cyber nudge them to correct what is likely an oversight whilst saving face for yourself and them?

The irony is that this is precisely the type of message that should be whispered in private…and on Twitter, that means a DM or direct message…but if they’re not following you…you CAN’T send such a message! Ugh! What to do? How to remedy this awkward social media situation?

*Special note to Alyssa Milano – If you would only follow me, I could answer all of your imploring inquiring direct messages about your career path. I mean, I would be happy to help you with that if you would only allow me to reply.

I think we need to put this up for a vote. I have come up with a few invaluable ideas:

Tweet: *nudge nudge* Pardon me, would you have any Grey Poupon–I mean, would you like to follow me?
Ask a friend to mention it to them in DM…is this high school, or what?
Tweet: Hey, ummm, Gerald, can you follow me so I can DM you? I have a really good stock tip :}
Unfollow and then follow them again. They’ll see you as a “new” follow and will see they don’t follow you. Whereas this would likely do the trick, it may initiate some head scratching…you know, get them wondering why you didn’t resort to option #1
We could always come up with a really subtle, sophisticated code or hashtag to use to avoid any unpleasantries inherent in a virtual knock on the head. I’ve given it a lot of thought and consideration to capture the feel of the friendly and unimposing tone we’d like to convey. Something along the lines of: #HeyYouDopeYoureNotEvenFollowingMeDuh!

But then, in the whole scheme of things, does it really mater? I mean, they laugh with you, they share your posts and make comments, recommend you on Follow Friday, maybe even send you virtual hugs. It would be kind of funny if you left it status quo and one day they DM you a question or comment and you’re left resorting to posting on the stream, hat in hand… “ummm…errr…dearest friend, I would be happy to answer your DM if you were following me” So, what do you say…number 5 is the best one, right? Dare me to use it? (Please don’t!) Thanks to my new friend, fellow G, for inviting me to tarnish his pristine reputation for high standards in blogging with my guest post. And thank you for reading and not immediately unfollowing me I encourage you to contribute your suggestions for follow nudging diplomacy: useful, useless and everywhere in between.

Also please cast your vote in the tweet poll below.

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11 Sure-Fire Ways to Annoy Your Readers (Please Don’t Do This)

Gloson — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 21:06:52 +0000

This could be one of your blog readers.

Are you unknowingly annoying your readers? Well, if you are making these 11 mistakes, you might be turning them off. Keep on reading…

Annoyed reader photo by Jonno Witts

1. Writing in gigantic blocks of text

Big text blogs are easy to get lost in. They also strain eyes and make reading difficult.

Because it’s hard to scan. Let alone read.

In fact, a study shows that only 16% of your readers read word-by-word. The rest mostly scan. So at least make it scannable.

I suggest keeping paragraphs 1 to 7 lines long. Then your readers would read your post relaxingly and enjoyably. Ahhhh…

2. Eye-straining text

No matter how good your writing may be, if you write in teeny weeny text, people are going to be annoyed and read with squinty winty eyes.

Or scan abruptly. Or not read at all.

Also, make sure the lines are not squeezed too tightly together, like…

This paragraph is an example of hard-to-read text, hard-to-read text, hard-to-read text. This paragraph is an example of hard-to-read text, which readers can’t stand and move on to the next. So, make reading easy so the poor eye can rest.

5 easy steps to make your text easy to read

1. Go to your theme’s CSS in your admin area. For WP users, go to the theme editor. Then, on the right, there’s a list of files. Make sure you are on style.css.

2. Find #content (the part of the blog post).

3. Add this line to the code. Below are the settings I use for my blog Gloson Blog, but you can customize it.

font: 15px/25px;

“15px” = text size.

“25px” = space between lines.

4. Customize the sizes (if you want). It’s important to consider the blog width, the blog post width, the sidebar width, and the design. Then update the code!

5. Clear-cache-reload (Ctrl + F5) your blog and check out your comfortable text. Aaaahhhh…..

If you need any help, just leave a comment and I’ll help out .

P.S. If you have the WP Super Cache plugin, go to another page to see the changes.

Photo by Daniel Y. Go

3. MR. ALLCAPS X. MARKS!!!!!!!!

To most people online, ALL CAPS IS SHOUTING and if used with exclamation marks, it’s EXTREMELY ANNOYING!!!!!! REALLY!!!!

It also looks unprofessional and is hard to read. So don’t write in all caps.

Of course, you can use it occasionally and appropriately if you want to emphasize a word.

Photo by toddheft

4. Where’s the about-me page?

Your readers have read an ammmmmmmmmmmmmazing blog post on your blog!

And now, they are heading to your about me page – They want to know more about the awesome guy who wrote it!

But if they discover that you don’t have an about-me page, they are going to get confused, frustrated and annoyed, especially loyal readers.

So, make sure you have an about me page. It makes the blog more personal!

Don’t forget to put up an image of you too! It really helps the readers to get to know you better and also builds your name and brand on the Internet.

5. Writing like a robot with no personality

Readers don’t like to read writing without personality. It feels as if you’re reading from a robot! Or even a impersonal “professional” commercial site!

Instead, write with your style and personality–who you are. That’s blogging. Readers love to read posts that are written for them and by you.

In other words, don’t ever write like Wikipedia (We don’t read their articles, unless we badly want a certain information, right? Their long paragraphs strainnnn eyes too! Arrgh!).

The cat photo? mis. tuh.-..purr. suhn. al. it. ee

And it’s taken by swanky

6. Reading…reading…reading…GAHH! Music!

Imagine you sitting at your computer then BANG! Music bursts out your speakers! Yikes! *Finds the stop button in panic!* Phew!

Music, especially autoplaying music, is extremely annoying to unsuspecting visitors.

I’ve read from many people that if they visit a blog with autoplaying music, they would leave immediately.

But if your blog really has to include music, just don’t set it to autoplay and you’ll be fine.

Photo by greggoconnell

7. Here an ad, there an ad, everywhere an ad ad

Advertising is really a very good way to monetize your blog!…if it is not overdone.

Too many advertising distract and annoy readers a lot, and they’re going to be turned off very quickly.

So, don’t fill your blog with too many or distracting ads (animated ones). Making money the smart way is much better than the “quick and easy” way.

8. Complicated, sophisticated commenting system

Don’t ever require commentators to login. No reader wants to go through all the effort to create an account for one single comment!

Mind-exploding Captchas are not a very smart way to prevent spam either. It drives away potential commentators more than it prevents spam.

Instead, install Askimet the spam exterminator. Mostly no spam gets past it.

If a blog requires people to login or enter a Captcha to comment, then it’s missing a lot of potential commentators.

Photo by mag3737

9. Really, really bad design

“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” they say, but that’s the problem. Most people judge a blog by its design.

If your blog has a poor design, it will give new visitors a bad impression and it isn’t very nice to look at, anyway.

So, make sure

typography easy to read
navigation easy to find
design doesn’t distract reader from content
design doesn’t look like a website from the 90’s
colors look cool .

And lastly, make sure your design never ever ever looks like this:

Designer’s nightmare

Ouch… my eyes hurt.

For some inspiration, here are 50 Beautiful and Amazing Blog Designs compiled by Smashing Magazine.

10. Snail loading speed… dot dot dot… Yawns

If your page takes 10+ seconds to appear, visitors lose patience and will click away before your page has even appeared.

To improve loading speed,

reduce the number of posts on homepage
reduce the number of images
reduce the size of images
reduce your coding

In conclusion, to improve loading speed a lot, remember the 3 R’s.

Reduce, Reduce, and Reduce.

To test loading speed, head over to Pingdom Tools. It gives a detailed breakdown on the loading speed of certain elements, so you know which one slows down the loading.

Here is one popular plugin to help boost your loading speed a lot > W3 Total Cache.

Photo by jpockele

11. Turn off comments, turn off readers

The blog community is made out of 2 things:

1. the blogger

2. readers

So, if you turn off comments, you turn off readers.

Readers like to voice out their opinions on your blog. It’s where they can converse, discuss, and have their say.

So, don’t ever turn off comments! (Unless you have serious spam issues and have put your reason in the comments section.)

Photo by Marc Wathieu

__________

Phew! That’s quite a list!

Don’t forget to share the things on blogs that annoy you in the comments below! If I think the point you shared is really annoying, I’ll include it here!

So, are you guilty of any of these?

Cheers!

Great Tips from Commentators (Thank you guys!)

Kristi

Great tips! I would add that in addition to having an about me page, you should have some small blurb on your sidebar that describes you and your blog for new visitors so that people know what the overall gist of your site is.

Susan Cooper (BuzzEdition)

Great post Gloson! But may I add:

Please don’t load your blog with so many ads that you have to scroll a full webpage to see the content

Josh

Gloson,

Awesome post man, these are some great pointers for anyone getting a blog started or needing to ‘spruce’ things up a bit.

I can’t tell you how many times I hate going to a blog that has an interesting title that loads sooo slowly.

Another thing that really annoys me is widgit overload! Too many widgits makes for a very busy page. Great Job!

Similar Posts:

Houston Search Engine Marketing and Optimization Services

11 Guidelines for Improved Website Usability

How Social Media Influences Consumer Behavior

4 Grammatical Mistakes That Can Enhance Your Copy

Twitter Trifles: A Follower Conundrum

11 Sure-Fire Ways to Annoy Your Readers (Please Don’t Do This)

1. Writing in gigantic blocks of text

2. Eye-straining text

5 easy steps to make your text easy to read

3. MR. ALLCAPS X. MARKS!!!!!!!!

4. Where’s the about-me page?

5. Writing like a robot with no personality

6. Reading…reading…reading…GAHH! Music!

7. Here an ad, there an ad, everywhere an ad ad

8. Complicated, sophisticated commenting system

9. Really, really bad design

10. Snail loading speed… dot dot dot… *Yawns*

11. Turn off comments, turn off readers

Great Tips from Commentators (Thank you guys!)

10. Snail loading speed… dot dot dot… Yawns