On average, these video’s wouldn’t have been more than 3 minutes each, and despite some being entertaining, some funny, some educational the rest just plain strange, few of them were compelling enough to keep my attention to the very end.

This surprised me enough to Google some statistics on what could be considered an ‘average’ adult attention span. Knowing how reliable the internet is when it comes to proper factual information, I settled on the following as it seemed reasonable (and to be honest with you, I was distracted before doing any further research):

• Average continuous attention span of a literate adult:8 seconds
• Maximum possible continuous attention span for a literate adult: 30 seconds
• Average general attention span of a literate adult: 10 – 12 minutes

As a website owner, this means you have less than a minute of to get people’s attention and even if you do manage to grab their attention, you’ll only be able to hold it for a few more minutes.

This means it’s crucial to not only know exactly what your potential (and existing) clients expect from your website and where they expect to find it – but to also do so in such a way that keeps them coming back for more.

Here are a few simple tips for how to achieve this:

• As a business owner, you should know the common things that clients ask when they make an enquiry about your products/services. Make sure this information is easily accessible – put it on your homepage, or within one intuitive, easy-to-find click from your homepage.
• Put all your contact information (especially phone number and address) on your homepage. Clients need to feel comfortable that they can easily contact you. Having to fill-in online forms, emails or support tickets might seem like a good idea, but nothing beats the power of a simple phone-call, so make it easy for your clients to do this.
• If you have an online store, minimise unnecessary steps in the ordering process, where possible, remove navigation options and make sure you label how many steps are involved in the purchasing process, so clients don’t feel like they’re on a never-ending quest to reach the final check-out page.
• Direct people to all the important parts of your website through well-placed text-links in your main website content. Having a menu is great, but sometimes if you’re in the middle of reading something and want to find-out more, being able to click directly on the word or phrase you’re reading can be far easier than having to figure-out where the item is in the menu structure.
• Incorporate a search feature on your site as well as a site-map.
• To get people coming-back for more, keep the content fresh and up-to-date. One simple way of doing this could be to add a blog, online newsletters or regularly updated industry-specific articles.

It should also go without saying that the site should at least look somewhat aesthetically appealing. Sure, we can’t all afford to pay expensive graphic designers, but it doesn’t take much to search around for an affordable (or even free) template.

There are lots of other usability tips and techniques that can be applied, but if you try and keep things simple, and employ common sense when it comes to the positioning of information, you’ll be doing a lot better than many of the sites I see on a daily basis.

The easier and quicker users can find what they’re looking for, the less likely they’ll lose interest and end-up browsing else-where.

How to appeal to web users with a shorter attention span than a goldfish

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Basically Ben comments on a thread over at WMW which indicates that social media is a waste of time and doesn’t yield a great deal of SEO value.

I both agree and disagree with this.

But before continuing, it’s important to understand what SEO is and what it isn’t.

In previous years SEO was all about doing keyword research, applying a few tweaks to the site and then getting some inbound links and presto, you’d be
ranking at the top.

As the Internet and search engines have evolved, many companies are now starting to use the web more effectively, (many still haven’t, but that’s really a whole nother post) so competing with such sites requires better quality content (and more of it), an intuitive and easy-to-use site navigation, regular updates to keep people coming back and a site that looks reasonably aesthetically pleasing.

Now I’m not saying that you can’t rank well without these things, but it only takes 8 seconds for someone to develop a first impression and if your first impressions aren’t great, then you’re fighting an uphill battle to convert that visitor into a sale.

As a result of this, some SEOs started encouraging clients to improve their site’s design, layout, content etc. because all of this would make for better conversions at
the end of the day. This extended the craft of SEO into online usability, which technically isn’t SEO, but it helps immensely with the whole process.

The same comment can then be applied to marketers who focus on viral material or linkbait. These types of promotions, if done well, can drive substantial traffic and work wonders for (or destroy) a brand, as well as attracting links in the process. Once again, not technically SEO, but also a useful means of gaining traffic with the added bonus of some links. Now, one could then go on to argue about the SEO benefit gained from such links, and I’ll agree that some social media links aren’t particularly helpful in passing link juice (take blog comments, twitter, wikipedia and everything else that utilises the ‘nofollow’ attribute). But the goal for a viral campaign is really more about gaining awareness on a global scale, so it really can’t be measured using the same metrics as conventional old-school SEO.

Which leads me to using social media for business purposes or to help promote a particular site or product. This also isn’t specifically SEO, and can be a huge waste of time if you don’t do it properly. The whole purpose of social media is to share and connect with others – to be social. The challenging part then becomes – how does one be social, while still trying to promote a website?

Blogging is a great way to share and demonstrate your knowledge in a certain area. Take this SEO blog – I try and discuss various SEO related topics that I think people might be interested in and share tips and information that they can help people improve their rankings. By sharing this information, I’m hoping it also shows I have a reasonable knowledge of the industry and if those readers find the SEO process too challenging, they’ll hopefully employ my services to help them out.

The key is to provide information that is interesting and helpful and written with passion. If you can achieve this, there is certainly a benefit to start blogging. The same then applies to other social media tools.

Take Twitter for example – if you only share information like “making a cup of coffee” or “replying to some emails”… it isn’t particularly engaging, nor does it give anyone a reason to follow you. But if you were sharing info about your industry by making comments like “just read this great article about….” or “new legislation for… what does everyone think” etc. You’ve just turned the tool into another platform where you can demonstrate your knowledge while connecting with others who also share a similar interest.

The problem is that most businesses and website owners will do one of three things with social media:

• they’ll create profiles on all the latest social sites and then think “well, that’s social media taken care of… hey, why aren’t I getting any traffic from it?”
• they’ll create a blog/twitter/facebook account but forget that they created it for business purposes and start making posts about the weather or what they had for breakfast that morning… and then wonder why it isn’t helping them with their branding
• they’ll create a blog/twitter/facebook account and spam the crap out of it by pushing their brand and website to anyone and everyone which just pisses people off

So, to sum-up, I think that all forms of online marketing (be it organic SEO, viral, social media, pay-per-click etc. etc.) all has its place and can be beneficial if used properly. Not all of these are technically SEO, but still important when marketing in the ever-changing online world.

Most importantly though, goals need to be set for each marketing method and different metrics need to be applied to measure the performance of each campaign. If you try and track the performance of social media using SEO metrics, you’ll find that it doesn’t yield brilliant results – but that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile – it simply means that social media is different to old-school organic SEO and subsequently can’t be measured in the same way.

The blurred line between what is SEO and what isn’t

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This means that your main aim should not only be to attract more visitors, but to keep them there as long as possible and guide them deeper into your site.

Coincidentally, this is quite similar to the process that managers and professional recruitment firms find themselves in when it comes to attracting and retaining good staff members.

In a HR Whitepaper by local recruitment firm Astor Levin, they state:

The key to attracting and retaining your workforce is to understand the needs of your employees and deliver maximum value in the context of what is feasible within the organisation itself and in relation to the other options employee have available to them within the marketplace.
It sounds simple. However, the 2007 EVP National Survey results showed that only 56% of respondents believe that their expectations upon joining their employer had been met.

If employers are failing at what should be a fairly easy task of making their staff happy, I hate to think how many websites fail to keep their visitors happy.

In most of the staff retention reports and articles I’ve read, money usually isn’t what motivates as many staff as you’d think – instead the culture of the organisation, the structure and hierarchy (ie. how easy is it to do your job without having to go through a dozen managers and how easy is it to advance within the company), and most importantly – how well the company understands the staff member’s needs, wants and desires and how they go about helping you achieve these.

So let’s take a look at some of these factors in terms of a website:

Your site’s culture

Every site has it’s own way of delivering it’s content. Some sites want to appear authoritative, corporate and professional, other sites have a more light hearted approach and joke with you in the content. Some want you to play and click on as many interactive elements as possible. Other sites want to dazzle you with flash, AJAX or other technologies that can look very pretty and impressive.

Whatever you decide your site’s ‘culture’ should be, just make sure it’s inline with the type of clients you want to attract. For instance if you’re users aren’t particularly internet savvy it might be best to avoid all the ‘bells and whistles’ and keep things as simple as possible.

Your site’s structure

How easy is it for someone to open your site and find what they’re looking for? How many steps are required to make a simple purchase? Does it require a dozen clicks just to find your contact page? Just like staff want to get through their daily tasks as efficiently as possible with as few hurdles and managerial red tape as possible, your website visitors want exactly the same. They don’t want to find themselves scratching their heads 20 minutes after adding a product to their shopping cart trying to figure-out how to get to the next step and submit their payment information.

Visitors goals / needs / wants / desires

When a visitor comes to your website, they will usually have a specific goal in mind, which can range from wanting to purchase a particular product to finding a certain piece of information that relates to your products/services/industry (or even something as simple as finding your phone number).

Understanding what this goal is will make delivering on your clients needs, wants and desires a whole lot easier.

If the goal is to make a purchase online, the user will most likely want some sort of reassurance the product is right for them (which can perhaps be achieved through testimonials or product reviews). They will need to know the features, benefits, technical specifications of the product. They’ll also need to know their payment will be secure and that there is some sort of return policy or guarantee in place.

Once you have a decent structure in place, a culture that fits nicely with your ‘ideal’ customers and you’ve delivered on your clients needs and wants… you can then add ‘desire’ through things like value-adds, loyalty programs etc. etc.

Every website, company and staff member is unique in their own special way, so some of the above points may not apply specifically for your situation, but perhaps now could be a good time to review things within your organisation. I’m sure by re-addressing your culture, structure, goals, objectives etc. etc. you’ll see an improvement in your website… or your staff… or even your business as a whole.

How to attract more visitors by keeping your staff happy

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The basic premise of the post was that it would be good if search engines could categorised websites by layout / design / colours etc.

As I skimmed through the article, I pretty-much dismissed this concept because really, the layout and design of a site is just the ‘packaging’ and the true value and importance comes from the content and functionality.

People don’t use Google because they think that it looks pretty (in actual fact, the minimal use of colours and simplistic layout almost make it seem a little bland), but people keep coming back because it’s a highly functional search tool. Wikipedia is another fine example of a site that looks fairly ordinary, but is used by hundreds of thousands of people every day because of the vast quantities of user submitted content.

Although there are plenty of reasons to have a website, I believe the most common are:

• for branding or used as a sales / marketing tool
• as an educational or informative resource (which also helps promote your authority for a given topic or industry)
• and to share your views, opinions, to vent, rant and generally express yourself

So going back to the start of this post, if you found a website, but the only thing you remembered about it was how it looked, then the owner of that website has pretty-much failed to deliver on most of those points above. Branding has failed since you have no recollection of who owned the site, they obviously didn’t deliver any ground-breaking content that would entice you to keep coming back for more… and if you spent most of your time drooling over the design, you probably would have been too distracted to make a purchase from them.

But then it got me thinking… how often have you seen an advertisement on TV which you really enjoyed, but not had a clue about what product it was actually promoting. Some of the best ads work because they are so obscure that they keep you guessing, inspiring conversation and causing you to subconsciously waste more time than you realise trying to find some vague relationship as to why a gorilla doing a Phil Collins drum solo could be so darn effective at selling chocolate.

So, now I started thinking – if this technique is so effective for traditional advertising, then it is highly likely that a website could create a very unique and interesting user experience (take for example the Don’t Click It site) which keeps you guessing and intrigued that you don’t even notice the content or branding.

Research shows that memories are most commonly triggered by the various senses. You smell something that haven’t smelt in years and all of a sudden you’re taken back to the alluring smell of your Mum’s cooking. You hear a song that you loved as a teenager, but haven’t heard it in over 10 years – even before they start singing the first verse you’re mind has wandered back to what you were doing the first time you ever heard that song.

Then there are paintings, sculptures, photos, movies, natural land formations, sunsets, and many other forms of eye candy that leaves a lasting impression on you. Why can’t a website do the same?

Just like I know that I really like the painting with those melting clocks (I may not realise that it’s called The Persistence of Memory by the artist Salvador Dali)… I just know it had clocks, looked a bit surreal and that I liked it. Given this vague description of the piece, it’s not unreasonable to expect to be able to search for something like “painting with melting clocks” and find more details about (and possibly pictures of) the painting in question.

So if I can search for a piece of artwork like that, then technically, I should also be able to find quirky and interesting looking website using a similar method. Unfortunately, people don’t generally refer to (nor link to) sites based on what they look like… instead they reference the site either by the domain name, company/individuals name or by the content found on the site.

The good news is that as social media continues to take-over the net, people are forever getting more descriptive with their tagging, bookmarking and referencing of sites and the search engines are already pretty good at indexing image content. All of this will make searches for specific styles and layouts a lot easier to find in the future.

There will never be a substitute to having great content and ensuring your site has the best usability and functionality possible, however if your goal is simply to be ‘eye catching’ then there still may be hope in having your site ranked organically (and if that fails, there’s always PPC).

If looks could kill… your search rankings

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Sure, venturing is a very crucial step and without venturing you will never achieve anything, but often the simple act of venturing will get you no where unless you have a plan as to where you want to get to and how you anticipate getting there.

Chances are, the journey will take you down different paths than you had originally planned and your destination may even change as your plans evolve… but without a plan you probably wouldn’t have ended-up getting anywhere.

So why am I placing my philosophical views about an old adage on an SEO blog? Because creating, maintaining, promoting and marketing a website is a very big journey for some businesses and it’s a venture that can bring much gain – if done properly.

The first thing that most businesses, bloggers or any other prospective website owner should do is clearly decide what the purpose of their new website will be. Perhaps you already have a website but can’t concisely describe its purpose or intentions. Don’t be dismayed, you would not believe the number of people who are keen as mustard to get a website setup, but have no idea why.

Most websites will have at least one (if not more) of the following goals:

• To help sell a product / service or simply ‘make money’
• For branding and awareness purposes
• To demonstrate or improve ones ‘authority’ in a given area
• To streamline customer interaction (by having FAQs, address and directions, case studies etc.)
• Or in the case of a personal blog it could simply be for fun

Having a website ’simply because everyone else has one’ may be a good catalyst to taking the plunge into the online world, but it certainly shouldn’t be the sole reason you have a website.

With each of the goals mentioned above, comes different types of content; different ways of structuring the information; will require information to be updated more or less frequently; and most certainly will require very different methods of promotion and marketing.

Once you’ve established the purpose of your website, the next thing to determine is: who is the site designed for?

Even though many businesses believe that their product is perfect for anyone and everyone, in reality, most products have a very specific demographic that they are perfect for. Not identifying what this niche or demographic is, will end-up costing you A LOT of time, effort and money because you’ll be trying to push your products / services / brand / reputation to people who couldn’t care less.

So hopefully once you’ve reached this point, you have your goals and target audience defined. Building the website, writing the content and promoting your services online should be much easier… but there’s still one final crucial element to having a successful website and that is testing and measuring.

Like I said earlier in this post – the journey and even your destination may change. Perhaps you thought you had a product designed for single women aged between 18 and 28 who work in a professional corporate environment, like to go to the gym during the week and enjoy a night-out with the girls drinking daiquiris and dancing till the sun comes up on the weekends (yes, when you profile your ideal clients, it should be as specific as this).

But after a few months of measuring your conversions, you discover that these aren’t the people making the most purchases – change your approach so you’re marketing to that newly discovered demographic.

Without testing and measuring you probably wouldn’t have discovered this and would still be scratching your head wondering why no one is buying anything even though you now have a new spiffy looking website.

So to avoid conversations like this:

Client: “I setup a website a year ago because everyone else had one so I thought I should too, but it just doesn’t seem to be working”
Me: “What isn’t working about it?”
Client: “I don’t know… I just thought that by having a website something would happen”

Make sure you plan; then do; then test; and repeat… until you have the most productive website that transforms all your goals into reality. It will take a fair bit of planning, a lot of hard work, more time than you ever anticipated and testing till you’re blue in the face, but if done well, the results will be well worth it in the end.

Sometimes venturing won’t gain you anything

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In the off-line world, you’ll usually notice traffic increases for a number of reasons:

• It could be because a particular area has become increasingly popular – the ‘cool’ place to live
• It could be due to the area offering ideal living conditions – nice sized yards, friendly neighbors, a great community, low crime rate etc.
• It could be due to excellent facilities – close to shops, public transport, schools and hospitals
• It could be thanks to affordable pricing

There are plenty of other reasons, but the list above gives you a pretty good idea why certain areas are better to live than others and that means that the traffic to those areas increases.

Now, why am I talking about regional economic growth on a SEO blog? Because the exact same concepts apply in the online world.

Image is important

When you drive through a sought-after residential area you’ll notice the houses all look rather nice, they are well maintained and the lawns are well manicured. If there was a run-down, poorly maintained house that needed a new paint job, some windows fixed and a whole lot of other work – it would really stand-out from the rest (and in a bad way).

Don’t let your website be that run-down looking house – keep the design fresh, make changes to the design (at least) every couple of years, make sure everything works (no old broken links floating around) and keep the content up-to-date.

Reputation can go a long way

The ‘cool’ areas to live are popular because people know about them – they aren’t tucked away at the back of a town that no one has ever heard of and the same is true for websites.

If your site is sitting not being noticed by anyone, you’ll never become the popular online destination that people want to go to. The best way to gain exposure and build an online reputation is through social media… the more you interact (as long as you aren’t insulting… unless that’s how you want to be perceived) the more popular you’ll become.

Bad Neighborhoods

It’s never a pleasant experience walking down the street in a bad neighbourhood – you’re constantly checking over your shoulder, you don’t feel comfortable or safe and one wrong move could end-up being quite costly.

Websites that link with bad online neighbourhoods also fail to make your users feel comfortable – if there’s lots of pop-ups, links to adult sites, pharmaceuticals and gambling pages, more advertising than actual content etc. your website will become the street that people don’t want to walk down.

Great Facilities

In the list above I also mentioned that areas within close proximity to a selection of useful facilities will always attract people because they know they won’t have to go far to get everything they need.

By incorporating online tools, links to useful sites, having a really easy-to-follow navigation structure and making use of sitemaps you reduce your clients need to search around and go elsewhere. Turn your website into a place handy to all the facilities your users would want.

Plan Ahead

When an area becomes too popular all the traffic can start to cause congestion. If you don’t want this to happen with your website – do what your local government planners should do and plan ahead. Find a web host that is capable of supporting decent amounts of traffic or a hosting plan that can be easily upgraded. Make sure you’re using your own domain name and that all the domain contact details are kept up-to-date so if you have to move, you can do so without running into unnecessary challenges.

Same, Same but Different

As you can see, there are a lot of similarities between the online and offline worlds (there are also a lot of differences), but if you try and keep things simple and apply everyday logic to your website, hopefully you’ll be able to create a location that people will want to ‘virtually’ live at.

Web traffic – an offline example

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Even though a recent patent suggests that Google is going to be getting better at interpreting text used in images, they’re still not quite there yet.

So while we’re waiting for Google to catch-up, let me introduce you to a technique known an CSS Image Replacement.

The basis of this technique is that you wrap your text with tags that are of a special type, class, or id and then use CSS to ‘replace’ them with images.

By doing this you’ll be able to have your pretty image-based menu items while still having a well optimised website. For more information and some great examples of how you can take advantage of this technique, have a look at MezzoBlue.

While on the topic of images and search engines, Matt Cutts made the following video that featured on Google’s Official Webmaster Central Blog about a month ago. The video discusses how to use the ALT attribute more effectively:

Just remember, all the techniques discussed in this article are quite safe and effective as long as they are used correctly. So don’t go replacing your images and ALT text with long blocks of keywords because you will end-up being penalized.

CSS Image Replacement

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The problem is that Flash is designed to look appealing to human visitors but since search bots like Google, Yahoo! and MSN don’t have eyes, the effect is useless to them. Ok, it’s not entirely useless as Google is able to read some Flash files and can even extract the text-links contained within them, but it still can’t decipher text or content that’s embedded in a Flash file. This means that even though the content may end-up being indexed due to off-site factors (such as inbound links), it often won’t rank as well as it could because of the lack of spiderable on-site content.

Google’s official blog offers some good advice on some of the better uses of flash and although Google is against cloaking (the process of presenting website content differently to users from that of search bots), a representative states that as long as the intent is legitimate, placing text behind an animation can be acceptable. You can read more about this in this Google Groups thread.

If you would rather not place text behind animations, there are other tools available that can be of assistance.

SWFObject allows you to write a page in HTML and then using javascript, replace the HTML with the Flash SWF. This not only allows users without Flash will see the HTML content, it also means Google will be able to properly crawl your page. You can also combine this with SWFAddress (which is an SWFObject script) allowing you to deep-link inside your Flash SWF.

So with Google giving the thumbs-up to putting appropriate text behind Flash animations or even better-yet SWFObject and SWFAddress – there’s no reason why you can’t gain great rankings with a Flash site.

How to get Google’s attention if you’re a Flasher

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