*The following guest post is by Duncan*

Have you ever felt like your blog readers are just a hassle to your site? Using up all your bandwidth and leaving messy comments all over the place? If so, you need some tips in how to alienate them and stop them coming back for good. Just follow these 4 simple tips and you’ll soon be the only one reading your posts in peace and quiet.

Insult Their Intelligence

Thinking that you are more intelligent than your readers and assuming they won’t understand if you start talking technical is one way to annoy them. You can of course alienate readers by being over-geeky, but this is nowhere near as affective as stopping to explaining every other word, or saying things such as “I would explain about this further, but it’s for a more proficient audience”. BTW ‘proficient’ is an adjective meaning ‘competent’ or ‘adept’. If you don’t know what these words mean either…go away.

Make Stuff Up

Following on from the last point, you can both anger and patronize your readers by making things up in your posts as well. Firstly, your readers will see right through it and become angry that you have the gall to lie to them, and they will then feel patronized by the fact you thought you would get away it. I once lost over 30,000 subscribers to my blog overnight when I lied about my gender. My readers Google-imaged my name and found out quite quickly I was not in fact a girl.

Not Proof Reading

Nobody is perfect and expecting bloggers to write without making any mistakes is unreasonably. However, when you read posts that have quite obviously been thrown together in ten minutes and have more mistakes that a dyslexic child’s workbook, it suggests that they don’t really care about what they are writing. If they cannot take the time to go over what they have written a couple of times and think carefully about their sentence structure, why should a reader invest any time in digesting what they have to say?

Disallow Comments

If you’re confident in what you are saying and you think you’ve pretty much covered all the bases, why should you throw your posts open to the audience? Believe it or not, blog readers like to have their say and often consider it arrogant when a blogger does not allow comments. The Internet is built on freedom of speech and choosing to terminate a conversation because you think there is nothing left to add will likely rile your readers beyond belief. Just in case you’re wondering ‘terminate’ is a verb meaning ‘to end’ or ‘finish’.

If, on the off chance you don’t want to alienate your readers, you might like to do the opposite of the advice given here and instead write honest, well thought out and intelligent posts, having the decency to allow your readers to leave their comments if they wish. This will help build trust and respect between you and your readers, and leave everyone much happier.

Duncan is an online marketing expert and SEO blogger, working for a corporate hospitality company in the UK

Image by TheAlieness

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*The following guest post is by Amber Singleton Riviere*

It’s surprising sometimes to visit websites and find even the most basic information missing.  For your website to stand up against the sea of competing sites that are available online, you have to make sure your site delivers the expectations of your customers and visitors.  Here are a few steps to help you make sure you’re not overlooking something they think is important.

Step 1: Give them what they want.

We often get stuck in our own thinking and plan things out based on what our needs are without considering the customer or end user.  Instead, try to think about things from the perspective of your customer or visitor.  If you were shopping for your particular product or service, what would you want to find on the company website?  Would you want to find every possible detail about the product or service?  Would you want to know the price?  Would you want to know the fine print?  Think about the tools and resources that will help support the visitor’s decision to act on your offer, things like a FAQ section, white papers on your products, etc.  Give them everything they could ever want and more so that you’re not creating obstacles between them and their decision to purchase or take action.

Step 2: Provide complete and easy-to-find contact information.

Many websites still don’t provide complete contact information.  They don’t provide email addresses, or they don’t provide a phone numbers or mailing addresses.  You never know which of these pieces of information would be helpful to a customer or site visitor, so be sure to provide all forms of contacting you.  If you’re worried about spam, just write out your email address, for example you [at] yourdomain [dot] com.  If you’re worried about security issues, like giving out your physical address or home and cell numbers, there are plenty of cost-effective (and even free) solutions.  Get a post office box and a free phone number through Google Voice so that you don’t have to give out personally identifiable information.

Step 3: Clearly lead.

What do you want your site visitors to do?  Do you want them to subscribe to receive updates from you?  Do you want them to sign up for service or purchase a product?  Ask yourself, “Does my website effectively lead my visitors to these things and to taking the actions I want them to take?”  Is there any way you could improve on this, like making clearer and more direct calls to action?  Once you have their attention and they’re ready to take action, you want them to do just that.  If not, your site is not helping you to meet your objectives.

Step 4: Don’t be too wordy or bury your best information.

It’s tempting to try to over-explain things and say the same things over and over, so once you have your copy in place, see how you could improve it and make it more concise and direct.  Eliminate unnecessary verbiage and reduce your overall copy by 15%, as a good rule of thumb.  Also, once you have all the copy in place, make sure that you don’t bury the most important information, like calls to action or key benefits of your product or service.

Step 5: Remember that function trumps form.

Although we always want to build visually attractive sites, and that’s definitely an immediate secondary goal, form comes first.  Your site should have a clear and easy-to-follow hierarchy with obvious navigation so that site visitors can actually get around your site and find what they need.  While it’s tempting to want to do something because it “looks better,” think about the usability standpoint first.  How will laying things out or naming links a certain way affect your visitor’s ability to actually use your site?

We generally approach our websites from our own perspective, forgetting to consider how the visitor or customer might like things to work or what information they’d like to find there.  Always step back and figure out ways to make your site meet the expectations of your visitor so that it helps you meet the goals of your company.

Amber Singleton Riviere is the founder of Upstart Smart, a resource for small business owners, as well as the Rock Your Genius radio show, which focuses on small business and entrepreneurship.  She also runs the Give Back Project, a web design and marketing firm, and writes for websites like Web Worker Daily on topics relevant to small business owners.  You can find out about all of Amber’s work by visiting AmberSingleton.com .

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A lot of time passed since my post on calls-to-action but I am still getting comments and requests from people who are willing to get their site visitors to act. One of the recent comments was about optimizing your site for phone calls: how to place your company number to start getting calls.

I don’t know any extraordinary hacks (if you do, please share) but here’s what I know about why and how to make your telephone number visible:

Do you actually need a phone number on your site?

Usability:

1. A phone number is an effective way to get your visitors’ instant feedback (view the number of calls you get daily as an indicator of the website usability especially after the redesign or some tweaking);
2. A prominent phone number on a website builds the trust and confidence (the Internet is impersonal enough: adding some evidence that there are real people out there – like the physical address and the phone number) makes people feel more comfortable). The telephone number offers an additional, convenient way to order, but most importantly it implies that a live person is ready to assist.

Source: e-tailing.com

SEO:

• A telephone number might be one of the on-page trust identifiers. One of the facts supporting this theory for example is that one of the old Yahoo criteria for listing was a valid phone number on the site contact page. (Some editors would even try the number to make sure it is legit);
• Search engines are often believed to associate local area code as the local search rankings factor.

Stick to the easily recognized formats:

A U.S. phone number separates the area code, exchange, and number into three fields. Parentheses surround the area code field, and a dash separates the exchange and number fields. Thus the correct way to format a US phone number to make sure the US-based visitor instantly recognizes the format is:

(XXX) XXX – XXXX

To make it universally recognizable, the phone number should contain the country calling code:

+1 (XXX) XXX – XXXX

Helpful tip: if you are wondering about your country standard, try checking a local search engines to see which format they are sticking to. This  local search engine is good option for Canadians, for example.

Mind the placement:

There are traditional (obvious) placements of your company phone number:

• Contact page;
• Help page;
• About-us page, and the like.

What should be noted here is that the best thing you can do to make sure your visitor is going to like you and your company from the very start is to make sure the phone number is easy to find. Often the owners seem to do their best to avoid the phone calls: look at this example (the phone number can only be found after the second click):

Contextual phone numbers

Some really essential steps in the buying process may require additional help or just re-inforce the feeling of confidence:

• Order page (Is there actually a person behind the site?);
• Checkout process (Is the site secure enough to entrust it with my billing details?);
• Service description (Are there any custom solution to fit my needs?); etc

Increased visibility:

It often makes sense to make the phone number visible sitewide (in the head banner for example).

Adding the phone number in the title tag (as well as meta description) might also make sense (both FireFox and IE will make the phone numbers clickable within the search results to make the listing stand out and thus more clicked ):

Additional reading:

• Providing contact details;
• Do you put a phone number on your site?

Post image by Daniel*1977

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CAPTCHA is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Human Apart”. In a broader sense, CAPTCHA is defined as:

Type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer. The process involves one computer (a server) asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade…

["simple" is the key word here]

CAPTCHAs present a very controversial topic: you can’t do without them as a webmaster and you can’t stand them as a user.

Some CAPTCHAs are just impossible to figure – no matter who you are (a robot or a human), you won’t pass the test. Here’s my gallery of impossible CAPTCHAs:

Read fast:

Source: mgccl.com

Find cats:

Source: Depressed Programmer

Train your imagination:

Source: Digg.com

Learn other languages:

Source: Sveit.com

Look for the hidden code:

Source: hidden-3d.com

Just guess:

(The second character cannot be figured I guess)

Source: neogaf.com

(Do you see text at all?)

Source: flickr.com

Know your 1-2-3:

Source: backreaction.blogspot.com

Post image: Geek and Poke via Search Engine People

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I’ve lately had to deal with a huge database-driven website. What troubled me most was the huge navigation menus – and I am wracking my brain over the ways to optimize it both for users and search engine bots.  It is always the hardest – to organize huge number of links into one easy-to-navigate and clear menus.

I am researching the topic now, drawing the site structure on a sheet of paper and still have to come up with the “perfect” solution.

Now, the best way to educate yourself is to learn from examples. Therefore I decided to look into one of the most successful (in terms of performance, not implementation) examples dealing with the huge database of products and sections: Amazon.com

Below, I am giving the history of Amazon.com navigation menus evolution without going into any extra ramblings. Your thoughts, resources and opinions are much appreciated! I promise to do a follow-up here or at SEJ linking to everyone whose comments I’ll be referring to!

I’ll start my analysis from 1999 when Amazon sidebar navigation looked overwhelming to say at least:

The key features:

• Website sections sorted into first- (bold links) and second-tier (“… And More” section – containing all things that can’t be combined – is a good sign of broken website information architecture) ;
• Inconsistent website navigation: why do “Top Sellers”, “Recommendation Center”, “New Releases” and “Soundtracks” come in one pack?

In 2000 Amazon took some steps to make the navigation menus much shorter (the image below) – second-tier levels were removed. It might be much more focused that way and less disturbing but does provide much less information for the first-time visitor.

During the whole next year it remained still top-tier-only but it continued to grow until it turned into something surprisingly huge and even more unfocused. Most elements seem to be completely in the wrong place: Video and DVD? In Theaters? Magazine???

It had remained to be that huge monster until 2006 when they changed the design twice again: first time it turned into something even larger and clumsier (with second level being back):

And then into something even huger but surprisingly much better organized (click to enlarge):

Positive steps in information organization:

• Main categories are listed in alphabetical order;
• Categories and subcategories are all logically related (e.g. there’s no more “Top Rated” and “Soundtracks” listed under one roof).

As of today (January 2009) Amazon sidebar navigation (hover) menus contains even more links (screenshot from Google cache to get an idea how it looks like with JavaScript disabled):

The first thing that comes to my mind is that they renamed the whole block from unclear “Browse” to “Shop All Departments” (which is already a good move).

Secondly, they have reconsidered the alphabetical order and probably list them by popularity now (I guess popularity was also the criteria behind re-arranging the subcategories).

So, what do you think on the whole topic of arranging links into the navigation menus? Any tips links observations to share?

Post image by flattop341

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A few days ago I tested this blog homepage with one handy tool I recommend trying: Five Second Test. That was both fun and useful. Now what I did:

• got a screenshot of the blog home page;
• filled in the form;
• uploaded the screenshot there;
• posted the generated link at Twitter and asked my dear followers to take part in the experiment.

The participants were offered to look at the picture for 5 seconds and list max. 5 things they remembered.

Here is the screenshot I posted (click for the full-sized version):

Now the results (that were fun): 25 Twitteres took part in the test.

Most often mentioned page elements:

• Top post title (mentioned 10 times);
• Color – “red” (mentioned 10 times); examples:
  • red head;
  • red & white color scheme;
  • red letters, etc.
•  Top post image (mentioned 9 times):
  • cursive writing;
  • frosted glass;
  • window with signature, etc.
• SEO smarty (mentioned 8 times);
• SEO consulting (mentioned 7 times);
• My photo (mentioned 7 times):
  • your portrait;
  • Ann Smarty’s face;
  • author’s photo, etc
• RSS (mentioned 6 times).

The funniest result:

1: Red in top
2: SEO Consultants Signature – Whats your tactic
3: Damn…

Conclusions:

• SEO association ended up the most popular after all (together with SEO smarty and SEO consulting it was mentioned 20 times);
• I do realize the test was taken by people who knew me (as they are my Twitter followers) and most probably had already seen my blog before the test.
• The test is a good way to look at your own site “from outside”; so try it!

P.S. Guess what the trick with the post image is!

Post image: Infinite Usability Loop!

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I mainly search for images online when I need a web design inspiration or if I want to decorate a post of mine. Some recent image search engines and search engine applications seem really impressive to me. They offer a wide variety of interfaces, filtering and sorting options that I personally enjoy playing with.

So the big question (like with other search types) is: what should the image search look like? The image search giants (Google images, Yahoo images and even Flickr) represent rather a poor example of image search usability (to my mind). Luckily we have a number of good examples (still none of them is perfect):

1. Picitup offers really interesting filtering options (that overall work):

• show faces;
• show landscapes;
• show products;
• set color preferences.

2. Flickr based Tag Browser will show you related tags to your search term giving you more ideas to explore:

3. Picsearch advanced search provides a variety of filtering options:

• by file size;
• color (black and white, color or both);
• image type (animated or not).

4. Imagery is Google image based tool that basically does the same as Google but in a much more easy-to-use way: it offers advanced search options at the same page, each image size and dimensions, and image source page (when hovered over).

5. Exalead (known for integrating facial recognition technology) allows for a number of useful filtering options (and besides it shows the exact number of available results for each of them):

• searching for faces;
• grayscale or color;
• wallpapers;
• layout;
• file types.

6. Snap.com offers a really great interface showing the list of images to the left and the image preview and characteristics to the right. The search is enhanced by quick filtering options letting you choose the color option (black and white or color) and image size.

7. Oskope visual search integrates data from a number of services: Yahoo image search, Flickr, Fotolia. It has a number of presentation options (grid, stack, pile, list, and graph) and scale grade enhancing your search experience. It also shows each image information (date and username for Flickr, size and dimensions for Yahoo image search) and source link when hovered over.

To cut the long story short here is a summing up table (the criteria are based solely on my personal opinion):

Post Image: Not the End of this Story

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Optimize your images for search engines:

• Keywords in alt text, text around the image, image name, page title;
• Preferred image formatting – jpg;
• Separate SE accessible image folder;
• Image freshness. (SEW suggests re-uploading your images to keep them fresh);
• Enabled image search option at Google webmaster tool.
• Reasonable image file size (see the discussion at WW)
• Limited number of images per page;
• Popular and reliable photo sharing hosting (e.g. Flickr is reported to help in Yahoo! image optimization).

Optimize your images for social media:

• (obvious) use really great images to give your readers another reason to spread the word;
• (to get Digg thumbnailed submission) stick to jpg format and make sure the images can be resized to (or already are) 160×120 or 160×160 pixels (Unless you have an image that can be resized that way Digg will not offer the submitter a thumbnail to go with the post).

Optimize your images for people:

• People pay more attention to a clear image where they can see details (choose high quality images).
• (Clean, clear) faces in an image get more eye fixation. (don’t use abstract images too often).
• Keep them relevant: images are not the first thing a visitor sees on a web page but they can compel him to stay (according to the eye-tracking research web text is prior to images; when looking at a printed article people see images first; with web page they see text first – nevertheless images make the visitor stay and remember the page via relevant associations).

Gender specific:

• women are better at recognizing facial emotions than men (research):
• men seem to be more likely than women to first look at faces rather than other parts of a nude body (source);
• women are more interested in images with more than one person (source).

Tools and fun for image optimization:

• SEO Friendly Images WP Plugin – automatically optimize image ALT and TITLE with the help of post “%title” variable;
• Play with Google Images labeling (and help improve the quality of Google image search).

How to find images online.

• Finding Stock Photos – lists 3 great resources for stock photos;
• A Guide to Finding and Using Incredible Flickr Images – describing (1) which Flickr images you are allowed to use; (2) tactics to quickly find best images.

Post image: Feeling lucky punk?

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[Off topic] Mark Dykeman has just posted an interview with me so I decided to share it with my readers right away, please check it out: Catch the brainwaves with SEO Smarty!

My previous post on calls-to-action attracted a number of comments asking for advice on my readers’ current website design. I am not a professional web designer, so the only way I can find the best solution is by experimenting and testing. So I decided to review two simple methods that can help you identify who and where clicks your call-to-action button.

What encourages your visitors to act?

Google Analytics Reverse Goal Path (not very convenient for blogs, but works great with static (ecommerce) websites) can help you identify the (most popular) paths that bring people to your call to action and (possibly) tracks who actually acted.

While Google Analytics is great at showing the path that brings your visitors to the goal (content and internal structure analysis), the heat/ click maps can show you which visual elements of your design attract more clicks.

I’ve been doing this quick test with CrazyEgg: the ‘hotter’ the spot looks, the more links it has generated – as simple as that. Well, assuming that the reason behind my blogging was not to find new clients, I am doing fairly well at attracting feed subscriptions with my ’seasonal’ feed button (well, I should probably change it for something more spring-like soon).

If you are testing a blog (like me), don’t set the experiment length to more than 1000 clicks. With each new post (and hence the home page look change), the heatmap can also slightly change. For example, with my previous test when the top post contained a black-and-white image, the click rate to the post link was considerably lower – instead people clicked at the ‘free SEO consultation’ link and feed button.

Who acts where?

Crazy Egg has another useful feature worth playing with: confetti. The beauty of this statistics is that you can learn your heat map based on the referrer. What can (probably) interest my friends who come to my blog from SEOMoz? That be (1) my profile, (2) my feed, and my content:

Alternatively, people who are referred by my StumbleUpon profile page get more excited with ‘free SEO consultation’:

Again, for more accurate results you will have to run a few short tests and compare.

These tips won’t provide you with the exact picture of your visitors’ behavior (like any other statistics, heatmaps and Google analytics are subject to generalization and missing some important variables, for example Crazy Egg does not show the world map stats and there is no way to filter my own IP address – and I am guilty of visiting my own blog a few times a day ) but they offer you the way to see what works and how to make it work better.

Post image: swarm1

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