Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [102]
This is an area where you can simply ask a friend or relative to help who will be completely honest with you about your website. Review your site on your own, and then ask others for their opinions about the readability of your site. Is the main point readable and primary on that page? What items distract from the overall message or make reading difficult?
Create a checklist for your testers, asking them about the specific elements contained in the Stanford University study (http://captology.stanford.edu/pdf/Stanford-MakovskyWebCredStudy2002-prelim.pdf). Ask each tester to rate your site in terms of credibility, readability, contrast, and text size. Feel free to add a few more rating categories after you’ve read the study.
Thursday: Create Accurate, Attention-Grabbing Headlines
In Monday’s content, headlines and subcontent headings were covered as a way of assisting in the layout of the page. Today we will cover the words used in those headings. This is the one thing that people will use to judge the page they open. Get it right, and they’ll stay longer. Get it wrong, and the Back button just became your enemy.
Headlines are meant to communicate as much information in as few words as possible. In newspapers, headlines are meant to be catchy, attention-grabbing information, with the intent to draw the reader to the story. In considering search engines, however, the writer must take into account the relationship that the title will have to the subject matter and the relevance of the information.
The important thing to remember is that there are multiple audiences that will see these pages and information. Your regular readers or website users are one audience, search visitors are another significant audience, and visitors from links, social news sites, and blogs are another audience. If you use this page as a landing page from a newsletter, email, or promotion, the context of the audience can change significantly, depending upon their expectations of the information. Basically, the headline needs to be concise and needs to present the information in the best context to meet the information needs of a wide array of visitors.
Heading Phrasing
Online publishers that have roots in magazine or print publication typically have an obstacle in developing headlines that speak the same information to both humans and search engines. Print publishers have a long-standing history of creating snappy headlines that grab a reader’s attention. They use puns, witty observations, and story-dependent headlines. However, that same talent that works wonders in print does not translate well to the Web.
Print publishers have the luxury of presenting to an audience that already understands the context and the presentation. Readers are typically subscribers or purchasers, and as such, they understand the context of the medium. Headlines are more meant for entertainment and flow, rather than doing double duty of reminding the reader of their purpose in reading the entire text. Internet publishers do not have this luxury. Readers find their articles from a vast array of sources, and as such, they need the context of the publication and the headlines to communicate much more information for their purposes.
Two anecdotal situations bring this to light:
One article titled “Why Brazil is so hot!” was about the commodities from Brazil and the why the Brazilian market is ripe for investors. However, the interpretation of the title may cause a reader to infer that the content is about the weather and Brazil’s proximity to the equator. In the context of an investment site or a newsletter, the title may be effective. For an investor seeking information about international investments, this headline will not rank well in search engines. For a searcher or browser who stumbles across the headline, it does not carry much contextual relevance.
The second situation was a publisher that wrote an article for the Christmas season titled “Holiday Time Travel.” Although the article was one of the most read articles online,