Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [95]
What people do is scan. In one study, nearly 80 percent of users would scan a new page, whereas only 16 percent of users would read the new page line by line. This presents a very large obstacle to online marketers. The content is critical to introducing the company, the purpose, and the marketing narrative. How can this be accomplished when users are not reading the content thoroughly?
The interesting observation is that many marketers, upon learning about this, are not fully surprised. All they really have to do is to consider their own habits when browsing online. It is a foraging type of reading—looking for elements on the page that speak to what we need. If we see enough evidence that the information we need is in a paragraph, we may slow down enough to scan the paragraph for the keywords that are important. Many people simply do not slow down enough to fully read a paragraph. Nielsen outlines many of the predominant behaviors and reasons in his article at www.useit.com/alertbox/whyscanning.html.
Scanning is most likely the result of a number of issues:
Time to target: Reading online takes time, especially during a workday. Finding specific information often requires wading through pages of data, paragraphs of information, and large websites. Finding visual clues on pages helps us navigate to other pages that may assist in our discovery.
Monitors: Nielson Norman Group also found that reading online demands time; people read about 25 percent slower on a monitor than on paper. In my own experience, I find that the contrast level of a monitor simply cannot compete with the printed page. On the printed page, the colors are less intense, and the contrast is much easier for long reading sessions. Monitors do not lend themselves to easy study.
Search availability: Ten other web pages are a click away from a search engine query. A user can simply click the Back button, return to the search engine results page, and find more options.
Progress: Nielsen notes that the Web is a user-driven medium, and people think they have to be actively clicking and navigating to have a sense of progress.
Overload: In addition, Nielson reasons that life is hectic, and the number of emails, voicemails, and information overload many people experience leads to a disjointed content experience with a web page.
What Do Humans Scan?
The primary elements used by people as they scan web pages are very interesting. It depends upon the presentation and layout of the content almost as much as the content itself.
People depend on headings, subheadings, topic headings, bullet points, captions, inline text links, graphics, bold and italic formatting, and colored text in order to scan a page. The concept is simple. These are techniques used to indicate that certain text is more important than regular text, so people use those as markers for quickly surveying the information available.
Think of a newspaper. When I travel, one thing that I can count on is the newspaper lying in the hallway outside my room door. In only a few seconds I can quickly browse through the major headlines, subheadings, bylines, and images and quickly grasp the major new stories of the previous day. The same concept applies to web pages; in fact, online publishers can learn much from their aging print counterparts. Looks matter.
Headings
Use headings to communicate specific information, utilizing a keyword or additional related keyword concept to maintain relevance. The headline is the primary indicator of content on the page, and the subheadings help show the organizational flow of content. Essentially, build an outline using the headings, subheadings, and paragraph headers. The reader should be able to get a sense of the page’s content by using this outline, even without the paragraphs of content.
When using HTML to format these elements, the current recommendation is to use the