Blogging Tips

Blogging: 30 Traffic Generation Tips

xcite Digital

1. Keep track of blogs and leave comments on them. A good way to keep the conversation going is to install a MyBlogLog widget and visit the blog of people visiting your site.

2. Nothing creates long-term traffic more than value. Consider writing posts with resources or explaining how things work. Useful things get linked to and they get onto del.icio.us, which is far better long-term than a digg front page.

3. Inform search engines and aggregators like Technorati (using the ping functionality) when your blog is updated, this should ensure maximum traffic coming from those sources. (check the List of Ping Services)

4.Simplify. Pay attention to complex issues in your field of work. It may be a big long publication that is hard to wade through or a concept that is hard to grasp. Reference it and make a shorter “for dummies” version with your own lessons learned and relevant tips. When doing this, I have been surprised to find that the simplified post will appear before the more complex version in search results. Perhaps this is why it results in increased traffic; people looking for more help or clarification on the subject will land on your blog.

5. Try to be polemic. I write obsessively about all-things political from the left-wing perspective in the form of humorous, sarcastic one-liners.

6. A simple tip that will probably boost your page views: install a translator plugin. I decided to use a paid plugin for this, but if I am not wrong there are some free ones as well. The translation is not very good, as you can imagine, but it helps to attract readers that are not fluent in English.

7.Submit articles to blog carnivals (http://blogcarnival.com) that are related to your niche. Your article almost always gets posted, and it must generate a handful of visitors, at least.

8. Newsgroups. I always see a spike when I post a review to a newsgroup.

9. Create a new design for your website. Not only will it be more attractive to your regular readers, but you can submit it to some CSS gallery showcase sites that feature great designs. This will give you exposure on those sites while generating a lot of traffic and backlinks from those types of sites.

10. Participate in conversations on related blogs. Start conversations on your own blog. Don’t just post about a story and leave it at that, engage your audience, ask questions and call to action.

11. Comment on blogs, write useful content and make good friends on forums.

12. You must be active to generate traffic. I post comments on other blogs that are related to mine, and I post my site link in my signature at the forums. Spread the word about your blog and it will certainly attract readers.

13. Just browse around MyBlogLog.com and you will surely get visitors to your blog. Also try to join as many communities as possible that are related to your topic.

14. A great tip for generating traffic is off-line by including your url in all your off-line liturature from business cards, letterheads, pamphlets, adverts through in-store signage if applicable. I even have our website on my vehicle.

15. Read lots of other blogs. Leave trackbacks. Make sure your blog is optimized for search engines. Leverage social bookmarking sites like digg (both for new ideas and for traffic).

16. Leave comments on other blogs. If you’re already reading them, it takes
just a couple of seconds to leave a message agreeing or disagreeing
with the author, you get to leave a link to your site, and you will almost
ALWAYS get traffic from your comments.

17. Post 3-5 times a day. Use ping services like pingomatic or set up wordpress to ping some of the ping services. Engage your readers. Put up polls, ask them questions, give them quizes, free tools, etc. Make them want to come back and tell their friends about you.

18. Community. It’s one word but it is the most important one when it comes to blogging. The only “blog metric” that makes sense is the vibrant community of readers it has. Building a community around your blog will bring you increased traffic, but how do you start? The boilerplate response to building traffic is always “SEO, social networking sites, and commenting on blogs” but it can be simplified to “be part of a community”. The easiest way to seed your blog is with an already existing community. But the only way to do that is to be part of the community yourself.

19. Squidoo Lenses are a good way to generate traffic. By using a lense,
you can generate your own custom “community” of webpages, including some
of the more popular pages in your “neighborhood.” Including your own
webpage in such a list is a good way of generating traffic.

20. I’ve had good success writing articles and submitting them to EzineArticles. Articles that have been written from well-researched keyword phrases and accepted by EzineArticles tend to rank very high in Google for that search term. Placing anchor text in the footer of those articles so the reader can visit my relevant website has always increased my site traffic.

21. I came upon some unexpected traffic when my blog popped up on some css design portals like www.cssmania.com and www.webcreme.com. If you can put some time into the concept behind and design for your blog, I’d recommend submitting your site to a design portal not only for
additional traffic but to build an additional community around your site.

22. I’ve recently gotten involved with several “MySpace-like” community sites that focus on my target audience. I share my thoughts in their forums, post intros to my real blog on their system blog and I’ve even created a group for my specific niche. It’s been very, very successful for me.

23. Well, obviously everyone knows that social bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, etc. bring lots of traffic. But I’m now submitting some of my articles to blogg-buzz.com (a digg like site for bloggers), and I always get not a bad traffic from there.

24. Participate in Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn Answers where you can demonstrate your expertise, get associated with relevant keywords and put your URL out there.

25. Be the first to write a post about the ‘Top Ten Blogs’ in your niche. The post will rank highly in any general search for blogs in your niche and other bloggers in your niche write about the post and link to it.

26.Participating in forums is a great way to get loyal readers. Either link baiting people in your signature or posting great advice and tips will give you high quality traffic, which will result in return visitors.

27. A simple trick I’ve used to increase traffic to my blog is participate in group writing projects. In fact, that’s what I’m doing right now.

28. Don’t forget your archives. I just posted a roundup of all interviews I did over the past seven months. One of them generated a new link and a big traffic spike from a group of users that look like they will be loyal readers now.

29. Write something controversial. I don’t think it’s good to write something controversial just for the purpose of getting traffic necessarily (especially if it’s only for that purpose and you’re being disingenuous), but it works.

30. Find the best blogs on your niche and contact the authors. Introduce yourself and send a link of your blog. This might help them to discover your blog, read it and possibly link to it.

Ref: dailyblogtips.com

The Importance of Copy Content – Rob Walker

Published by: Rob Walker – Xcite Digital

On the Internet, anyone can be a publisher, and when done properly this can be a great way of reaching out to your customers. Without giving due thought to the copy content, however, the impression can turn from positive to negative without even a second click.

It is often the case that users will dump information on their website without much thought and without any idea about making the content usable. Websites are about far more than images and navigation, and good content always manages to find a good reader, especially on the web with the power of search engines that look for well structured, informative copy.

If you do not have a skilled copywriter then we strongly recommend that you use one. At Xcite Digital we can offer the services of a writer with many years’ experience who has written for some big names and also brings his strategic experience to bear.

If you decide to write your own copy, checking grammar, punctuation, sentence structure and spelling are basic requirements, but a good copywriter will tighten content and make structuring suggestions that will significantly improve the readabillity of your site. This is in turn leads to a more fulfilling (and profitable) visitor experience.

Here are my top 5 tips for improving copy and readability:

1. Highlight Keywords
2. Use concise, descriptive titles and headings
3. Bulleted lists and numbered steps are a must
4. Keep paragraphs short
5. Make sure that the most important point on a page is stated in the first two lines

If you would like any guidance on the most effective ways to improve the results derived from your website please feel free to email info@xcitedigital.com

Published by: Rob Walker – Xcite Digital

The Long Tail – www.XciteDigital.com

Kevin Kelly: The Three Tails

“Seth Godin recently posted a dissection of the three “profit pockets” within the Long Tail, which he illustrated like this:

There’s
a blatant switcheroo that Seth (and almost everyone else) makes when
explaining the Long Tail. In pocket #1 of the curve, Seth talks in
terms of a creator of a work. In pocket #2 of the curve, he also talks
in terms of the creator. But then when he gets to the long tail, he
switches away from a creator, to talk in terms of an aggregator of
other creators’ work. Why is that? What happens to the creator? The
creator is dropped when we get to the long tail “pocket of profit”
because the long tail is not profitable for the creator. It’s
profitable only for the audience and aggregators.

I’m not
really sure the “fractal long tail which operates within a long tail”
(every subject has its own long tail) mentioned in Seth’s previous post
helps a whole lot either, other than to say you want to be as close to
the head as possible even in your niche. That is a no brainer. Being
an aggregator is not an option either for a creator. Almost no creators
I know are productive enough to create sufficient quantity of new
things to aggregate their own work. Aggregators are by definition not
creators.

So as one crosses the sections — going from the
short head to the long tail — one should be consistent and view it
from the aggregator’s point of view or the creator’s point of view. I
think it is a mistake to conflate the two view points.

I’ve
been wrestling with this for a while and I think the only advantage to
the creator that I can see in the long tail is that aggregators can
invent or produce a long tail domain that was not present before. Like
Seth’s Squidoo does. Before
Squidoo or Amazon or Netflix came along there was no market at all for
many of the creations they now distribute. The proposition that long
tail aggregators can offer to creators is profound, but simple: you
have a choice between a itsy bitsy niche audience (with nano profits)
or no audience at all. Before the LT was expanded your masterpiece on
breeding salt water aquarium fishes from the Red Sea would have no
paying fans. Now you have maybe 100.

One hundred
readers/watchers/listeners is not economical. There is no business
equation that can sustain profits for continual creation from so few
buyers. (It can of course support the business of aggregation above the
level of creation.) But the long tail niche creation operates perfectly
well in the realm of passion, enthusiasm, obsession, curiosity,
peerage, love, and the gift economy. In the exchange of psychic
energy, encouragement, meaning of life, and reasons to live, the long
now is a boon.

That is not true about profits. Economically,
the more the long tail expands, the more stuff there is to compete with
our limited attention as an audience, the more difficult it is for a
creator to sell profitably. Or, the longer the tail, the worse for
sales. But if we view the long tail as a market of a different type, as
a market of enthusiasm and connection, then as the long tail expands,
this increases the chance of two enthusiasts meeting, and so the longer
the tail, the better. The first two pockets of the curve are trying to
maximize profits; the last pocket of the long tail is trying to
maximize passion and connectivity.

There is one further
indirect advantage to the long tail. Since your creation now exists in
a market (where it would not have existed at all before) it can, if you
are lucky, start to migrate uptail. With creativity you may be able to
move your creation out of the economic doldrums of the long tail up
into section #2, where 1,000 true fans and other mid-level success
lies. As I argue in 1,000 True Fans,
this is where you want to be as a creator. Seth calls it the pocket of
” the profitable, successful niche product” and I agree with him that
this pocket #2 rather than pocket #1 is where you want to aim for.

But
if you fairly evaluate section #3 according to the same metrics as
section #1 and #2 — the dollar value to the creator — then the long
tail is a desert for profits. It makes sense to pursue this pocket only
if you switch. You must switch in pocket #3 either to looking at it
from the perspective of an overlord aggregator, OR, you need to switch
to looking at this territory as an alternative economy, one that is not
running on the dollar. A new region with its own dynamics.

In
other words, Squidoo and Amazon and Netflix make the profitable long
tail very happy. But happy long tail does not make happy creator.

I
prefer to think of the Long Tail as being a tail to a different animal.
We’ve misidentified the intangible being it belongs to. It is not the
long tail of the Beast of Commercial Profits. Rather it is the long
tail of the Dragon of Love. The love of creating, of making, of
connecting, of unreasonable passion, or making a difference, or doing
something that matters to ourselves, the love of connecting, giving,
learning, producing, and sharing.

It is important to know which tail we are wagging.”

Posted by Chris Anderson | Permalink

Xcite Digital Basic Marketing Guide – Rob Walker

Quick guide to getting search engine traffic levels up:
Nb. These will take 3-6 months for any noticeable effect in the search engines

Inbound link building / social networking

The best long term way to build up your organic listings is to find as many places to link back to your site as possible. These could be facebook, bebo, youtube, any associated blog, ecademy. The list of endless but it just takes time, it is free though.

Read up about social networking, you know facebook is popular but the figures are scary. Work out the demographic you want to chase and then market accordingly.

CMS
You should have a blog on your site to increase the amount of recognised content changes by the search engines. The more updates the better, at least once a week.

The CMS also has the advantage of providing useful interesting and unique content to your site visitors. Everyone is different obviously so its about finding a middle ground.

Blog
Having a blog on your site will build up brand recognition and drive repeat use. You may even generate a following to your blogs. Its not about always being relevant to your clients either, it can simply be about getting recognition with other people in the industry – in fact I think you mentioned it.. the long tail.

This is where you create long links on the web that eventually come back to your site, and although they may be links to something irrelevant to your clients it can still lead some time to say they have heard of you. You do not even need to think about search engines with this option!

Keywords/Metatags

Make sure these are correct and have prominence in your site page content. You should have at least title, keywords and description tags. These will have little impact on the whole but are a good rule of development.

PPC

Although the costs may be little off putting, its all about return. If you get 10k sales back then your £1000 has gone a long way. All I would suggest is that you do market research to find out how much return you can get for what investment.

A good reputable company can help you with this as part of their project set up. The most important lesson is make sure you do not deal with cowboys as there are a lot in this industry.

Here is a summary:

• Inbound link building
• Outbound link building
• Social Networking
• Continual updates to website content
• Blog/Latest News
• Meta-tags, titles, descriptions etc
• Online Marketing/PPC
• Site map
• Alt tags
• Email capture facility – good basic marketing
• Usability review – are users getting the most out of your site

The above are a few general ideas to help, most can be achieved by your self, but to get the best results it always worth looking around for a good deal. Online marketing can sometimes be seen as spending little for large return, rather than large spend little return… but only if done correctly.

Also remember that your competition are likely to be spending less and less on Marketing over the next 6-12 months so it is a great time to capitalise on their market, you can come out of this on top and with a much bigger market share. Just spend wisely rather than not at all.

Robert Walker – Xcite Digital

Social Networking is walking around with a drink eating canapes isnt it?

Not quite. If traditional networking means mingling with like-minded
people, swapping contact details and making connections that could help
you further your business, online social networking offers all this -
and a lot more besides.

Sure there’s no actual
flesh-pressing – or wine-quaffing – in cyberspace but the internet
means your potential network is very large indeed. And of course the
web offers possibilities for sharing a lot more than a few anecdotes -
detailed information, say, or media such as photos and video. As a
result social networking is booming, with websites dedicated to
building online communities of likeminded souls attracting users at a
very rapid rate.

Crumbs. But what exactly is social networking?
Social
networking is the business of engaging and interacting with other
internet users in a communal online space. Users typically build an
individual profile – which might consist of photos, contact details, a
blog or favourite links – and make ‘friends’ with other users with whom
they are linked in some way. They might join up with those who share
knowledge or a common interest, be they old school buddies or fellow IT
professionals.

Ban it?
Should social networking sites be banned at work? There’s really no need, according to the results of a recent silicon.com poll.

I’m thinking this stuff is popular with kids…
And
you’d be right. Like many aspects of the web, the youth has long been
down with it – creating profiles, uploading photos, posting links and
generally spending a lot of time tinkering with their online profiles.

It’s
also something that hasn’t escaped advertising execs who are getting
excited about the opportunities for tailoring marketing on these sites
and reaching demographics they are extremely keen to connect with.

In
an interview with silicon.com, Michael Birch, CEO of social networking
site Bebo, referred to this new breed of adverts – call it ‘advertising
2.0′ if you will – as “engagement marketing“, adding that it is “a more integrated experience” than traditional online advertising.

But
it’s not just kids getting into this stuff. While it’s currently still
most popular with younger age ranges, you’d be wrong to think it’s
exclusively for the under-18s.

So more savvy advertising… is that the only business opportunity here then?
That’s
one aspect of it. Businesses are only just starting to realise the
potential and explore the possibilities offered by social networks -
and much of the talk is about how important these online hubs will be
in future.

Some see social networks becoming juggernauts
of media consumption and distribution, giving web users a forum for
locating and sharing their own media (a natural extension of the web 2.0 user-generated content trend). This is something Cisco for one is talking up. Earlier this year, the network gear maker also acquired software company Five Across, which develops tools to allow companies to easily add social networking features to their websites.

Then
of course there’s social networks as networking career tools for
individuals – which can take the form of
something-for-every-business-professional networks, such as LinkedIn,
or smaller, niche sites that serve a particular slice of industry, such
as the Intellect Young Professionals’ Network.

Anything more for business?
Social
networks have potential to be used to drum up new business – as a way
of linking suppliers with clients in a global marketplace, say. That’s
the idea behind a social network called Insight in the pipeline from
Reuters. Another network, called the Wireless Industry Partnership,
launched last year with a similar idea but specifically focused on
wireless technologies. Then there’s virtual world-based social networks
such as Second Life, which have their own currency and offer a variety of in-world money-making and networking opportunities.

An
obvious corporate use for social networks is as a tool for building a
sense of community within an organisation – linking up staff across the
business by giving them a shared space to communicate and collaborate.
For example Cisco has 1,500 employees using Facebook which means they
don’t need internal tools to provide community.

I’m sensing some mobile opportunities…
You’re
catching on. Operators are getting excited about the potential for
social networks on the go – and not just as a means of driving more
traffic across their networks (and therefore boosting revenues). Users
of web stalwarts such as Facebook, Flickr and MySpace have been able to
post content to their profiles via their handsets for a while now but there are bigger ideas kicking around out there. GPS-enabled social networking, for one.

Tell me more…
Since
social-network-alites are more than likely to be owners of mobile
phones, there’s immediate potential to hook up hardware and software -
provided, of course, the hardware in question is GPS-enabled – lending
another dimension to social networks by enabling the location of users
to be pin-pointed on a map. This is known as ’social mapping’ – and
brings social networking full-circle, back to real-world meet-ups.

So I could check my phone to see if any of my buddies are hanging out in the local pub?
Exactly.
But before you get too excited, social mapping is currently little more
than a gleam in mobile operators’ eyes in the UK, as GPS phones are
still a rarity here. However, the tech is more developed across the
pond – where services with teen-friendly names such as Loopt, Mologogo
and Socialight have been enabling well-heeled US youngsters to hook up
for some root beer for a few years now.

A slightly less
high-tech example of mobile social networking, but one that’s not
hamstrung by expensive hardware restrictions, is Twitter: a site that
enables users to publish SMS messages detailing their current status to
the web and to mobiles of whoever has signed up to hear about it. It
surely can’t be long before ‘twittering’ enters the lexicon as a word
meaning ‘random, trivial text-based utterings’.

Interesting – sounds like there’s a lot of stuff going on. Any concerns?
Well,
on the flip side, businesses are now having to deal with employees
spending time during the working day checking out what their friends
are up to online – a classic case of web-facilitated time wasting.
Company reputations could also be put at risk by inappropriate online
behaviour by staff. To this end, some businesses bar access to social networking websites.

Another
possible corporate concern is the potential for confidential
information to leak out via social networks – or for rival
organisations to gather intelligence on the people who work at a
competitor, whether for staff poaching purposes or to eavesdrop on
corporate secrets.

Jobseekers should also be worried -
research has shown employers are increasingly checking out job
candidates’ social networking profiles. And what they find online can
have a significant impact on the outcome of a job application.

Of
course there are more general privacy concerns too – not everyone is
comfortable with the idea of putting so much personal information on
the web, even if it’s possible to restrict who can view it.

Thanks for the warning but I think I’m ready to join the revolution. So where do I go to get me some social networking action?
Well-established social networking hubs that may be of interest include virtual world Second Life, business networking site LinkedIn and juggernauts of mass appeal such as Bebo, Facebook and MySpace.

Here
in blighty, MySpace is currently top of the social networking pops -
with 34 per cent market share, according to Hitwise stats – just
pipping Bebo, with Facebook in third place.

10 Aspects of an Effective Social Media Campaign

There’s a lot that goes into a successful social media campaign,
much more than just creating great content or asking some friends for
votes. Here’s a look at 10 different factors that will influence your
success.

1. The Purpose

In order to run a successful social media campaign you have to have
a clear understanding of what your purpose is. Yes, this sounds
obvious, but many website owners and bloggers set out to gain huge
amounts of traffic with social media without a definitive purpose.
Unless you are producing advertising income based on traffic volume,
you will not really gain anything just by getting tons of visitors
(although it may make you feel good).

For a social media campaign to truly be effective you need to have
an idea of what you want to accomplish as a result of the traffic. Are
you hoping to draw inbound links, gain subscribers, etc. Without
specific goals you won’t be able to measure your accomplishments.

2. A Multi-Part Plan

Once you have a purpose for your campaign you need to have a plan to
go about accomplishing your purpose. If you’re hoping to draw inbound
links, part of the plan will involve developing an idea of something
that others will want to link to. Another part of the plan will involve
how you will go about getting your content “popular” with social media.

In many cases your strategy may involve more than one phase. Simply
getting a page or a blog post to the front page of Digg isn’t
necessarily a strategy. Maybe your plan involves using multiple blog
posts at different times to follow up on each other or to test
different social media websites. Whatever the case, your plan needs to
lead you to achieving your goals.

3. Studying of Targeted Networks

Each social media site has its own users with different preferences.
An article may do very well on one social media site and not on
another. An effective campaign will involve studying the sites that you
want to use to see what types of content do well. Obviously, you can
then use this knowledge to your advantage by creating something that
users are likely to appreciate.

If you are already very familiar with the social media sites that
you want to use, this step may not be necessary. However, don’t limit
yourself to social media sites that you have used in the past. Keep an
open mind towards smaller sites or newer ones that you haven’t tried
yet. Their audiences may just be a better fit for what you want to
accomplish.

4. Leveraging of Existing Strengths

Do you already have a significant number of readers? If so, take
advantage of them by encouraging them to vote for your submissions. You
can do this by placing a voting button on your pages or by directly
asking some of them to vote for you.

Do you have strong contacts with other bloggers and social media
users? If so, see if they can be of some help to you. You may have a
friend who has a strong profile on Digg that would be willing to submit
one of your blog posts.

Your social media campaign should tie in with your other activities
as a website owner or blogger to allow you to take advantage of your
existing strengths.

5. Relevant Content

Of course, success with social media is highly dependant on the
content. You may be able to get your submission to the front page based
on a strong profile or a lot of connections, but what will ultimately
determine your level of success is the content itself.

In order to create the strongest long-term results your content that
is created for social media should be as relevant to your site as
possible. It’s not that uncommon for people to create something
specifically targeting social media users that doesn’t really relate to
the primary subjects of the website or blog. In many cases this is done
to create inbound links for a website that covers a topic not normally
associated with social media. However, you should always make it a
priority to find an idea that is as relevant as possible. This way the
visitors that you attract through social media will be highly-targeted
for your site.

6. Measurable Goals

The first point we looked at was having a purpose. In addition to
having a purpose you should also establish some basic goals to help you
determine if you’ve achieved your purpose. These goals should be
directly related to that purpose. If you want to gain inbound links,
your goals should involve a specific number of links that you want to
attract, whereas having goal of 1000 diggs (or something similar) is
really not an effective goal since the number of diggs do not directly
relate to the number of inbound links.

7. Visitors Are Led to Take Action

Unless your purpose is just to gain high traffic volume, you will want your visitors to do something. Maybe you want them to subscribe to your RSS feed
. If this is the case, you will need to lead them to take that action.
Place your feed subscription link in a prominent place and even remind
them to subscribe somewhere else on the page. Make it clear to your
visitors what you want them to do.

8. Duplicatable

Ideally you’ll want to have success with social media on a number of
occasions. An effective plan will allow you to duplicate the success of
one campaign at another time. Many of the websites and blogs you see on
the front page of Digg and Del.icio.us are there over and over again.
They know what it takes to get there and they have a plan that allows
them to duplicate their success.

9. With Each Step, Success Builds On Itself

One thing that you will learn with social media marketing is that it
will become easier with time. For example, the more you use specific
social media sites, the strong profiles you will develop and the more
influence you will have. Over time, you will be more capable of
promoting your content because of your improved connections. Plus, as
your blog gains readers it will essentially promote itself and you’ll
be able to focus more on just creating the content.

Ref: http://traffikd.com/smm/campaign/

Clean up our website design!

We are continually asked how to clean up our clients website designs, here are a few ideas..

When designing a site there are usually 2 phases – Layout and Polish.
The
layout phase usually involves placing the elements of the design on the
page, finishing with something that appears relatively complete. Then
would come the second stage – the Polish – this involves a reworking of
the design, adjusting colours, type treatments, shadows, layers, adding
gradients and generally cleaning it all up.

Step 1 – Clarity:
When designing for the web, one of your aims should always be to keep things sharp and clean.

1. Text Clarity
When
laying out text you should give thought to what Anti-Aliasing you use.
You can choose between None Sharp Crisp Strong. For editable text on a
page you would usually use the setting ‘None’, but for text that
appears within an image it is usually best to smooth it using one of
the Anti-Aliasing settings.

2. Lining
Adding a 1px line
between a lighter and darker section of the design can mimick the
effect of the sharpening filter. This emphises the border and contrast
between the two colours and gives the design more impact and clarity

3. Colouring
Colour
makes a big difference in sharpening things up. The background colour
that you choose for the design can play a intrinsic role in the way the
elements infront appear. You should always choose a colour that
enhances and intensifies the content of the page above.

4. Cleaning Up Objects
Sometimes
with objects such as logos you will see that an edge can look slightly
blurry. This can be fixed by using the Polygonal Lasso Tool (L) to
remove any rogue pixels. Of course this isn’t essential but it can be a
good idea to think about the details and make sure everything is nice
and crisp!

Step 2 – Light and Shade:
Some designers would say
that gradients are the hallmark of web 2.0 design.In Shadows and
gradients are a powerful tool for giving your designs more depth and
prominence. Adding shadows and gradients to backgrounds, boxes, headers
and even text titles can give your design that extra ‘shine’ and
professional feel that lifts it above the competition. Subtle
highlights used with shadows and gradients can lift elements up from
the background and pull attention to sections of the page you wish to
drive traffic to.

Step 3 – Precedence:
Precedence is the
single most important visual aspect of information design. There will
be information in your design that you wish the user to look at first,
then second and so on, using visual precedence correctly will help you
to create a user friendly site that delivers the information that is
required efficiently.

Visual precedence is a mix of factors:

1. Size
You
can be sure that a large element on the page is going to take
precedence over something small. The main titles usually have top
precedence to draw a user to the information that is needed. In the
same way, home page calls to action can be a powerful tool for
filtering users to the sections they require. When you look at the page
the first thing you should notice are those two elements.

2. Colour
Colour
also creates precedence. Using high contrast colours for areas of
importance make them stand out against the other areas of the site.
Less important sections can be designed with colours that blend into
the design a little more.

3. Background Colour
With both
background colour and colour the important thing is not so much what
specific colour something is, as what colours everything else is in
relation. This is integral in controllling the precedence of elements
within the design and influencing the way a user will navigate around a
site.

4. Position
Positioning in a layout makes a difference
in how items are perceived. Having the important elements higher up
usually gives more precedence, as does having something further left.
The important sections and information should always be above the fold
of the page.

Step 4 – Simplify
Sometimes during the polish
you may change the actual information on the page. Tweaking the content
can lead to an improved experience, sometimes elements can be
simplified to improve the impact and usability of a design
And there you have it!

There
are many ways that you can improve and enhance a design during the
‘polish’ stage and it is often the case that this is where a site will
really come to life. Remember to use all these tools to their full
potential and get the most out of your designs!

For more inspiration please email Robert Walker rob@Xcitedigital.co.uk

XciteDigital has been set up to help provide a fast effective turnaround for our
small to medium sized clients, giving all of our clients the same level
of care and attention.

PR in a Social Media World – Free Marketing Webinar

PR
used to be about bombarding the media with your pitches and press
releases. You had to beg the media to write about you to communicate
with your customers. But today, your customers are going to the
Internet to learn about you and your products directly.

Blogs, online
news releases, social media, and other forms of web content give
companies the opportunity to communicate with buyers directly. Learn how to leverage the Internet and
social media with Xcite Digital to make your PR more effective.

Discover your fold

http://www.foldspy.com

Blasting the Myth of the Fold

by

Milissa Tarquini

on 2007/07/24 | [50 Comments]

The Above-the-Fold Myth

We
are all well aware that web design is not an easy task. There are many
variables to consider, some of them technical, some of them human. The
technical considerations of designing for the web can (and do) change
quite regularly, but the human variables change at a slower rate.
Sometimes the human variables change at such a slow rate that we have a
hard time believing that it happens.

This is happening right
now in web design. There is an astonishing amount of disbelief that the
users of web pages have learned to scroll and that they do so
regularly. Holding on to this disbelief – this myth that users won’t
scroll to see anything below the fold – is doing everyone a great
disservice, most of all our users.
First, a definition: The word
“fold” means a great many things, even within the discipline of design.
The most common use of the term “fold” is perhaps used in reference to
newspaper layout. Because of the physical dimensions of the printed
page of a broadsheet newspaper, it is folded. The first page of a
newspaper is where the “big” stories of the issue are because it is the
best possible placement. Readers have to flip the paper over (or unfold
it) to see what else is in the issue, therefore there is a chance that
someone will miss it. In web design, the term “fold” means the line
beyond which a user must scroll to see more contents of a page (if it
exists) after the page displays within their browser. It is also
referred to as a “scroll-line.”
Screen performance data and new
research indicate that users will scroll to find information and items
below the fold. There are established design best practices to ensure
that users recognize when a fold exists and that content extends below
it¹. Yet during requirements gathering for design projects
designers are inundated with requests to cram as much information above
the fold as possible, which complicates the information design. Why
does the myth continue, when we have documented evidence that the fold
really doesn’t matter in certain contexts?

Once upon a time, page-level vertical scrolling was not permitted on AOL.
Articles, lists and other content that would have to scroll were
presented in scrolling text fields or list boxes, which our users
easily used. Our pages, which used proprietary technology, were
designed to fit inside a client application, and the strictest of
guidelines ensured that the application desktop itself did not scroll.
The content pages floated in the center of the application interface
and were too far removed from the scrollbar location for users to
notice if a scrollbar appeared. Even if the page appeared to be cut
off, as current best practices dictate, it proved to be such an unusual
experience to our users that they assumed that the application was
“broken.” We had to instill incredible discipline in all areas of the
organization that produced these pages – content creation, design and
development – to make sure our content fit on these little pages.

AOL client application with desktop scrollbar activated

As AOL
moved away from our proprietary screen technology to an open web
experience, we enjoyed the luxury of designing longer (and wider)
pages. Remaining sensitive to the issues of scrolling from our history,
we developed and employed practices for designing around folds:

• We chose as target screen resolutions those used by the majority of our users.
• We identified where the fold would fall in different browsers, and noted the range of pixels that would be in the fold “zone.”
• We
  made sure that images and text appeared “broken” or cut off at the fold
  for the majority of our users (based on common screen resolutions and
  browsers).
• We kept the overall page height to no more than 3 screens.

But
even given our new larger page sizes, we were still presented with long
lists of items to be placed above the fold – lists impossible to
accommodate. There were just too many things for the limited amount of
vertical space.
For example, for advertising to be considered
valuable and saleable, a certain percentage of it must appear above the
1024×768 fold. Branding must be above the fold. Navigation must be
above the fold – or at least the beginning of the list of navigational
choices. (If the list is well organized and displayed appropriately,
scanning the list should help bring users down the page.) Big content
(the primary content of the site) should begin above the fold. Some
marketing folks believe that the actual number of data points and links
above the fold is a strategic differentiator critical to business
success. Considering the limited vertical real estate available and the
desire for multiple ad units and functionality described above, an open
design becomes impossible.

And why? Because people think
users don’t scroll. Jakob Nielsen wrote about the growing acceptance
and understanding of scrolling in 1997², yet 10 years later we are still hearing that users don’t scroll.
Research debunking this myth is starting to pop up, and a great example of this is the report available on ClickTale.com³.
In it, the researchers used their proprietary tracking software to
measure the activity of 120,000 pages. Their research gives data on the
vertical height of the page and the point to which a user scrolls. In
the study, they found that 76% of users scrolled and that a good
portion of them scrolled all the way to the bottom, despite the height
of the screen. Even the longest of web pages were scrolled to the
bottom. One thing the study does not capture is how much time is spent
at the bottom of the page, so the argument can be made that users might
just scan it and not pay much attention to any content placed there.

This is where things get interesting.

I took a look at performance data for some AOL
sites and found that items at the bottom of pages are being widely
used. Perhaps the best example of this is the popular celebrity gossip
website TMZ.com. The most clicked on item on the TMZ homepage is the link at the very bottom of the page that takes users to the next page. Note that the TMZ
homepage is often over 15000 pixels long – which supports the ClickTale
research that scrolling behavior is independent of screen height. Users
are so engaged in the content of this site that they are following it
down the page until they get to the “next page” link.

Maybe
it’s not fair to use a celebrity gossip site as an example. After all,
we’re not all designing around such tantalizing guilty-pleasure content
as the downfall of beautiful people. So, let’s look at some drier
content.
For example, take AOL News Daily
Pulse. You’ll notice the poll at the bottom of the page – the vote
counts are well over 300,000 each. This means that not only did folks
scroll over 2000 pixels to the bottom of the page, they actually took
the time to answer a poll while they were there. Hundreds of thousands
of people taking a poll at the bottom of a page can easily be called a
success.

AOL News Daily Pulse with 10×7 fold line and vote count

But,
you may argue, these pages are both in blog format. Perhaps blogs
encourage scrolling more than other types of pages. I’m not convinced,
since blog format is of the “newest content on top” variety, but it may
be true. However, looking at pages that are not in blog format, we see
the same trend. On the AOL Money & Finance
homepage, users find and use the modules for recent quotes and their
personalized portfolios even when these modules are placed well beneath
the 1024×768 fold.

Another example within AOL Money & Finance is a photo gallery entitled Top Tax Tips.
Despite the fact that the gallery is almost 2500 pixels down the page,
this gallery generates between 200,000 and 400,000 page views depending
on promotion of the Taxes page.

It is clear that where a
given item falls in relation to the fold is becoming less important.
Users are scrolling to see what they want, and finding it. The key is
the content – if it is compelling, users will follow where it leads.

When does the fold matter?

The most basic rule of thumb is
that for every site the user should be able to understand what your
site is about by the information presented to them above the fold. If
they have to scroll to even discover what the site is, its success is
unlikely.

Functionality that is essential to business strategy
should remain (or at least begin) above the fold. For example, if your
business success is dependent on users finding a particular thing
(movie theaters, for example) then the widget to allow that action
should certainly be above the fold.

Screen height and folds
matter for applications, especially rapid-fire applications where users
input variables and change the display of information. The input and
output should be in very close proximity. Getting stock quotes is an
example: a user may want to get four or five quotes in sequence, so it
is imperative that the input field and the basic quote information
display remain above the fold for each symbol entered. Imagine the
frustration at having to scroll to find the input field for each quote
you wanted.

Where IS the fold?

Here is perhaps the biggest problem of
all. The design method of cutting-off images or text only works if you
know where the fold is. There is a lot of information out there about
how dispersed the location of fold line actually is. Again, a very
clear picture of this problem is shown on ClickTale. In the same study
of page scrolling, fold locations of viewed screens were captured,
based on screen resolution and browser used. It’s a sad, sad thing, but
the single highest concentration of fold location (at around 600
pixels) for users accounted for less than 10% of the distribution. This
pixel-height corresponds with a screen resolution of 1024×768. Browser
applications take away varying amounts of vertical real estate for
their interfaces (toolbars, address fields, etc). Each browser has a
slightly different size, so not all visitors running a resolution of
1024×768 will have a fold that appears in the same spot. In the
ClickTale study, the three highest fold locations were 570, 590 and 600
pixels—apparently from different browsers running on 1024×768 screens.
But the overall distribution of fold locations for the entire study was
so varied that even these three sizes together only account for less
than 26% of visits. What does all this mean? If you pick one pixel
location on which to base the location of the fold when designing your
screens, the best-case scenario is that you’ll get the fold line
exactly right for only 10% of your visitors.

So what do we do now?

Stop worrying about the fold. Don’t
throw your best practices out the window, but stop cramming stuff above
a certain pixel point. You’re not helping anyone. Open up your designs
and give your users some visual breathing room. If your content is
compelling enough your users will read it to the end.

Advertisers
currently want their ads above the fold, and it will be a while before
that tide turns. But it’s very clear that the rest of the page can be
just as valuable – perhaps more valuable – to contextual advertising.
Personally, I’d want my ad to be right at the bottom of the TMZpage,
forget the top.

The biggest lesson to be learned here is
that if you use visual cues (such as cut-off images and text) and
compelling content, users will scroll to see all of it. The next great
frontier in web page design has to be bottom of the page. You’ve done
your job and the user scrolled all the way to the bottom of the page
because they were so engaged with your content. Now what? Is a footer
really all we can offer them? If we know we’ve got them there, why not
give them something to do next? Something contextual, a natural next
step in your site, or something with which to interact (such as a poll)
would be welcome and, most importantly, used.

References

¹ Jared Spool UIE Brain Sparks, August 2, 2006:Utilizing the Cut-off Look to Encourage Users To Scroll

² Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, December 1, 1997: Changes in Web Usability Since 1994

³ ClickTale’s Research Blog, December 23, 2006: Unfolding the Fold

The Digital World of SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is an often debated topic simply
because the dominant search engines hold their ranking secrets close
their chests. In this blog, I aim to look at a model created to help
you think about your website in relation to the Internet landscape and
make use of the two simple underlying but powerful topics that are the
foundation to the whole strategy – text and links. This principle
focuses on natural search listings.

The headings fit into a tidy acronym which it easy to remember: PACT – Preparation, Aspirations, Catwalk and Text.

Preparation

Preparing
yourself for the web is about understanding the digital world you are
about to embark on. Don’t limit yourself to just your vertical market,
look outside and see what others are doing to achieve common principles
such as user experience and relationship building. Armed with this
insight, look at your competitor’s sites carefully and find out what
they are doing really well and where they could benefit from the vast
array of digital functionality. Do they have RSS? A blog? Do they show
their case studies clearly and give the user insight into what they do?
Some key points to this are listed below:

• Pay attention to how the sites ‘share’ their information with the Internet – after all, those who send more, receive more!

• Your
  users are interested in the substance of what you offer as opposed to
  who you are and what you say you can do. Prove to them that you have
  substance, through trials, videos, excerpts and user feedback/ratings
  (remember negative ratings can be a good thing since they give you a
  chance to reply and show how genuine you are).

• Work
  out your income method: is it advertising, membership sales, product
  sales or are you selling a service. Be realistic about conversion rates
  which can typically be 1% on ecommerce sites and know you need millions
  of page views each month to gain advertiser interest. Sites like the SitePoint marketplace can be useful to sell advertising whilst you are building up your traffic profile.

• Install stats such as Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools to follow your indexing and learn how the search engine spiders are reading your content.

Aspirations

Your
aspirations sit directly beneath your brand. These are the keywords on
how you wish to be perceived as a business. Are you unique, sassy,
exciting, edgy, strong, leading etc… Build a profile of words that you
want your customers to associate with your brand. Everything you then
do as a business must adhere to these brand values. Some key points are:

• Use these words to direct viral campaigns, blog entries, website copy, imagery and other material whether it is on or offline.

• Actively use social media like YouTube, StumbleUpon, Flickr and PhotoBucket
  to engage with users who like to browse unusual and viral digital
  media. Remember to place keywords (see ‘Text’ below) in any links back
  to your site since these sites are held in high regard by search
  engines.

• If you have a small budget, at least
  consider a professional design of your site. The subconscious affect of
  a decent design can speak thousands of words and gain instant trust
  from a user. One trick is to familiarise yourself with well known
  like-sites and adopt similar styles.

Catwalk

This
interesting topic has been around in the offline world for generations
but lends a great hand to a social media strategy. Large clothing
brands often demonstrate their creative fashion skills on a catwalk.
Most of the clothing does not hit the high street stores but the
creativity/uniqueness on display helps drive brand awareness. This is
true of car companies who take part in F1 or frequently produce concept
cars demonstrating innovation and direction. It makes them stand
out.This is key to any viral campaign or social media strategy where
high quality inbound links are built at great speed. Listed below are a
few things you can think about for your catwalk element:

• A
  blog can capture an audience when written well and frequently. A blog
  allows you to inform customers of upcoming products/services, showing
  them that the company is ‘alive’ and developing. A blog can be an
  instrumental part of creating a long tail so it is important that they
  are written well and with keywords in mind. Social sites that you can
  get benefit from include blogger.com, digg.com, del.icio.us and technorati.com who are massive content aggregators made up of vast web communities. Consider using WordPress or Blogger to set up your blog.

• With
  the domestication of broadband, Internet speeds allow for the
  syndication of video and rich media. It is very easy to post a video on
  YouTube and embed it into your site. Consider putting time and effort
  into making use of this vast Internet TV channel where it is free to
  advertise. Depending on your business, there should be a large amount
  of video ideas you can come up with and make you stand out a little
  more from your competitors.

• Consider the use
  of Flash to create a game or competition for your users to take part
  in. Large brands continue to develop promotional sites to reinforce
  their values and drive awareness to their brand and gather email
  addresses for future promotions/newsletters

Text

Last
but certainly not least is the ‘Text’ element of your site. Arguably,
this falls to Preparation but due to the scale of the topic, I have
separated it here. The main concept behind text is relevance. You want
to aim for a low ‘bounce rate %’ (the rate at which users exit your
site without visiting more than one page). Some key tips for optimising
the text on your website:

• Use tools such as Google Keyword Tool
  to find out the traffic volumes on relevant keywords. This useful tool
  will show you search volumes and likely keyword targets. For example;
  If more people are searching ‘Vans’ than ‘Commercial Vehicles’ then you
  would use the word ‘Vans’ with prominence over ‘Commercial Vehicles’.

• Include
  title, meta keywords and meta description on every page and aim for
  unique and highly specific descriptions for the content of that page.
  Sometimes it is impossible to uniquely markup each page but where
  possible make use of article/product titles and synopsis/short
  descriptions within the meta data of the page.

• Consider
  the use of a tag cloud. Not only do these ‘shout’ to the user what is
  popular/most listed on the site, they are great for search engines and
  contain targeted hyperlinked words linked to relevant results.

• Make
  sure any inbound links you control (such as those on the social media
  sites) contain relevant keywords to the page they are linking to and in
  addition to this, make sure those words get high search volumes from
  the research you would have conducted above.

• Use modern coding standards (XHTML and CSS – http://www.alistapart.com/articles/seo).
  This minimises the amount of code used to create the page and provides
  a clean presentation layer for search engines to easily index your
  site. Also, think about the logical structure of your content making
  use of headings, sub-headings and bulleted/numbered lists.

• Use
  title/alt tags on images and name your images with descriptive
  keywords. Image searches such as Google Image search can provide a
  substantial amount of traffic.

So in summary, SEO is the
sum of its parts and it is important to focus on each the above with
the same intensity. The Internet is a ‘network of networks’ so
everything you do has a ripple effect that can in turn improve your
SEO. There is one more element that supports all of the above and that
is frequency. The more frequently you can produce a blog, a video, an
image etc… the greater the expanse of inbound links and search
keywords that lead to your site (also known as the ‘Long Tail’ http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html). User Generated Content (UGC) can aid in automating much of this but that is for another day…

David

Evening

Quite late, been working on my design brief.

About to watch the season finale of Dexters…!

Search Engine Optimisation

The following correction was printed in the Guardian’s Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday June 11 2008

We said in the article below that the car insurance comparison site GoCompare dropped from page one in Google results for “car insurance” to page seven overnight – when the search engine tweaked its search criteria – and that this had a devastating impact on its business. GoCompare has advised that, while a change in Google’s algorithms did result in reduced traffic to its site, search marketing is one aspect of its online and offline marketing strategy and its overall sales figures were not affected. When we said the change had a “devastating impact” on GoCompare’s business, we were referring to its rankings in search results and not to its financial performance

---

As a web publisher, you are one of more than 100m websites in the world. So how do you make your site as easy as possible to find? The key is through search engines, which can drive as much as 60% of the traffic to major news sites.

What exactly is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation is the process of making web content easy for search engines to index, find and display. It’s hard to exaggerate its importance in driving traffic to websites. Most consumers use search engines every day and probably only look at the first page of search results each time. So if a consumer is trying to find your website, and you happen to be listed on page two of the search results, far fewer people will visit your site.

How does Google decide on the order of search results?

Google uses more than 200 assessments of a site’s content to determine the order of search results and the exact algorithms are a secret – just as they are with Yahoo and Microsoft’s search tools. But the criteria are roughly split between on-page factors such as the actual text and content, and off-page factors that include the number of external links to the site in question.

So how do I make sure my content can be picked up by search engines?

Google publishes its own SEO guidelines. First, ensure your site is indexed by search engines, which means automated “spiders” will crawl over your site’s content and put it on the map. From there, optimisation involves a combination of editorial and technical tweaks. Essentially, content – particularly headlines – needs to be descriptive and literal, using keywords consumers are likely to use. Some sites may try to “trick” Google, either by loading pages with too many irrelevant keywords, or with “doorway” pages that use links in bulk with no original content.

“If you don’t get search right, you don’t exist on the web,” says Edward Cowell, a director of digital agency Guava. “You only have two chances – organic and paid listings. It’s all about making content more relevant and presenting it better.”

Can’t I just pay to be listed higher up in search results?

You could pay for a sponsored link, but that would be a costly way of driving traffic, especially if you have a lot of users. SEO concentrates on influencing “organic” search listings. You can pay an SEO specialist to advise on how to improve your ranking, but you can’t directly pay Google to appear higher up the results. SEO is a thriving industry in itself, estimated at around £2.22bn last year in the UK alone.

You keep mentioning Google. Surely other search engines are available?

In the UK, Google, Yahoo and Ask are the most popular search engines. But according to Hitwise, in April an estimated 87.69% of web searches conducted in the UK were through google.com or google.co.uk – an enormous market share.

Don’t the large commercial sites have more advanced ways of improving their search rankings?

Tharien Pieterse, head of search at the Media Contacts agency, says clients have begun to seriously get to grips with SEO in the past two years: “It is the centre of all the media activity, because most channels drive people to search for those brands, catchphrases and promotions,” she says.

A major part of SEO is identifying keywords and repeating them in headlines, opening paragraphs and in web addresses. Links to new stories from the home page also help, because the home page is likely to be trawled by search engines more frequently. Photos and video need to be tagged with relevant keywords so they are also picked up. And you may also see publishers scaling the rankings by using “kickers”, prefixing a headline with an obvious keyword subject such as “Olympics 2008″, for example.

Isn’t it dangerous to become reliant on just one search engine?

The greater risk is when search engines tweak their search criteria, as GoCompare discovered earlier this year. The car insurance comparison site dropped from page one in the results for “car insurance” to page seven overnight – which had a devastating impact for its business. There was speculation that Google had penalised GoCompare for the dark art of link-buying – a practice Google disapproves of.