BlueSkyVista: All You Need To Know About SEO

I trusted you with my real name, my real home address, and my real email address. In exchange, you promised me informative and relevant topic-specific information. Unfortunately, the quality of your newsletter is just about on par with the 50 other spam messages that litter my inbox every week. As a matter of fact, your e-newsletters are WORSE than those other useless messages because I actually paid attention to them for a few minutes. But no more…you’ve stolen enough of my time. I am unsubscribing (and, BTW, I am going to talk shit about your company to anyone who asks).

Free e-Newsletter Tips: Keep them short, keep them simple, make sure that they are useful, and keep self-promoting hype to a minimum. e.g. I don’t care who got promoted to VP of Sales last month. I don’t care that you just landed another relatively insignificant account. I don’t care that you just signed up your 1000th customer (only 1000? In a marketplace of millions?). I don’t care that you’re speaking at a conference on the other side of the globe. And I don’t appreciate you “re-capping” all of the other articles I’ve already read from my more authoritative newsletters.

You promised me value. Give it to me. Or I quit.

I get ten industry-related newsletters a day. Please make yours count. I don’t even need an entire article for cryin’ out loud! (Just a little something that points me in the right direction and gets me thinking.) I’m not asking much from you…only what you promised me when I signed up in the first place.

Please don’t waste my time, please don’t bore me, and please don’t insult my intelligence. Monthly newsletters are a great way of building your business and keeping your brand top-of-mind, I get that. But if your subscribers feel that your newsletter is nothing more than opt-in spam, you are doing your company more harm than good.

Usability guru, Jacob Nielsen is currently on a world tour confirming results that were confirmed last year and the year before that: That people of left-to-right-top-to-bottom-reading cultures actually prefer to read Web content left-to-right and top-to-bottom. His groundbreaking research has also determined that most users are generally blind to old-school, graphical banner ads…they just don’t notice them anymore. They scan pages quickly, in an “F” pattern, looking for the juicy bits.

A less sarcastic report on eye tracking can be found here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2776

Many visitors gradually lose interest while reading Web pages because (a) they have short attention spans, (b) they don’t have a lot of time/have other things competing for their attention, and (c) the content they are reading just sucks in general.

Bottom line advice: Make your headline count. Make your first sentence count. Make your first paragraph count. Make your content interesting. If you are a Google adWords advertiser, make sure you are in one of the top 4 positions in your space (the first 2 spots above the organic listings, and first 2 spots on the top right column). And forget banner ads, they are invisible.

Did you know that if you have a form on your page, users will more likely take the final step and send (submit) the form data if it says something other than the word “submit”? It’s true, and there are studies that prove it. And it’s pretty obvious why if you really stop to think about it. I mean, “submit” also means:

Submit: v. tr. To yield or surrender (oneself) to the will or authority of another.

Now that’s not a very soft and fuzzy feel-good message, is it?

You will get better results if your default submit button says something like, “Yes, Send Me More Information!”. Even better, reinforce what the reader has already seen (and thus has already cognitively processed) as the headline or link text to the page. For example, if the link they clicked said, “Request more information”, use the button text above. If it said “Request a Quote”, label the button “Send Me a Quote”. You get the idea.

Web developers sometimes forget that real human beings are submitting these forms and not robots. You want something from these people, something very valuable…so you better damn well better talk to them like they are people, not robots!