Quick blog tip

Unless the visitors to your blog are very loyal, you may want to consider summarizing your blog posts on your blog homepage if you aren’t already doing so. Jakob Nielsen conducted a blog engagement/eye-tracking study on a variety of corporate blogs. The basic finding was that summarizing your blog posts gives the website visitor a better chance of finding something they’re going to spend time reading. On blogs that include the full posts on the blog homepage, readers tend to abandon the blog after viewing the first post.

Am I going to change the way bradparsons.com operates? Probably not, at least not in the near future. I have decent visitor loyalty so why jeopardize readership? If you’re unsure of what’s best for your blog, you could test two versions and see what version keeps visitors on the site longer. Longer stays + more pages viewed is probably the version you want to run with.

From 79th to 1st

Search engine optimization is often overlooked by marketers simply because it is unfamiliar. You can’t buy search engine results, there’s no guaranteed results for your investment and seeing results isn’t immediate.

I recently conducted a small SEO project for a client I work with and wanted to share the process on my blog – the client has been gracious enough to allow me to share the results. If you’re not already, it’s time to start working SEO into your online plan, and I hope this post demonstrates why.

Big White Ski Resort is a popular family ski destination and if you want to take your family skiing over the Christmas holidays, now is the time to consider booking. With Christmas bookings as the goal, I began researching Christmas related terms and search trends. “Christmas Ski Holidays” is a popular search phrase in Google and Big White had already designed a great Christmas holidays landing page. I won’t get into the finer details of the optimization process, but I can say at the beginning of the process bigwhite.com ranked 79th in Google.ca for “Christmas ski holidays”. One month later after fairly minimal optimization efforts, bigwhite.com ranked #1 for that phrase in Google.ca and now has a great chance to receive thousands of qualified leads per year to their website.

The issue organizations have to be ready to face is that#1 search results are up for grabs. You may reach #1 for a desired phrase only to be bumped off that top spot a month later by a competitor. However, an SEO consultant can assess the competition and identify niches that have relatively little competition. The best approach is to come up with a budget and educate an SEO consultant about your business. From there proper tactics can be planned out.

You can take the easy route and buy Google Adwords beside the phrases you’re after, but it’s fairly common for those ads to receive less than 5% of the traffic that is searching for the particular phrase. Granted it’s a “safer” and you can guarantee your results to an extent – it’s a great place to start your online advertising and makes sense for many organizations – but the real success will always be found in strong, organic search results.

Writers Wanted

In January of 2010 I launched HST in Canada (www.hstincanada.com) with the help of a friend and colleague Isaac Oslund. There are 2 main reasons why this website was launched. Firstly, unlike client projects, I can discuss the results of this project freely here on my blog – you could call it a “proving ground” project. It’s a tool I can use to demonstrate the opportunity that exists through writing online. Secondly, the discussion around harmonized sales tax was growing and the web was under-served on the topic; someone had to step up and fill the niche.

Identifying the niche was the first order of business. Before HSTinCanada.com there were three types of websites that were posting information about HST. Government party websites, news outlets and anti-HST websites. There didn’t seem to be a single website that talked about both Ontario and BC, nor was there a website that didn’t have an agenda. There were HST supporting websites and HST opposing websites – there was no neutral source of information where a worth while discussion could take place.

Thus, HSTinCanada.com was born and 6 months later the website is closing in on 100,000 page views per month. In those 6 months over 70 strategic articles have been written and hundreds of comments have been posted. With advertising revenue the website is generating some welcomed extra income and it will be a valuable web entity for quite some time to come.

You may be asking why I’m posting this here – the reason is simple. Blogging exploded onto the scene – anyone and everyone setup a website about their lives, their hobbies, etc. The problem with this approach was the content wasn’t usually written strategically, or the blog structure itself didn’t help the website rank in search engines. This doesn’t mean the writer wasn’t talented, it simply means the writer wasn’t focused on optimizing the website for search engines. Furthermore, we’ve seen local newspapers, magazines and other printed periodicals closing their doors or struggling to remain in business. Now we see select blogs maintained by one individual raking in 6 figures per year, sometimes 7 figures. The landscape has changed for written content, and now is the time to take advantage of the situation.

I’m dedicating some time to replicating the HSTinCanada.com process with a variety of topics by working with passionate, skilled writers. Instead of writing the content, I will simply be working with writers to guide the content and start the website on the right foot. I will create and host the website and show the writer how to post articles to the site – all the technical stuff will be taken care of. As these projects launch I will be writing about them here – I already have a couple lined up and am excited to get underway. If you or someone you know has always had a knack for writing or is overly knowledgeable about a particular topic, I’m open to discussing a partnership with the writer – just contact me!

Website Response Times

The response time of a website (that is, the time it takes for a page to load for a visitor) corresponds directly to the success of your website. Choosing a quality web hosting company to deliver your content is important, and as your website grows it’s important to pay attention to if and how the load time changes based on higher traffic levels.

Jakob Nielson conducted a great eye-tracking study using Norton’s website – the blue circles on the image below represent eye fixations.

Jakob Nielson

The image near the top of the page took an average of 8 seconds to load for visitors to the website – and you can see how the delay affects how the page is viewed. A quote pulled straight from Jakob Nielson’s article states:

A snappy user experience beats a glamorous one, for the simple reason that people engage more with a site when they can move freely and focus on the content instead of on their endless wait.

Keep in mind there are a variety different connections speeds and those speeds can vary from region to region if you have a national/international audience. Nielson reports websites that improve website response time as little as 1/10th of a second often see “juicy lifts in conversion rates”. Nielson recommends keeping your website response time within 3 seconds, and I completely agree. If your website currently takes longer than that there are a a variety of things a web development firm can do to speed up the site. From script optimization to lowering the quality/number of photos – it all helps. If the web development company runs out of ideas to optimize for speed, it may be time to look at upgrading your server or switching to a new web host. It’s also worth noting that different web firms will have different ability levels when it comes to this type of work.

The cost of bandwidth and hardware has fallen substantially over the past few years and many web hosts are charging older clients outdated rates. Take a look at competing web hosting companies to see what they’re offering for the price you’re currently paying. In fact the server this website is hosted on was recently switched for that exact reason – 1/3rd the price for an improved hosting experience was a nice upgrade.

The Changing Value of Ad Impressions

The web is being consumed in an ever increasing variety of ways. Mobile phones, wifi-connected televisions and Internet connected gaming consoles like the Sony PS3 are all changing the landscape in subtle ways. Aside from the iPhone/iPad not supporting Flash animated ads, the way these devices are used is distinctly different from the way we use our desktop PCs.

For example, you have an iPad in your hands and you’re reading a Castanet article. The text is slightly too small to read by default, so you’ve zoomed in, which coincidentally moves the advertising off screen. Is an iPad ad impression worth the same as a regular desktop ad impression? Or maybe you’re sitting with a half-dozen friends in your living room watching YouTube videos through your Playstation 3 web browser. Any ads displayed have technically received 6 ad impressions, so is an ad impression delivered to a Playstation 3 or wifi-connected television worth more than the typical desktop ad impression? Newspapers and magazines often presume the average issue is read by multiple people – it’s probably time for online advertising to start considering the same approach.

Publishing companies will need to consider this when attaching values to their display advertising options. Ad networks have already started allowing advertisers to target specific types of devices – Google Adsense allows it’s users to enable or disable delivering ads to mobile devices. Advertising firms will also have to consider the format they are building ads in – Flash is the most popular format to use, but iPhones and iPads won’t display Flash ads, so it’s becoming more important with every passing day to supply both Flash and static creatives. For publishing companies selling online ads, they will need to detect what type of device the visitor is using and swap Flash ads out with static ads if the device doesn’t support Flash. That’s where the opportunity lies, at least temporarily.

When publishing companies first start delivering ads specifically to mobile devices like the iPhone, that creates the perfect opportunity for the appropriate advertiser to swoop in and buy some exposure at an introductory price. If you have an iPhone app to promote or an iPhone friendly website, you might be surprised at how well these ads can perform for the price. iPhone/iPad targeted advertising won’t be the bread and butter of most online publishers, so the fact that it’s an afterthought should keep prices low. This same concept applies to game console targeted advertising if that type of audience/platform suits your brand.