Persuasion 101: Ask Yes/Yes Questions
One thing I like to think I've learned over the years is the subtle art of persuasion. Here are some tips on how to ask Yes/Yes questions (and almost always get a "Yes").
Marketing Psychology
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SEO - Only Half the Battle
Over the past years I’ve come to love SEO and all that encompasses the skill set needed to be a knowledgeable and productive internet marketer. I’ve read the books, scrolled through the blogs, created test sites, monkey’d around on many different tools and created my own Excel Super Spreadsheet for analytics and data analysis. My desktop has learned to hate my fix...
CAPTCHAs' Effect on Conversion Rates
Personally I hate SPAM with a passion and I’m sure many of you will agree that you hate it also. Some time ago, I had a client ask me if there was a way for us to eliminate the SPAM that was generated from his web form. I went to the usual places to see if I could find the answer and was a little let down with the solution, that was presented, CAPTCHA. I’m ...
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Why Newspapers Should Stop Using TinyURL
The inspiration for this blog post came to me when I was lying on my sofa reading the Guardian newspaper over the weekend. I was at home and so didn't have any of the following to hand: * iphone * pen * regular phone * internet
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Are You Forcing Your Users to Superfluously Click?
Unnecessary clicks really put the "super" in "superfluous," yet we run into them all the time. Whether they're the fancy yet impractical creation by a site designer, a lazy workaround courtesy of an apathetic developer, or a misguided "I've been trying to architect this site for two months now and I can no longer see straight" decision by an SEO, these seemingly innocent clicks can have a negative impact on conversion rates or, simply put, they can irritate users. Below are a few examples of some clicks that cause me to grit my teeth and shake my fist.
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Links Should Really Look Like Links
As there haven't been any posts in the usability category of youmoz since March, I thought I write a short usability entry. You SEOs out there certainly know how a link should look like for search engines. But do you also know how they should look like for real people, I mean the ones visiting your page and spending money on your products?1. Links onlineLinks ...
The Benefits And Pitfalls of URL Shorteners
TinyURL QurlyQ MemURL dwarfURL doiop Kurl.us dn.vc SnipURL ix.lt metamark.net TinyURL shorl.com w3t.org xaddr.com si9.org urlTea.com icanhaz.com turo.us rubyurl.com rurl.us RlinkR.com urlx.org is.gd tnij.org abbrr.com...
Why Don't We Read (and How Much Do We Read) on the Web?
This short post looks at a Jakob Nielsen alertbox column entitled, How Little Do Users Read? Why a short post? Well, it would appear that we don't read long posts, so why bother? Nielsen examines a study from the ...
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RSS Feeds - Right and Wrong
Who Makes an Effort? Well, it turns out that it depends on what make means:42 SEO Feeds, 126 posts reviewed: 0% mangled text, 65% of posts had a graphic or something visual55 News Feeds, 165 posts reviewed: 10% mangled text, 0% grapics (excepting posted videos)25 Political News Feeds, 75 posts reviewed: 25% mangled text, 0% graphics (excepting...
Your Users Aren't Intuitive, Which is Why Your Forms Need to Be
For SEM Tuesday I'm cheating a little and talking about forms and usability; however, if you have a sign up form or some sort of registration on your landing pages, this is sound advice that ties in well. In an attempt to be hardcore in 2008, I decided, at Christine's insistence, to sign up for the New Balance Half I...
Soft Cloaking: META Tags, Robots.txt & Sitemaps
It's no mystery that people in the SEO world have strong feelings about cloaking. The very mention of an off-white hat tactic in one of my YouMOZ posts earned me multiple thumbs down and accusations of cloaking. One comment in particular interested me, though: someone suggested that they consider cloaking to be virtually any tactic that treats search engines differently from end-users. As...
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How to put Google custom site search into your current website design
A few years ago a webmaster did not have many choices available to have a search solution for their websites. That has changed dramatically, but up to last year or so ago the free site searches provided by Yahoo and Google were less than ideal. They interrupted your visitors experience by taking them to a search results page that looked entirely different than the page they were on. ...
Web Users Don't Read Online
Last Thursday, Bryan Eisenberg, one of the smartest people in the world of conversions & analytics, wrote a post called - The Web's Old Wives Tale: People Don't Read Online. An excerpt: Web developers like to say it. Designers love to...
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A Trip Down Memory Lane
A couple weeks ago, I was watching an episode of Monk where the obsessive-compulsive detective was introduced to the wonderful world of computers and the internet. I LOL-ed as he won a Solitaire game for the first time and watched the cards go dancing across the screen. For many of us, that's terribly old school. But it was endearing because it brings back good memories. I was lucky ...