Interacting with your Visitors

Helping the User find what they want

The first thing to recognize is the nature of the web itself. It is generally information rich but content poor. Most web surfers are internet savvy. They know that they may well have to visit several websites to glean the information they're looking for. As a result they tend not to examine a particular website in detail. Rather they 'graze' a particular site looking for specific keywords so that the particular information they're looking for can be sought-out.

There's a tug-of-war happening at the moment between the needs and desires of webmasters and website owners who want surfers to stay on their website as long as possible and the needs of the surfers themselves who want quick access to a piece of information or a service so that they can move on somewhere else. If these opposing needs are skewed too far in favour of the web designer your user may become so fed-up with your site that they never visit it again. From the viewpoint of the web-designer, it may sound counter intuitive: however, actually helping the user find what they want so that they can leave quickly may actually significantly improve return traffic to your site. If you arrange each web page with easy sub-titles and an obvious key to the main sections whilst providing easily navigable sitemaps and site search systems will make them feel comfortable on your site.

The truth is that even though our societies have changed significantly we humans are basically the same as we were a thousand, two thousand, five thousand years ago. We still live in tribes composed of our families and our nearest neighbours or friends: with a circle of close relationships that's generally little more than 150 people. We have evolved to deal with other people on a personal level. We need to know other people so that we can grow to trust them. Providing easy and consistent navigation on your site helps this aspect of 'trust'. So that people believe you are trying to help them rather than trying to help yourself. Your site will, as a result, become an information resource that they will come back to again and again. This interaction with your visitor, gaining their trust and giving them reasons to come back to your site, is far more important than trying to trap them into your site on a single visit. This is why you should develop your own 'voice' on your site. Make it individual, use your own writing style so that your visitors know you and know you can be trusted. This way they will come to trust other aspects of your site, such as the advertising you're providing.

How we look at Websites and Why

By far the commonest form of advertising on the web today is the banner advert. This form of advertisement often combines animation, sophisticated graphics, and even audio to endorse product information. The effectiveness of such advertising being generally measured in terms of the 'click through rate' which is the ratio of the number of times an ad appears on a page compared to the number of times an individual clicks on the banner. The problem is that banner ads are great for the retailer but poor for the website owner. Analyses by Ipsos-ASI research shows that an internet banner is effectively equivalent to a 30-second TV advertisement in increasing overall user awareness of a brand by as much as 40%. So, 2/5 of your visitors will remember a brand from a banner advertisement after they leave your site but only 1 in every 100 will actually click on the banner. What you're really doing with banner advertising is providing the companies who display banners on your site with a lot of free advertising for very little personal gain.

Indeed, a study by Benway (Benway, J.P. (1998). Banner blindness: the irony of attention grabbing on the world wide web Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 42nd Annual Meeting, USA, 1, 463–467) demonstrated that extremely colorful and obvious banners tend to be ignored by users. If is from this study that the term Banner Blindness derives. Benway also found that banners located at the top of the page (away from other links), tended to be ignored more often than banners located lower down the page (closer to other important links). This finding is supported by another study by Athenia Associates which showed a 77% increased click-through rate for advertisements placed 1/3 of the way down the page.

How humans actually Look at Web Pages

Human beings are great apes. We share a close genetic relationship with chimpanzees and gorillas and we are slightly more distant relatives of the Orang utan. Our colour perception and our front-facing eyes giving us binocular vision are all part of our primate heritage. We evolved in colourful rainforests and colour vision is part of the background to our lives. The problem is that our vision is keyed to movement. This is why static colourful banners can be ignored easily, as they fade into the background of our visual surfing experience. This may explain why animated ads generally have a 15% higher click-through rate than static ads (as examined by ZDNet, 1996) and in some cases may have as much as a 40% higher rate. This is because motion against a colourful background speaks to the primate brain of danger; something we have to investigate to make sure it's not a threat.

If the investigation of movement is something that's hard-wired into our primate ancestry then writing, by comparison, appeared very late in human history Reading and writing doesn't come naturally to us, it's a learnt skill that's an effort to maintain (compare your attitude to spelling mistakes compared with mispronunciations if you don't believe me). Reading requires a conscious effort which is why recent investigations examining where an user's eyes track on a web page show that about 92% of the time is used-up in examining textual data as show in a Poynter Institute study of 2000.

This has led to the trend for using text-based advertisements with the same colour scheme and fonts as used in the main body of the text. This way the reader of the web page actually reads the text of the advertisement (or at least scans it) in the same way that they scan the remainder of the text. This has proved very effective, and in using it on my own site I have seen an almost 8-fold increase in click-through revenue (yes, that's right 800%) since movingtot text-based ads embedded within the text of the web page itself.

Knowledge is power, and once you know how people actually view your web pages and what works/doesn't work you can begin to alter your marketing strategies to make the most of your content. If you want to know more about this subject, then read my page on Internet Advertisig Effectiveness.

The Importance of Links

If you're serious about promoting your website then you will have realized by now that after creating your website and optimizing it for your chosen keywords or phrased the MOST important thing you can do is to improve the number of incoming links to your website. After all the internet is supposed to be a web of interconnected sites.

Indexing systems such as Google also need some way of measuring the importance of your site on the internet and one of the ways to do this is to measure the number of incoming links to your site. Of course, what your really want are a large number of high-ranking sites (with PR [page rank] of 5 or better) with incoming links only to your site, but that's not really realistic.

Your incoming links, however are important. What you want are good incoming links as these (at least in terms of Google's latest algorithms) count the most count the most both in terms of giving your site good page ranking (PR) and in terms of getting your site deeply indexed. Reports coming from Google even indicate that if you don't have sufficient incoming links then though your site may be actively spidered it will not be thoroughly indexed. Indeed, I have fallen foul of this myself and have some anecdotal evidence to support this as a reality.

In putting up my main Nemeton: Home of the Celtic Gods site (along with its sub-sites of Nemeton: Home of Ancient Recipes and Celtnet Information web information site) I concentrated on putting-up good content and where possible writing tight code that would verify well. I did join a few web-rings to get initial traffic and after a few moths, as I wrote new content Google was finding and indexing the pages with the spiders coming about once a week. By March I had an adsense income of about $80 a month (not great, but pretty good after only three months in the program). Then in April the adsense money dried up...

I was desperate to find out what had happened and eventually when I went to the Google sitemaps page I found that my indexed pages had dropped by 90% and almost 75% of these were marked as 'supplemental' from August 2005 and would realistically never be found in any normal web search. It was horrible. Initially I thought this might be a 'blip' and I waited for a month but the situation did not improve. Desperately searching for whatever might be wrong I cleaned-up the sites, thinking that they might have been penalized by Google for whatever reason.

Then, finally I came across this posting on Matt Cutts' BLOG. It looks like my problems were all down to my inbound links (basically I had none). I'd taken a very 'white hat' approach to the whole web thing and having a good website I wanted my links to grow naturally. My desire was basically to have the site pay for all my internet and web hosting costs, which basically meant getting $70 a month, which I'd achieved. But the new Google indexing rules meant that I was in a bizarre catch-22 situation. Google wouldn't index my site unless I had enough inbound links and there was no way to naturally grow in-bound links unless my site was indexed — which is complete madness!

This was pretty much when I decided to join the remainder of the web world both in attempting to make as much money as I could from the website and in using any and all means possible to get good in-bound-links [IBLs]. Partly this started as an experiment to see whether it would work or not. First I started with web directories that offered free in-bound only links. But finding these sites and signing-up to them was proving to take an enormous amount of time. As I result I signed-up to the service offered by Seoster who submit a website to multiples of 100 directories for $10 per set. I opted for 200 submissions to see what would happen. Their service was quite fast and in just over a week I had my first confirmations of inclusions. A few days after that and the number of pages indexed in Google began to climb at a rate of about 5 pages every other day. A breakthrough!

Of course, these were all decent inbound-only links. Which fits with the proposition that in-bound links score better in Google's algorithms that reciprocal links. Though reciprocal links also count in terms of Google's indexing algorithm. As a direct result I decided to update the whole linking process at my site, designing a new PHP front-end and using a MySQL back-end which would allow users to automatically submit their sites to the index for either reciprocal links or paid uni-directional links. This led to the development of the CeltNet Links System.

Of course, I can't ever let a good thing go so I also extended this page to link through to a classifieds advertising page which offers both free and paid-for classified ads. I'm now in the process of adding as many links as possible (though, as recommended by Google I'm only allowing links that fit-in with the three themes of the website: Celtic, Web Information and Recipes. In a month I'll post again to let you know how this new approach is working for me.

improving your Website rankings and Website Income

The advent of Google's new Bigdaddy datacentres and their latest indexing software has significantly raised the bar in terms of getting new (and even some established) websites indexed. In terms of how your website is likely to be indexed what seem to count now are unique inbound links (especially inbound links from sites with good page rank). If you want full indexing of your site and want to improve your page rankings you will have to increase the number of inbound links you have (and joining link farms won't help you).

One of the ways to do this is to join on-line web directories such as such as The Open Directory Project (DMOZ). There are literally thousands of these available and many will cost you nothing to be listed and won't even expect a reciprocal link from you. These will get you the needed links and as many have good page rank they will also improve your page rankings. If you don't want to hunt-out these directories yourself then you can use a service such as: Seoster who will submit your site to a large number of directories at a cost of $10 per 100 submissions.

Another way of increasing your visibility and your indexing is to use and write for article sites such as eZines.com which allow you to submit articles where you can use deep links into your site as part of your signature at the end of the article. This not only provides you with additional links to your site but also gives you deep links, improving your overall indexing.

However, perhaps one of the most best-kept secrets of successful webmasters is the program run by morethantraffic.com. This is a truly innovative program that aims to make you $100,000 US Dollars in 4 months from your web site!; simply by driving an increased stream of traffic to your site — which is what we all want!

What makes this program stand out, however, are its terms. The company aims to make you $100 000 in just four months. So confident are they that you can make this target that they are not going to charge you their fee unless you reach this $100 000 mark. Indeed, if you don't reach the target of $100 000 in four months they will give you the remaining eight months of your one year absolutely free! Now, you can't say much fairer than that (especially for a program that actually works).

Moreover, as well as allowing you to dramatically increase the income generated from your own website they are also making a a very lucrative affiliate program available so that you can also make additional income by driving new sales to their website. Yes, that's right, they give you two streams of income instead of one...

I've joined this program with my Celtnet website and I have to admit that currently I'm well on target to earning my first $100 000. Try it out for yourself, you have literally nothing to lose.

If you want to learn more about some simple search engine optimization tricks for your website, then see the full story on my webmaster resources page.

CSS Cascading Menus

If you're even partway interested in the web and the position of your web pages in the major search engines you will undoubtedly have noticed that big things have been happening to how and when Google indexes web pages. This is mainly as a result of their Bigdaddy datacentres and the changes to indexing software. This means that incoming links from good sites (without reciprocal outbound links) are becoming more and more important in terms of which sites Google index and how deeply they index sites. As a result, the more help you give the indexing bots the more likely they are to find the internal links on your site and to actually crawl those links.

Expanding dropdown menus are an useful way of providing navigation to your users in a pretty, intuitive and space-efficient manner. However, the standard ways of implementing these types of menus (in frames, using JavaScript) means that they will probably never be indexed by the search bots. How, then, can you provide the same functionality to your users, whilst also allowing the bots to find and cache your valuable links.

The answer is to use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) which is a way of defining styles used to mark-up standard HTML tags and elements in what can be very beautiful ways. In fact, you can encode your menu as a standard unordered list cascade and then use CSS markup to turn this into a cascading menu.

In essence this is done by hiding the leaf nodes of the menu and only revealing them when a mouseover event occurs. If you use the following CSS code:

div#menu ul ul ul,
div#menu ul ul li:hover ul ul
{display: none;}

div#menu ul ul li:hover ul,
div#menu ul ul ul li:hover ul
{display: block;}

it achieves precisely this for you. You can now achieve the hid-and-reveal functionality of a menu, but what you have is still only a list (albeit with some cool functionality). It will take quite a bit more CSS style to convert this into a proper cascading menu. To achieve this you will need to add the following CSS code:

#menu {
width: 105px;
background: #0000FF;
margin-left: 5px; 
position: absolute; 
top: 180px; 
left: 0px;
}


#menu ul {
list-style: none;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}

#menu a, #menu h2 {
font: bold 9px/16px arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
display: block;
border-width: 1px;
border-style: solid;
border-color: #ccc #888 #555 #bbb;
margin: 0;
padding: 2px 3px;
}

#menu h2 {
color: #000;
background: #FFFFCC;
text-transform: uppercase;
}

#menu a {
color: #666666;
background: #efefef;
text-decoration: none;
}

#menu a:hover {
color: #a00;
background: #fff;
}

#menu li {position: relative;}

#menu ul ul ul {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 100%;
width: 100%;
}

Note that the first #menu item in the CSS code above defines where the menu box should be located on the page (in my case it's on the left-hand side of the page just below my standard page header. After this come the functions that take care of how each element in a menu apears and how they are positioned relative to one another. Apply all the code above to an unordered list within a <div id="menu"> block and you will get your cascading menu.

To see such a menu in action have a look at this recipe page. If you want step-by-step instructions (with examples and complete code) for how to implement these CSS menus have a look at this CSS menu guide page.

Because the indexing bots view web pages as if they were pure text (they do not apply style sheets and do not look at JavaScript) when they encounter a CSS menu it simply looks to them like an unordered list of URLs and each and every link is cached and navigated. Which is precisely the kind of behaviour that we want the bots to perform.