Posts

Showing posts with the label seo

Your site search isn't as important as you think

Image
Many times I've heard from colleagues who want to make our help website search the top priority and  I think they’re really missing more important priorities that are much more effective in assisting customers in finding relevant content (and site features/functions). Step back for a moment and consider your site search compared to a Google search. (For that matter even compare to Bing and Yahoo search.) The technology is fundamentally different. Google indexes every page its crawler can access. Your site search has a finite amount of content to index. Google looks at what pages are the most popular both from links to (the pages) and click-throughs (and so much more). At best your search engine knows page popularity, which will become a problem for new content and may likely become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most people will search with 1 to 3 keywords -- only sometimes using a phrase. Google has a rich history of search results related to those words and what’s

Front-loaded text and scanning the page

Image
We push our writers to always front-load their titles and paragraphs not just because we think it's a good idea, but because studies back up the technique. Jakob Nielsen posted a great article, " First 2 Words: A Signal for the Scanning Eye ," where he goes into the details of his research in this area. Jakob starts with reminding us how our customers have many lists to read, err scan -- it's not just search results. Search result pages List of current and/or archived articles and press releases Product listing Table of contents Question lists on an FAQ page Bulleted and numbered lists, checklists, etc 11 characters is used as the baseline measure the number of characters a user actually reads when looking through a list (link text). The test is to see just the first 11 characters and see if you can predict what's behind the link -- what will you get when you click. The best link text has these characteristics. Plain language Specific te