You catch more flies with honey. Make sure readers stick to your web site!

When last I blogged, I talked about using your site’s information to either make the sale or to move toward the sale. Now let’s look at how you can use information to keep readers on your site longer.

Little Links That Loop

None of us lingers on a site that isn’t keeping our attention. The more interesting we find a site, the longer we stay. The longer we stay, the more we remember the site—the business, the product, and the person.

Keep readers on …

Repetition can be a very good thing for Google.  It can also be a very bad thing.  It depends on what you are repeating and where you are repeating it.

As I discussed previously, anything that is worth saying once is worth saying again.  Google looks to see which words and phrases re-appear on the same page, and uses this to determine what the page is about.

Google also looks to see which words and phrases re-appear on multiple pages.  It uses this form of repetition to identify duplicate content, which it will then omit from its indexing.

This is actually …

Your web site is a valuable tool in making the sale. Information is a valuable tool in making the sale.

Where your web site fits into your sales cycle determines how to present information.

Information makes the sale

Let’s say you own a restaurant. People visit your web site to see what’s on the menu and what it costs. They also want to get a look at the photos, to see if your place suits their plans—be it for a business lunch, a family after-church-brunch, or a romantic dinner. Your web site falls at the …

Search engines like honesty.

If only one out of every three sites that Google returns on a search for Free Internet Consultation actually offers free internet consultations, it reflects poorly on Google, especially if another search engine can do better.

While it is certainly possible to stump the public with the truth (and the TV Show To Tell The Truth gives us plenty of examples), do you really want to convince your target audience that you’re exactly like the people who are pretending to do what you do?

Something Only an Expert Would Know

One of the things that the judges in To Tell …

Two weeks ago Google announced “Rich Snippets,” a new campaign on their part to categorize frequently sought items. The four main categories they are focusing on at this time are people, businesses, products, and reviews.

What Google recognizes right now is patterns of letters. It cannot be said to truly understand them as words, let alone understand how they interact relative to each other. Perform a search for “Marissa Berger” and you will get a mix of company websites and individual social media profiles from different Marissa Bergers all across the country.

Rich Snippets will eventually give Google the …

Rich media is the result of combining text, still graphics, voiceover audio, background music, and video. These elements are combined to create dynamic motion that occurs over time or in direct response to user interaction.

Rich media is powerful because it engages the user and keeps him captivated more so than any other media. It draws users in and makes them part of the experience.

At MB/I, we use Flash—the industry-leading software for creating interactive experiences. We deliver presentations to audiences across platforms and devices. With Flash, we can add interactivity by customizing what each user sees and these same …

How to get them, how to use them
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How to get them

Ask. It can be that simple.

• Ask when you complete a project for a customer. When they say how pleased they are, ask if you can use their name on your web site. If they email you a compliment, ask if you can quote them.
• Ask long-time customers. Call each up and ask if they would provide a testimonial for your web site.

Determine the text. You’re asking them to do you a favor—help them out!  Draft the text yourself, based on remarks they’ve made to you,  …

At MB/I, we have partnered with Scott Stiefvater of Blue Sky Video Production to offer e-learning programs. Our approach involves three key areas: instructional design, user experience, and technology.

Instructional Design
We see learning for what it is – a complex process. Our e-learning programs are developed with the understanding that they are just one part of that process. Yet, we are intentional about every element of the learning programs we develop so that the learner is motivated to apply the information, concepts, skills and attitudes they learn. To this end, instructional design calls for a vast amount of creativity, but creativity …

Depending on who you ask, some people will tell you that metadata keywords are essential to a website, and no design is complete without proper use.  Other web developers make it sound like metadata is an outdated concept, and that using metadata is a waste of time.

But what is metadata, and why is the debate over its use so contentious?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, metadata is a set of data that describes and gives information about other data.

That’s a very powerful and broad definition, but because it’s so encompassing, it’s not very helpful when trying to wrap …

Let’s get physical with web content.

Whatever you post on your site, the reader sees. Sure, we all know that. But consider—your reader’s eyes do the work: Find the data, register the data, shoot the data to the brain.

What if the eyes can’t find the message? What if tracking that elusive message fatigues the reader? They’ll click and they’ll be gone.

Make your web content literally easy for your readers’ eyes!

• Line length matters. On a long line, it’s difficult for our eyes to swing back and find the beginning of the next line. On a short line, when the end arrives …
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