I don’t want to sound like an old-crotchety-cynical-email-will-never-overtake-fax-machine dinosaur but I don’t think podcasts or video blogs are all they’re cracked up to be. I’m the first to admit that I may be way off the mark here, because this is a somewhat counter-intuitive argument. The newer media of internet videos and podcasts seem like the next logical evolution of the written word, but think again. For the near future at least text-based information still has distinct advantages over video and voice.
The main advantages text has are: usability and searchability.

Usability

• Text is much more scanable. Most people on the internet still don’t read entire articles. They like to scan through and pick out certain parts. This is much more difficult with long videos and podcasts. Its just not worth listening to an hour and a half podcast for 5 minutes of useful information.
• Text is quicker and can be more to the point. I think this is the reason people still text-message or instant message rather than just picking up the phone and calling someone. It’s a more convenient way of communication.

Searchability

• Search engines can’t search video or voice. If you ever want to rank for anything you’re better off being text based.

So that’s the problem. Now, what’s the solution? - All podcasts or longer length videos should highlight the important parts with text. If this post were in vlog format:

(5:37) - Interview with Brian Thibault begins.
(9:29) - Brian talks about the significance of podcast usability, and states that podcasts are not usable nor searchable.
(12:14) - Brian says the way to fix podcasts is to highlight important events.

Documenting the events of the vlog or podcast solves the problems to a certain extent by:

1. Making the podcast much more scannable. The listener can cut straight to the point by fast-forwarding to the time intervals of her choosing.
2. Offering an alternative to actually listening to your podcast altogether. Someone can get the information they require either way.
3. Adding text you make the podcast search engine friendly. You increase your chances of picking up many more long-tail searches like “+podcast +usability + searchable”.

I know this just throws a lot more work on your plate, but without it, don’t be surprised if your new vlog takes a nosedive quick.

Apparently Google thinks I’ve been clicking my own ads. They not only banned the account in question but also banned a second one in my name that actually belongs to a company I work for.

I checked my account last week an noticed I was earning way more than usual. Upon cross-referencing my analytics I saw that I was getting 4 day spikes of 800 visitors a day directly navigating to my site for the last couple weeks. On a crummy domain and a site that doesn’t rank, something was up. Clearly this was some kind of click attack. I have no idea why anyone would want to click attack one of my crappy MFA (made-for-adsense) sites though - thats the baffling part of the whole equation.

I used my appeal and declared that I can’t know someone’s motives for a click attack, I have no idea why this happened to me, and that Google should know better than I would because they are the “CLICK FRAUD DETECTIVES”. That appeal was summarily denied.

Anyway, what a joke! I guess I can never have another Adsense account in my name. So I’d like to say, “Thanks for the screw job, Google!”

Andy Hagans, of Andy Hagans Link Building fame and his relatively new SEO blog, Tropical SEO sat down with me to talk accessibility. Unbeknownst to most, accessibility is actually Andy’s third love (first is his mother, second is SEO). Andy is somewhat of a perfectionist which lends well to his accessibility skills because it can be a very time consuming task that requires a lot of little fixes. Accessibility is often overlooked when planning or improving website usability, but it in fact is the basic building block of usability. Andy provides his thoughts below:

ConvertUp: What is accessibility and how does it relate to usability?

Andy: Accessibility is giving people the ability to access your content, regardless of their limitations, device, or platform; that encompasses all types of situations—for instance, can someone on a mobile phone use your site? How about someone using the Netscape 3 browser? How does your design degrade? What if a visually-impaired person bumps the text size up by 3 points, will this “break” your design?

Accessibility and usability are joined at the hip. If someone can’t access your website, they can’t even begin to use it successfully.

ConvertUp: Does making your site accessible make it more SEO friendly?

Andy: Ha, funny you should ask. I contributed an article to A List Apart on the very subject.

ConvertUp: Do you see web-site accessibility heating up as a cultural or political issue in the near future?

Andy: Well it’s political in the sense that it’s legislated; governmental sites, for instance, have certain accessibility standards they are required to meet. Otherwise they would be discriminating against certain groups (for instance, the visually impaired). If a major company’s website isn’t very accessible, that also has the potential to turn into a public relations or legal problem.

Above all, I see usability and accessibility as a business case. When you make a site usable and accessible, you usually increase profits. More customers can access your site; more customers can successfully use it to achieve a goal. Who doesn’t want increased sales?

ConvertUp: What is a reasonable accessibility standard someone’s site should pass?

Andy: There is no short answer to this question. Sites of different reach, scope and audience should be held to different accessibility standards.

There’s also quite a spectrum, and accessibility standards change over time (and, in fact, many smart people disagree on what should be the standard in the first place). If you’re even thinking about accessibility, and integrating it into your design process, you’re well ahead of most people. If you absolutely need a “rulebook”, check out the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (and note that achieving even Level 1 compliance puts a web page above 99% of what’s out there).

ConvertUp.com: Can you give some tips to help people get started making their site more accessible right away?

Andy: Sure. First, I always like to do two things to show people how inaccessible their current site is: number one, bump up your font size a few times in your browser. This is what some of your visually impaired users are looking at. Still proud of your design? Number two, turn off stylesheets and browse your site. Still proud of your markup and content organization?

The good news is, this stuff isn’t rocket science, and you can learn the basics in a week: start with Dive Into Accessibility.org.

I’m going to do a series of posts where I select a site from users submissions for a ‘usability makeover’. It can be an e-commerce site, a blog, or an affiliate site. My only requirement is that if you submit a site you must either own it or have permission from the site owner. I would also like to select a site that has some kind of goal tracking set up so we can see the results if you make the changes I suggest. After I select one lucky winner I’ll do write up about their site on this blog and use screen shots to highlight things that I would change to make the site more usable.

What’s in it for you if I select your site:

1. Possibly higher conversion rates - If you choose to make the changes I suggest you may see an increase in conversions, or I could totally f-up your site. Either way its a win-win.
2. Exposure for your site - By posting about it here, you’ll get a link out of it and some traffic.

If you would like to participate shoot an email to brian@convertup.com or use my contact form. Give me a few sentence description of the site, the URL and whether or not you use an analytics package or goal tracking. I’ll let you know by email if I select your site. I’ll do a few more of these as time goes on so if you don’t get selected you can just resubmit at a later date.

If you would like to submit a site please have it to me by Friday, February 23, 3:00pm EST.

In a report from November, 2006 Akamai and JupiterResearch concluded that 4 seconds is the threshold an online shopper is willing to wait for pages of the sites to load. In addition:

The report ranked poor site performance as second only to high product prices and shipping costs as leading factors for dissatisfaction among online shoppers.

Based on the feedback of 1,058 online shoppers that were surveyed during the first half of 2006, JupiterResearch offers the following analysis:

* The consequences for an online retailer whose site underperforms include diminished goodwill, negative brand perception, and, most important, significant loss in overall sales.
* Online shopper loyalty is contingent upon quick page loading, especially for high-spending shoppers and those with greater tenure.

Fast load speed is essential to usability and accessibility. If you can’t get your pages to load in 4 or less seconds, this study indicates you are losing a serious amount of visitors. Aside from optimizing code and image sizes there is a nifty little tool out there called MOD_DEFLATE. Mod_deflate is a module you can plugin to your apache webserver to compress the data it sends out. Most of today’s browsers uncompress the data as they receive it. If you’re using a browser that doesn’t support compressed data, then apache will send the normal, uncompressed data stream. Using this does increase the load on the CPU load on the webserver, but sacrificing CPU for faster page loads and saved bandwidth is entirely worth it.

I’m pretty sure most shared hosting accounts use mod_gzip (the older version) or mod_deflate these days, but check with your hosting provider just to make sure. If you’re running your own webserver at home, at work, or at a colocation make sure mod_deflate is installed and operational.

It’s been along time since I’ve had to install or upgrade an Apache webserver, so I’m not sure the exact procedure, but there are some good resources out there already. If you’re a web admin you probably are already familiar with installing modules for Apache, if you’re not a web admin person then you’ll probably have somebody else do it anyway. Regardless, this should help you get started optimizing your page load times with mod_deflate: Howto Forge - Howto mod_deflate.

Something that has really been “eating my head” lately, as my Indian friends say, is the fact that comments haven’t been working on several of my blogs. Of course I didn’t know it until I got an email about it, because I really don’t comment on my own blogs that much.

After you would enter a comment it would just route you to wp-comments-post.php, and the screen was blank, and no comments were coming through in the moderation queue on the backend. After some investigation I figured out what the problem is. I have my .htaccess file set up to redirect http://example.com to http://www.example.com to solve any Google url canonicalization issues, but in my Wordpress options I had the URL of the blog set as http://example.com. When someone would submit a comment, Wordpress would send the comment to http://example.com/wp-comment-post.php but my .htaccess would redirect that to http://www.example.com/wp-comment-post.php. During that redirect the comment was “lost” or the system got confused or whatever and I saw a blank page.

I was also having a problem when logging in at /wp-admin.php. After I logged in successfully I was getting routed to /%2Fwp-login%2F. I would suspect that it was the same .htaccess problem, although I don’t for sure because when I upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 it fixed this problem.

If you’re having the same problem make sure your blog URL and .htaccess match up and it should fix the issue.

This is purely subjective, but I think the hardest part of making a site more usable is resources or peoplepower. Usability takes tweaking, measuring, studying, and more tweaking. There is a limit to how much tweaking to one website you can do, but then by the time you reach that limit you’ve probably already done a redesign or added new features. Usability optimizing could literally be a full time job. How many companies can afford to have a full-time usability person? Probably not many.

A bigger problem is when a small-company has a website contracted out for some exorbitant sum. Then they get their site usability tested, and almost immediately the next question they ask is “Ok, what do we do now?”. They find out there is about 100 small changes they can implement to make their site more usable and convert more. Now who is going to make these changes? Bill the shipping manager? I don’t think so. They have to go back to the same company that developed their site and ask them to make some changes, add this, do that, and move this over here. Good luck with that, especially if you’ve already paid them. IF they do want to help, you’ll probably rack up another huge bill.

Most brick-and-mortar stores that are trying to establish a web presence have no in-house web development staff and have are on a tight budget for contracted out web work. So what is a small company to do to make their site more usable? Quite honestly I don’t have a good solution. This is something I’ve always struggled with in my in-house SEO job. I’m busy planning the next step for web sites, thinking about the next great feature that will get people talking. I don’t have anybody I can hand a list of minor changes to and say, “lets try it like this”. At this time the only thing that has worked for me, is hiring a part-time employee / full-time college student that has web design experience to make changes on a development box. After we decided that we should go ahead and make the changes live, then it goes to our full-time programmer to make it happen.

I guess my point is here, that while we want to always be moving forward with our website, don’t forget to go backward and optimize usability and accessibility for the existing website. I do realize many companies don’t have the resources to make this happen, but the only thing I can tell you is that you have to spend money to make money. Hire someone whose sole job is to tweak and test the website. This will take the grunt work out of it, while you’re busy doing more important things, like masterminding your future website strategy.

Making multi-part posts or articles is a fancy little trick for linkbaiting I bet you’ve never tried. By dividing your posts into three parts you can:

1. Triple your exposure
2. Triple your views
3. Triple your new subscribers
4. And possibly triple your incoming links

Let me give you a case-in-point with a two part link bait. Building a Niche Minisite Part 1 got 1221 diggs as of writing this. Building a Niche Minisite Part 2 got 651 diggs. I didn’t check Digg the day part one hit the homepage, but part two happened to catch my eye the next day. Matt Coddington got 2 days worth of exposure for the price of one. If it were a one-parter I may have missed it altogether, instead he got 2 sweet authority links out of it :).

He also made sure he released the second part on the next day after the first one was released. I don’t think this technique would work if you spaced out the parts by more than one day.

Increasing conversion rate can be a daunting task that requires a delicate touch and some expertise, not to mention some trial and error. Don’t be afraid to fail at it - just remember to keep trying until you succeed. If you work hard at optimizing your site, you really can double or triple your conversions. That said, I put together this quick and dirty list to give you a few changes you can make to get started optimizing your e-commerce site for better usability and more conversions.

1. Remove clutter

Cluttered web pages are one of the most common mistakes on the Web. For some reason people like to jam all their information on one page. Clean things up by removing distracting, useless images, charts, or text. Provide users with information as they request it. You don’t need to put it all in front of their face at one time. The path you want the user to take should be clear from the homepage. When you stack up text and images, it dilutes the goal message, and can confuse users. Less is more!

2. Remove ads

If you’re trying to get people to buy a product or a service and you’re running Adsense or another ad system on your site you may be making a big mistake. These ads provide exit points for your traffic (and potential customers). Keep your customers focused on the task at hand. If they leave the site through an ad, “Great you made $.25,” but just don’t assume that person will hit the back button or ever return to your site. You may have just lost yourself a sale.

Not to mention, ads look extremely unprofessional on e-commerce sites. They are fine for blogs with no other means of monetization, but if you’re selling something do yourself a favor and leave the ads off.

3. Offer more payment options

I generally recommend offering 3 forms of payment for e-comm sites. Taking credit card is obviously the first choice. I think two good alternatives to offer are PayPal and BillMeLater. BillMeLater gives you the money right away and then just bills the customer at a later date. This is great for sites that target demographics who may not have credit cards or checking accounts. Adding BillMeLater and PayPal makes sure all bases are covered.

4. Show shipping costs upfront

How many times have you been ready to purchase an item online only to get to the last step of the process and find out shipping was $15.00? Shipping charges are already a huge deterrent to buying online. Why make it a bigger problem by hiding them?

Be honest and upfront with people about extra charges. When hidden fees are applied, it can anger the customer, and, worse, cause them not to trust you. ( Loss of trust is a loss of sale, and most likely a loss of any future sale.) Put the shipping charges on the shopping cart page before the customer clicks checkout.

5. Sales, Promotions, Free

Many practices from traditional retail simply don’t apply online. Running sales, however, is one that does. Incenting customers to buy is a pretty broad and well documented topic. But the basic principle still applies: everybody loves a sale. Experiment with different promotions to up your orders. Also experiment with different wording and calls to action. I recently tested a category on an e-commerce site called “specials”. We renamed the category “sales” and click-throughs and orders went up noticeably.

6. Sales copy

Strong sales copy is a must. Check out The new SEOBook sales letter by Brian Clark. Your copy doesn’t necessarily need to be a “sales letter” per se, but Brian does an awesome job explaining the benefits of buying the book to the visitor. I am by no means a sales copy expert, but I do know that with more expensive products and services you need more than a simple description. Explain why the potential buyer absolutely needs this product, and needs it now.

7. Stronger calls to action

Evaluate your calls to action on a site-wide level. I just bet you find some great content or images that really pop, but lack a call to action. You may have come up with some outstanding copy about how special your service is and then left the reader hanging by not telling them to take the next step. You’re wasting your efforts if you aren’t telling your customers what they should be doing. I’m a fan of putting the word “now” on many calls to action because it implies a sense of urgency: “Order your money saving guide now!” This is just one example. There are many ways to form excellent calls to action. Find one that works well for you and stick with it.

8. Add reliability Indicators.

This another small step that can gain a customers trust. Consider adding brand-recognized logos “above the fold” on your site, such as the Better Business Bureau, and HackerSafe. Of course you have to actually join respective company’s services, don’t just put the logo up.

Security concerns such as using SSL to encrypt data are huge for web shoppers. Calm their fears by adding a security logo (maybe “Secured by Verisign”?), and a security policy to your policies page.

9. Offer expert reviews

Another way I like to drum up sales is by adding “expert” reviews / analysis of products. Sometimes a product description just isn’t enough. Customers want to know if this product is right for them. Offering fit and feel analysis, care tips, information about what the product should used for, how it performs under certain conditions, etc. can really help sell. Just be honest, most customers can see right through the B.S. if you tell them how great everything is. Don’t be afraid to list some cons too. Customer’s will appreciate your advice and your company’s willingness to share information (transparency).

10. Add another navigation path

Adding several navigational paths to a desired goal is usually a good idea. Of course, you should have some logical categories that products or services fall under. You may also want to consider adding a search field. Some people don’t like to browse if they know exactly what they’re looking for. If you can also figure out a way to monitor customer searches and search results to keep track of what people are actually looking for on your site, you can get clued into your customers behavior and buying patterns. From there you can fill in holes in your product offerings if there is a pattern of searches for something that you don’t offer.

11. Test. Measure. Rinse. Repeat.

Okay, so this one isn’t quite “quick and dirty.” But trial and error is one of the foundations of usability testing. Try out different elements, such as different headings, one at a time. Then measure the effect through an analytics program. You should test one variable at a time so you know what change caused which effect. If you have some kind of multivariate testing program that can tell you what the effect of each change was, then by all means use it - its much faster that way. Keep whittling away at different page elements (”add to cart” buttons, headlines, page copy, image placement, etc.) until you are satisfied with the results.

An effective way to split-test is to point the same pay-per-click ad at 2 different pages, one with with your changed page and one with the current page to see if your changes were effective.

(Disclaimer: If your site is paying your mortgage you may not want to just go diving into this head first. Use mock-ups and test changes on a development web server rather than your production box, and please don’t just change your site all at once. Roll changes out one by one.)

Other Resources:

• Twelve steps in writing a truly compelling sales copy
• Effective Site Search Whitepaper (PDF, 422k)
• 37 Calls to Action for your website
• Building Better Category Pages