Get Found -- Use Descriptive Micro-Content
Before users click through to your site, they usually see some sort of Micro-Content about your Site. That Micro-Content is contained in your
Remember Jakob Nielsen's Law of the Web User Experience, www.UseIT.com (↑):
If your Micro-Content is not compelling enough for people to click through, that's all they ever will see from your site.
- Link texts,
- URIs,
- meta description text,
- headings,
- text set bold or strong,
- and eventually your first paragraph of the page
Remember Jakob Nielsen's Law of the Web User Experience, www.UseIT.com (↑):
“Users spend most of their time on other sites, so that's where they form their expectations for how the Web works.”
If your Micro-Content is not compelling enough for people to click through, that's all they ever will see from your site.
Users will get to your site via search engine result pages (SERP), inbound links on other Web pages, or by typing your domain name in the navigation field of the browser. The first impression actually is from the microcontent, even before people see your page.
Micro-Content must stand on its own, because it is placed out of context of your Web page. Your search engine rankings for certain keywords depend heavily on descriptive microcontent.
Let us do an example: Open a new browser window, go to Google.com and search for “Click here”. Actually just click on this link — www.Google.com (↑) — I do it for you.
I am getting about 1,310,000,000 results (that is indeed billions).
Congratulations to Adobe, who managed to be number one for the violation of this usability guideline, “Use descriptivelink text”.
Does it pay off to be number one for this search phrase. I bet not. I think you get the point. Always put the most important words at the beginning of the heading, title, and link text.
Yours
John W. Furst
Micro-Content must stand on its own, because it is placed out of context of your Web page. Your search engine rankings for certain keywords depend heavily on descriptive microcontent.
Let us do an example: Open a new browser window, go to Google.com and search for “Click here”. Actually just click on this link — www.Google.com (↑) — I do it for you.
I am getting about 1,310,000,000 results (that is indeed billions).
Congratulations to Adobe, who managed to be number one for the violation of this usability guideline, “Use descriptivelink text”.
Does it pay off to be number one for this search phrase. I bet not. I think you get the point. Always put the most important words at the beginning of the heading, title, and link text.
Yours
John W. Furst
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