Marketing Tips

Tips for PW clients to help market their wares.

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People Skim, Not Read

Statistics today suggest that website visitors typically read only about 20% of the text on a page.

This can be attributed to several factors, including both the quality of the content and changing reading habits. Here are the main reasons:

Skimming Behavior:

Online readers tend to skim rather than read word-for-word. According to the Nielsen Norman Group, users scan pages for relevant information, often focusing on

  • headings,
  • subheadings,
  • bullet points,
  • and highlighted text.

This behavior is driven by the vast amount of information available online and the need to quickly determine the relevance of content.

Information Overload:

The sheer volume of information available on the internet means visitors have developed habits to quickly filter through content. This has led to a preference for scanning over in-depth reading, particularly when visitors are searching for specific information.

Content Quality:

The quality of content plays a significant role. Poorly written, unengaging, or irrelevant content can cause visitors to lose interest quickly. High-quality content that is well-structured and directly addresses the visitors’ needs can encourage more thorough reading.

Attention Span:

Studies suggest that the average attention span of site visitors has decreased over time. A report by Microsoft noted that the average human attention span has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to about 8 seconds in 2013. This reduced attention span affects how site visitors interact with online content.

Mobile Usage:

The increasing use of mobile devices for browsing has changed reading habits. On smaller screens, visitors are even more likely to skim content rather than read in detail. This shift emphasizes the need for mobile-optimized content that is easy to scan.

Time Constraints:

Visitors often land on a site’s page with specific goals in mind and limited time to achieve them. This urgency prompts them to scan for the most relevant information quickly rather than reading everything in detail.

While these factors collectively contribute to the tendency of site visitors to read only a small portion of the text on a webpage, improving the quality, relevance, and presentation of content can help increase engagement and encourage visitors to read more.

Structuring content with clear headings, concise paragraphs, and visual aids can also enhance readability and retention.

The goal of a successful site developer is to find the balance between the information or message the client is trying to portray and and the limited attention span of the visitor. This balance must be achieved in a way that allows the intended message to be absorbed before the reader loses attention which as the statistics above suggest, will happen very quickly.

It is important the message be broken into short concise messages that can be skimmed by the reader.

Yet for the purposes of SEO it is equally important to keep the visitor on the page as long as possible.

Let Praise Worx find that balance for your site!

Engage the visitor with stunning images (eye candy),

attention grabbers,

and attention holders,

yet provide the information they were seeking that brought them to your site in the first place.

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Posts Not Pages

why?

Because people don’t want to read any more. So keeping content short, allows a simple message to be delivered in a post. Another post can then add to the first message. A sequence can even be developed and maintained using categories and sequence numbers. But that’s too much information for this post!

Posts also are regarded higher in the SEO ranking scheme. A page is considered static and unchanging to the search engines. Continuously editing a page is not considered new content to the search engine.

Creating new posts however IS considered new content to the search engine.

So instead of creating pages, even for something like events, it is better to create posts of each event and then use the virtual page features in WordPress to display all the events or all the posts with a particular category on the virtual page.

Posts are considered new content. Pages are not.

Create posts, not pages.

Read more about how to use post categories to your advantage to have an infinite number of pages (albeit virtual).

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Plan for Fresh Content

Plan for fresh content at regular intervals.

Why? Because you are passionate about your craft. Be it art, music, salvation, wellness, principles, society.

Whatever it may be, you have important messages for your audience.

Posting messages on a regular basis helps to build the interest of your audience.

It also helps in your search engine rankings! No longer is the number of pages a key factor in the search engine rankings. Instead the post, it’s content and a keyword strategy are what’s important.

Praise Worx can help determine a posting and keyword strategy that helps bubble your site higher in the rankings.

You simply post, tell your stories, share your energy, articulate your message.

Let Praise Worx handle the keywords, and help with the technical details of posting on autopilot, even when your inspiration is on vacation!

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Compose Stunning Sites

Build stunning sites to keep your visitors attention.

Your site doesn’t call to strangers to come visit it. But when visitors do arrive on your site, ultimately you want them to experience something particular and then take some action.

You may want your visitor

  • to look at products, choose one of their liking, and purchase it.
  • to learn something new.
  • to sign up for a newsletter.
  • to enroll in a class.
  • to take some action.

You may want their experience to be somber, exciting, exhilarating, sad, or compassionate.

Along with the mood, having the visitor remain on your site longer helps to improve your rankings in the search engines. This is called dwell time and shows the search engine algorithm that your page provided value to the visitor.

Praise Worx will design a site that helps create the mood that will lead to the ultimate action, and design a site that provides the technical effects to hold your visitors attention.

But you want to be the seller, artist, musician, manager, or some other such!

Let Praise Worx handle the technical, the SEO and the statistics for you!

The Post – The Fundamental and Most Powerful Data Structure in WordPress!

Learning how to operate with posts in WordPress will allow your site to be built initially with little effort and to be dynamically displayed with no effort! Essentially, using posts strategically will reduce the maintenance on your site while providing the flexibility to add pages easily either dynamically or manually.

Categories are the one attribute that provide the muscle behind the post. A page of posts with the same category has a default layout. Sometimes this default layout is available within the theme. But the beauty of the post / category muscle is that all you have to do is define a new category, assign it to a few posts, and you have a new page without having to do anything except keep posting which is what most blogging site owners really want to do.

Using categories also helps increase SEO ratings.

Do you have a good strategy to exercise this powerful combination found in WordPress?

Let me give you an analysis of your site’s posts / blogs and categories to provide a better strategy that will allow pages to be created out of thin air on the fly, without you doing anything!

Do You Know Your Visitor?

Website visitors are quite the characters! And they are varied in their purposes for being on the site in the first place.

Many are there for a particular purpose. Most are there for the content and to gain some knowledge or information.

Depending on the site, some visitors are there to look at the pretty pictures, while others are there to associate a pretty picture to some content.

If you have a site, it’s because you have a particular purpose you’re trying to achieve. Most likely it is to provide some information or some product.

Why then would you need to have pictures of yourself on your site, unless of course you are the product, but most of the time, this is not the case.

Pictures help your visitors digest some of your content but only when the picture actually relates to the content text. Otherwise the picture is just eye candy and could interfere with the visitors achieving their purpose.

So what is the purpose of your site? What is the purpose of the pictures you’re selecting for the pages and content? Do the two purposes align with your visitor’s purpose for being there?

I contend that in the age of instant gratification, a site needs to align with the visitor’s purpose most. This should be the highest priority goal in the development and layout of the site. With that in mind, many site designs with beautiful headers at the top or with beautiful background images are pretty useless because the visitor must scroll just to get to the content. Or in the case of the background, the visitor must strain to get their focus on the content instead of the pretty picture.

I really get a kick out of seeing these news sites and the images they use with different news stories. Many times the image has nothing to do with the story. Other times the image presents a connotation that is different from that of the story. Remember the old black and white paper newspaper that was delivered to your door? It had headlines, but seldom had pictures because they were expensive to print. I’m advocating moving in that direction again. Unless a story needs a picture to help tell the story, why provide the picture? And I contend that if the story or content needs the picture, then perhaps the story is not being told very well. And if the picture is provided to assist the content, then it should be in a relative location of that content and not scrolled off the page as in the case of a header.

But the real question is what does your viewer want? If your statistics show that your visitors are leaving your pages after only staying 3 – 5 seconds and your site is loaded with pictures, my guess is they aren’t finding the content they want immediately.

The character of your visitors can be determined in the statistics and holding a visitor on your site longer will help your site achieve its purpose.

Let me look at your statistics and analyze what can be done to keep your visitors on your site longer.