Found this little gem via Ads of the World, which credits (for lack of a better word) Saatchi & Saatchi France as the agency. It’s ad for a French newspaper showing planes flying above the Twin Towers, which appear to be about half their normal height. “Learn to anticipate” is the headline.

Learn to anticipate? LEARN TO ANTICIPATE? This is just plain stupid on every level. Not to mention terribly offensive, extremely disrespectful and about another three dozen adverbs. What kind of shitbrain agency presents something like this? Then again, what kind of shitbrain client signs off on it. Apparently French ones.

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• Ads closer to the center of the page tend to perform better
• Ads above the fold tend to perform better than those below the fold
• Ads placed at the end of articles tend to do well, even though they’re below the fold
• Ads placed near site navigation or by images or other rich content tend to do well, too

It’s most important to consider your users, their behavior and the page placement on the site.

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Yeah, I’m that old.

When I heard the idea behind the FourSquare application, I gasped. I get that location-based services are all the rage. But what I don’t get is why on earth would anyone would use it? But they do. Apparently thousands of people willingly broadcast when they’re not at home. Are thousands of people really that stupid? Isn’t that pretty much saying “Hey – I’m not home. Come rob me.”

Apparently so.

Then I heard about a website called Please Rob Me. A website designed to point out just how easy it is to rob people blind on the basis of the information they posting on the Web. The site automatically scans feeds to find location check-ins that are being FourSquared, GoogleBuzzed or Tweeted out. It then posts that message and the user’s whereabouts (if known) online for all to see. Dozens of new entries hit every minute. You can filter through by city or username. The site even hints at how long would-be burglars – or surprise-party organizers – have to hatch their scheme, since Twitter and FourSquare also share when you marked your location.

I love this.

Let’s face it. Are you going to get robbed because you’re over sharing? It’s unlikely. But if nothing else, Please Rob Me pokes fun at social-media fan’s desire to share a bit too much and shows that sometimes a little discretion online can go a long way.

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They don’t.

People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences.  Here’s a few hints to increase the effectiveness of your writing on the Web:

SHORTENED WORD COUNT
The word count for an online version of a given topic should be about half the word count used when writing for print. Web users skim, rather than read. Users find it painful to read too much text on screens, and therefore read about 25 percent more slowly than print.

WRITE NEWSPAPER STYLE
Web users are impatient – they don’t like to scroll through masses of text, so put the most important information at the top to allow users to quickly find the information they want. Subheads provide a visual roadmap for readers, alerting them that something different and potentially important is coming up. To see how this works, check out CNN.

INFORMAL STYLE
The Web is an informal and immediate medium compared to print, so users appreciate a somewhat informal writing style and small amounts of humor. Keep your sentences short and simple. Long, convoluted sentences may read nicely in print but will often seem forbidding onscreen.

HYPERTEXT LINKS
You can make text short without sacrificing depth of content by splitting the information up into multiple nodes connected by hypertext links. Long and detailed background information can be relegated to secondary pages; similarly, information of interest to a minority of readers can be made available through a link without penalizing those readers who don’t want it.

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• Blackberry (despite the sexiness of iPhone, the largest segment of Smartphone users are BlackBerry users)
• Iphoney (for the iPhone)
• Opera Mini (Opera offers the best browsers for mobile phones)

Page size, low use of images (which your mobile users will thank you for as well), doc types and more are all said to be factors. Mobile search is still in its infancy, but the growth expectations for it especially on local searches over the next five years are large. Make that HUGE.

Now if you’re a smallish company that’s not looking to sell a hundred thousand pairs of jeans or airline flights, (Jamison/McKay) you’re fine. But if you ARE looking to sell a whole lotta stuff, and attract a whole lotta traffic/business, you best get on it. Being early to the battle is one of the biggest factors in winning the war in search. You can learn mobile search now or wait until it’s a necessity and you have to spend a gagillion dollars redesigning your site. I’d highly suggest choosing the former.

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With web analytics, you’ll know how many visitors you get daily, how long your visitors stay on your website and what city they came from. You’ll know their clickstreams, the keywords they use, and how they came to be in your website (referring pages, search engines, organically etc). You’ll also be able to determine how many times a visitor returned to your website and which campaigns, if you’re running campaigns, were successful or not.

Why is this important? Well, aside from being really cool, once you’ve studied the actions of your visitors, you can optimize your website and formulate a sales and e-marketing plan based on actual facts and not hypothesis.

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Be sure to design your page in such a way that engages the visitor and incites action. Your landing page needs to quickly help the visitor make the transition from click to conversion. Here are a few additional suggestions:

• Strip out any unnecessary site navigation, menus, or links. Users intuitively want to click things, so they’ll only distract from the goal. The same goes for any irrelevant copy or imagery – only elements that help move the visitor  toward the completion of your desired action should be included.

• Don’t make the user click to get to your offer. Ideally, the action (whether it be a registration form or an interactive assessment) should be directly on the landing page itself, rather than a link to the offer (e.g., “click here”). The less work the visitor has to do to convert, the better.

• Include a relevant graphic or “hero shot.” Most people respond more to visual cues versus text. Providing a graphic representation of your offer/product/service is important because the user can quickly understand what the page is all about. It also helps improve the aesthetic of the page and makes it more dynamic.

• Locate your offer “above the fold.” Make sure your offer is visible on the page without the user having to scroll down to get to it. This is called “above the fold.”

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Who vs That. The rule: use who when you are referring to a person, and that when you’re referring to a thing. “She is someone who I have known for years.”

Orient vs. orientate. The rule: Use orient as a verb to express “to find direction”; use orientate if you want to sound affected.

Bi- vs. Semi. As in bimonthly vs. semimonthly. Bi- is two, and semi- is half. So bimonthly is every two months, whereas semimonthly is twice a month. Just remember, you don’t ride a semicycle, you ride a bicycle.

Affect vs. effect. Affect” is a verb and “effect” is a noun. When using “affect”, substitute another verb and see if it works.

Between you and I. In case you’re wondering, it’s between you and me. The exact reason and it has to do with objects of prepositions and a whole lotta other crap. You can check that out by visiting Grammar Girl. But let me boil it down: Use between you and me, because it’s correct.

Irregardless. Irregardless is NOT a word.  It communicates that you’re a trying to sound smart and fancy-like, when you actually sound like a dope.

Your vs. You’re. Ok, now this is just pure laziness. And that’s why it’s pet peeve #1.

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The single best thing you can do to be more visible on search engines is have plenty of engaging, readable, relevant, original content. Now there are other factors that help with SEO such as having clean code, site speed, a URL that’s not about to expire and plenty of inbound links. Not reciprocal links. Don’t be tricked by offers of link exchanges – they’re essentially worthless.

We’re sorry to disillusion people who want instant solutions, but overall, when it comes to SEO, content is king.

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http://gizmodo.com/5520164/this-is-apples-next-iphone

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