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keeping people around
mark schaaf
Posts: 365
Joined: 04 Oct 10
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04 Feb 13 3:28 pm

keeping people around

I have been at this for a little while and still don't understand why people want information but are too lazy to read an article to get the information. With that in mind how do we write things to get these lazy people to stay around and get the information they are looking for.

Maybe some if this is my prescription because google anayltics most of the time doesn't tell you how much time a visitor spent on the page they land on if they don't go to another page so maybe people do stay for a minute or so I just don't know.

But for an example someone landed on an internal page of my site when a visitor typed in a keyword search saying ( how many us dollars does it cost to get 100 euros ) so this person is looking for an exchange rate.

He landed on my page telling how to budget there money for a European vacation. Well right there on the top right of the page is a rate exchange calculator so this person wouldn't even have to read the article if he didn't want to he could just use the calculator but is shows zero time spent on the page. Like I said I don't think google tells us how long people stay on the page they land on but I think they should, maybe I wouldn't think so many people are lazy and don't want to read.
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Mark
 
PremiumMember
jimcoe
Posts: 259
Joined: 13 Feb 12
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05 Feb 13 12:00 am

 Hi Mark,

I noticed that at least one of your pages ("City Tours") still has long paragraphs of text, with no visuals to break it up or make it quick to scan: No headings, no lists.

I'd recommend some online research on best practices for text readability (line height, characters per line, etc.):
I think line length is supposed to be about 60 characters - your lines on that page are about 90 characters long. To me it looks like your line height is also too great, making reading harder.

Since some of your pages are long, with several headers. How about making a little menu at the top of the body text of your longer pages, listing the topics of each header and providing in-page links?

This would give visitors a very quick way to review the page topics and zero in on what they are looking for - without going through the long list they might get from a search. I did a site search for "maps" and found the results list pretty daunting (also got a 404 on the first item).

My idea here is that they may be looking for some specific info and don't want to scan the whole page visually looking for it. By only having to scan a small menu at the page top, they would have a much simpler task - if your headers and menu were carefully designed re: the content covered.

Perhaps your pages would look a bit more interesting if you used colored titles and headers? They don't need to be bright cartoony colors, but something like these:

Title One #00 40 00
Title Two #40 00 00
Title Three #00 00 40

Just some thoughts...
_jim coe
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mark schaaf
Posts: 365
Joined: 04 Oct 10
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05 Feb 13 1:15 am

 thanks Jim I will have to check that out. I just launched my entire site change where I changed the entire home page and the color and changed the font from Veranda to Aerial because a few people told me that they couldn't get that font and was changing the text to something goofy.

Also when I changed the font I had to change the size and re sized the the page so as to not have a lot of blank space at the bottom. I know I did have to re set some of my paragraphs on a couple pages because it combined them so maybe that is what happened on the city tours page so i will check it out. I will also look at the error that you found when looking for maps and see what is going on with it. I will also check how many things come up because I have never used it and was told I should add it because it helps a lot so I will have to see how it works and if I need to change things with it or get rid of it I will. Again Thanks Mark
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Mark
 
PremiumMember
jimcoe
Posts: 259
Joined: 13 Feb 12
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05 Feb 13 3:20 am

 By the way the font looks good to me - very readable on my screen. Don't know what control you hve over your site search function - but it's certainly a good thing to have. I wouldn't get rid of it.

It's weird that Verdana didn't work for you - wasn't "Veranda" was it? Verdana was designed specifically to be read from a display screen and is supported by all browsers. I use Verdana often.

Wikipedia says, "According to one long-running survey, the availability of Verdana is 99.70% on Windows, 98.05% on computers running Mac OS, and 67.91% on free operating systems like Linux."
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mark schaaf
Posts: 365
Joined: 04 Oct 10
Trust:
05 Feb 13 9:45 pm

 Hi Jim that is what my research also said when I put the site together 3 years ago that is why I chose verdana but I had a few people on another forum say they couldn't get it and there computer was turning it into new roman times.

I like the verdana font but switching to Aerial and it is ok and what is funny is I typed up a couple things both in verdana and aerial and sometimes I could read one better then the other then the next day I could read the other one better.

I don't have any control over my search on my site but am sending them my web editor people a note telling them what is going on and what they are going to do to fix it. I am also going to read over a few things and see why so many things come up in a search and if I find that just having the word maps in an article will bring it up in a search them I may have to go through my site and try and rewrite things so only a few things come up in a search. Because what good is a search if you are looking for something specific but pulls up a dozen pages because it has that word on the page. Mark
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Mark
 
Site Admin
maryt
Posts: 3224
Joined: 16 Apr 12
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06 Feb 13 8:04 am

 Hi Mark,

Just a thought: Perhaps you may want to try social media campaign for your site. I mean, besides SEO, have you tried SMM campaign?

I think your site is best promoted in social media sites. Like for example, you can create a Pinterest account and probably post travel pictures there. Or you may also use flicker and instagram.

Registering your site to foursquare is also a good idea. :)

I suggest you lessen your content or at least make short, easy to read content and have a lot of good pictures with descriptions instead. You may also put videos.

I hope that helps!

Mary
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