Web usability tip: write for the audience
If there is one thing I say all the time, it’s that everything we do as marketers must be about our audience. This extends to our choice of words.
Blogger Craig LeFebvre just alerted me to Alertbox, and after being generally fascinated by many posts there, I happened upon this post on web usability. It’s a very, very good reference and worth signing up for. The post says:
Familiar words spring to mind when users create their search queries. If your writing favors made-up terms over legacy words, users won’t find your site.
For example, a headline like the one that appeared in Variety on black Monday—Wall St. lays an egg -- is bad in today’s world because people will be searching for things like “Wall Street” and “stocks.”
That’s why straightforward names, headers and tagging are so important. I named this blog nonprofitmarketingblog.com not because it was an exciting name but because it gets people here.
If you’re not up on tagging, which I find quite confusing myself, go here. They helped me figure it out.
So did Ike of the Red Cross who says:
There are a number of ways you can post your del.icio.us links to your blog, providing an extra value for the sidebar. But you don’t have to go with every single link you save. You can use your tags to determine which will be displayed. For instance, on my personal blog Occam’s RazR there is a list in the sidebar called “del.icio.us coolness”, which is simply the roll of links I think fit the theme of my site. When I bookmark my links, I just add the tag “occam” if I want it to show in the blog, and my list is configured to filter my links for that keyword. If you were to add a “Non-profit news headline” list to your page, you could do the same thing. Tag the clippings with an appropriate category, and let the programming do the work for you. You could even run several categories at a time, and tag them separately as “Fundraising”, “Scandals”, “Cool Ideas”, or whatever strikes your fancy.
I’m going to try it.
Syndicate
I use the tag “linkblog” for my delicious side bar of links. They have widget on the delicious site that allows you to format how you want it to look. I got the idea from Marnie Webb. I find lots of good stuff, but I don’t necessarily have the time or brain to blog something about the finds individually. I’m looking for patterns or trends most of the time anyway. So, the linkblog is a great way to add some more content, send a little linklove out there, and integrate into your blogging workflow.