Happy Mother's Day

Tunnel Vision of Website Visitors

Many business owners think customers read their website in logical order, like a book, but that's totally wrong.

Customers exhibit a type of tunnel vision, ignoring what is irrelevant to them. They skim and scan and skip everything that is not directly related to the problem or need they feel at the moment.

Thus, your website must clearly emphasize major concepts and topics that customers care about, helping them to be blind to irrelevant content and helping them to focus only on their immediate interest.

Special, idiosyncratic, personalized focus of customers is a big important part of website usability studies. One weird fact is that if a customer thinks a bit of content should be found in a certain spot on your website, they'll keep coming back to that spot, over and over again. It tends to be a vicious circle phenomenon.

You must make each page of your website focus on a specific topic, product, or idea. In the HTML document, this will be the one and only H1 tag. Then each topic should have clear subheads, which will be H2 tags in the HTML document.

You must realize that the vast majority of visitors to your website will not be interested in everything you have to say.

Most customers will have one specific, narrowly-defined issue. They'll have one burning question or aggravating problem they want to solve. They'll want to quickly and easily find relevant content for that topic, without having to swim through tons of irrelevant content.

Since you can't predict which question or problem any given customer may have, you need to make sure that all conceivable questions and problems pop out from the website, making it easy for customers to skim through it and identify the bit of content that meets their needs.

Even if your product can do many things and solve multiple problems, a specific individual customer may not care about all that. They may have just one thing that's motivating them to visit your website. Be sure that your website shows awareness of this customer reality.

Don't bury your topics and sub-heads in a flurry of hype.

Don't force your customers to read lots of irrelevant content before they finally find the one thing they need.

If we all had to pay attention to everything all the time, we'd never get anything done.

Present the salient points about your product in a logical manner, within a framework that makes it easy for customers to jump around and zero in on a specific bit of content that satisfies whatever their need is at a given moment.

An FAQ format is ideal for presenting this information.

An example of web visitor tunnel vision is here:

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/tunnel-vision-and-selective-attention/

Voice Search Changes How You Optimize Website Content

Google is moving more strongly toward being a direct answer provider, rather than a search engine providing links to possible solutions.

This means your website can be Google's quoted resource -- IF your web content completely answers every question a customer could possibly ask about their problem and its solution.

If your answer is so complete and well-written that Google serves it up to customers, you'll crush your competitors.

Look at your website. How good a job does it do in answering customer questions? Does it even show any concern about typical questions customers have?

If you don't know all the questions your website should be addressing -- ask your sales staff, service department, or receptionist. Also, go directly to customers and ask them what questions, concerns, frustrations, and problems they have.

An FAQ format is a great way to present information about a product, rather than long, dense blocks of hype. You'll see this on Amazon product pages, where customers ask questions, then answers are provided by other customers or the manufacturer of the product.

Think deeply about your customers, the problems they face, and the questions they are asking. It's very annoying to go to a website, wanting to purchase something, but not finding answers to important questions you have.

Customers with "more nuanced" questions tend to be ready to buy now. They're doing research and want to be very sure they make the right product choice, with no regrets later.

Make sure your website accommodates them.

Read more about voice search and Google snippets here:

https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4889153.htm

10 Types of SEO Keywords for Effective Website Content

Everybody knows that for SEO power and content enrichment, your website text must contain naturally occurring keywords.

Keywords are words and phrases that customers and industry leaders use that are relevant to your business, problems of customers, and how to solve them.

You don't take mediocre, hurriedly thrown together copy, then sprinkle strategic keywords into it to empower it for SEO. That won't work. Google will consider poorly written, superficial, fluffy content to be Inferior Quality Web Content and will downrank your website in search results.

You explain the customer problem, why it's urgent to fix it immediately, and how your product solves everything easily, quickly, and affordably.

Then your website needs to answer every conceivable question a customer could and does ask, from every possible angle, defining technical terms, and speaking in a friendly, person-to-person voice of authority and credibility.

Now let's drill down into the general kinds of keywords that should be used in your website.

10 Basic Types of SEO Keywords

1. Customer Defined Keywords (User Vocabulary)

2. Industry Defined Keywords (Technical Terminology)

3. Product Defined Keywords (Catalog Copy)

4. Thought Leader Defined Keywords (Buzzwords / Insider Slang)

5. Geolocation Keywords (Local Shopping)

6. Related Vertical Keywords (Commercial Ecosystem Glossary)

7. Prospect Footprints (Customer Conversations)

8. Leading Keywords (Highly Competitive Nomenclature)

9. Longtail Keywords (Esoteric Terms of Highly Motivated Shoppers or Researchers)

10. Synonyms / Close Variants (Alternate Terminology)

How to Save a Post on Facebook

See a really great post on Facebook? Full of good information?

Shared it to your wall perhaps, but afraid it will get lost as you add more posts, and it gets pushed down into oblivion?

Use the "Save Post: add this to your saved items" tool to keep track of it.

Save Post tool is found in the 3 dots at upper right corner of a post. Click or tap on it to activate the drop down menu, it's at the top.

When you save things on Facebook, they'll appear in the Saved section.

To view the things you've saved:

Go to Facebook.com/saved or click Saved in the left side menu of the homepage. Click a saved category at the top or click a saved item to view it.

Note: Saved items are private, so only you can see them.

Reading a Book in a Bar

One time several years ago, I brought a book into a bar on Main Street called Sonny's. It was not tolerated.

As I was reading it, some guy came up to me and actually growled, "I don't drink beer in the library, so why are you reading a book in a bar?"

I replied, "I don't tell you what to do, so why are you trying to tell me what to do?"

Dangers of Free Public Wifi

While Starbuck’s free public Wi-fi is convenient, is it actually safe? NO. Never use it.

It’s not just Starbuck’s Wi-Fi that is considered to be unsafe, using any public Wi-Fi can put you at risk for hacking, malware, and identity theft.

The main reason for this is how open these public networks are.

There are either very little (or no) authentication steps required to connect. Anyone with any device capable of connecting online can freely establish a connection.

The other big reason that public Wi-Fi spots are unsafe, is the lack of any encryption. The purpose of encryption is to protect data as it travels from point A to B. It does this by scrambling the data, so that if it is intercepted, it cannot be read or accessed.

The absence of any encryption means that any data flowing through the web can be intercepted, read, and accessed.

So for instance, if you are using Starbuck’s Wi-Fi to online shop, and you enter your credit card information, this info can be read as it is traveling from your device to the store’s server.

On public Wi-Fi networks, hackers can also set themselves so that they appear to be the connection point, or place themselves in between you and the real Wi-Fi connection point.

In these cases, instead of being directly connected to the coffee shop’s Wi-Fi set-up, your information is actually being routed through the hacker’s set up.

This allows them to see everything you are doing online, and collect the information going through the web. Malware can also be distributed through unsecured networks.

Don't use public wifi -- but if you do, never buy anything online using your credit card. Wait until you're home.

Also, make sure that any software updates and upgrades are coming from the software itself, and not from a website’s pop up notification.