Shiny Pretty Relevant Things. Technology Changes, But Apparently We Don't.

MIAMI -- When you go to a Web site, your eyes are darting all over the place. They jump from shiny objects to shiny objects, to attractive objects, to things that might help you, to things that are just interesting, to things on your mind, maybe even to things relevant to what you’re doing! Like that’s going to happen.

You might think you’re concentrating on one thing or another but in just a second your eyes have pinballed around a Web page about a million times and even found your favorite two or three places to land.

Bill Barnes, co-founder of Enquiro Search Solutions Inc., makes a living out of turning that spastic ocular activity into money. With customers like Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO), IBM (IBM) and LexisNexis (my employer), he has a lot of experience to draw on.

Mr. Barnes spoke during the SIPA Marketing Conference here today. I won’t attempt to capture his talk completely. Let’s be honest. I am not getting paid for this, and my fingers are now frozen. While I am in Miami, my air conditioner thinks we’re at the Equator.

Mr. Barnes summarized your Web mission for you. Make sure there is a connection between intent and content. Understand what someone intends to do when they sit down at their computer, and make sure you help. He showed “heat maps” of various Web sites, showing red zones, where most eyeballs landed, and light blue zones where fewer landed, and zones with no color where . . . . I think you follow. This kind of data is invaluable. He can show how the top left of the page is truly hot hot hot! But that the top right still can draw 30% of your visitors. He emphasized that hot spots are blogs, video (and audio), press releases and images. He encouraged you to get relevant content of this type on your site and make sure it is tagged to draw search engines.

Personalization rocks. Even if appearing low on a page, he showed how personalized content – content based on understanding your user – draws eyeballs. He showed how eyeballs tend to move down first, which is good news for content even below the fold, and then back up again, but not necessarily all the way to the top. So the middle can be tops. Mr. Barnes found that personalized results can increase clicks fourfold! To extrapolate, a photo that is relevant to the search and personalized would be a great eyeball magnet just about wherever it is on the page.

He strongly advised having a site map image for any site. He suggested doing an image search on your company right now and see where you pop up. Again, make sure the images are relevant and tagged, and preferably original, not from clip art.

Adding images to press releases is a good technique, as is including company stock symbols and linking to Google’s stock page. See the third paragraph of this post for how it's done.

Optimizing video is important since it is not picked up automatically by search engines. Put your video on YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe, Yahoo Video, etc. Then, get people to comment on your video, he said, and while you’re at it, comment on other companies’ videos.

Get your bloggers to comment on your companies’ activity and press releases, even if you have to separate yourself from employees by letting them blog on their own.

Get as much interlinking in your site and with other sites as possible. He strongly recommended creating a FaceBook for your company now.

Study the key words people are plugging into your site as great customer feedback.

OK, that might be the worst summary I have done today. Or in my life, although the bar is pretty low. I invite Mr. Barnes to please respond to this, either to elaborate, correct or just complain about me.

He offered a free white paper white paper on the subject at http://www.enquiroresearch.com/. I am sure that’s better than what you’re reading right now. He also had great things to say about research performed by Nielsen Norman Group. Check it out.