~David Ogilvy, legendary advertising copywriter
Google Launches Browser Size: Is Your Good Stuff Above or Below the Fold?
The more impatient web users grow, the faster we demand at-a-glance content, the less likely we are to scroll below “the fold,” or the lower edge of your browser window.
Yesterday Google launched BrowserSize, a webpage overlay tool that gives designers, writers, and other content creators the lowdown on how much of their sparkling new content is actually “at-a-glance” or available to visitors w/o scrolling. BrowserSize lets you search for any site you wish to test. The tool features a variety of “visualizations of browser windows” represented as translucent contour overlays.
What may be best about this is that now there is clear proof of the risks involved when say your “Buy” button falls below the fold for a certain percentage of browser users, as in the sample/default page that opens when you first visit Browser Size.
Use Browser Size to Your BEST Advantage: “See” Customer Needs vs. Your Own
The purpose of the Browser Size tool isn’t to inspire you to cram all your page elements and content above the 90% contour, but instead to think more critically about your visitor priority–her immediate need. Is the priority news about you or your company (not likely and who the hell cares…), or is it how to order something, find something, get quick information, etc?
Think of the advantages to seeing your webpage content sliced and diced this way– here’s your chance to make almost very page on your website a well-designed and content configured landing page–seeing as how you should know that a first-time visitor could end up on your site via some oddball deep interior page….
Screenshot of Google’s Browser Size tool:
from perpetualkid.com
I admit it– I’m a USB drive dork. I love these things. Since it’s the holidays Web Urbanist is showcasing a veritable online catalog of USB flash drives, from Pentagon-level security models (IronKey) to the totally absurd (think sushi-inspired). And since I’m such a nut I thought it only proper to share. In the spirit of Christmas. I’m still hopeful I’ll get the Swiss Army knife flash drive in my stocking. (it has a built in laser pointer 
“There are no new ideas, only new ways of making them felt.” Audre Lord, Am. poet
In the era of the WWW we are faced with a daily smorgasbord of mixed media and sliced and diced ideas, literally massive sources offering up all kinds of content and copy components.
Mashups
Originally a “mash-up” was a term applied to a combination of web apps cleverly knitted together to form a new and fully functional application. Today we have mashup music, mashup videos, mash-up maps, etc. Some argue the term “mashup” started as a way to describe music remixes. Regardless, the term has been widely applied to almost any form. And exactly when it appeared in language is also up for debate. (The Virtual Linguist reports that despite the fact that the Oxford English Dictionary only recently added “mashup” to its pages, it nevertheless offers a linguistic reference for the term from 1859…)
Swipe Files
Copywriters’ swipe files, while they’ve gained a LOT of attention in recent years thanks to web copywriting and marketing of the same, are traditional advertising business tools. Swipe files are literally files of proven advertising “controls,” or ads that have performed well. Swipe files might be created and saved in online formats or as print and in almost any format you’d like. Swipe files are intended as inspiration, as go-to resources when copywriters are looking for a similar “hook” or to study how the best controls have been written and much more.
In the hands of the totally uncreative and lazy, mashups and swipe files are used to rip-off others’ successful works. But when properly used they can help you invent fresh and totally maverick content and copy.
You can add almost anything you’d like to a swipe file: screenshots of webpages, text from news articles, your own list of effective headlines (cuz you’ll find scads of these floating around the web), magalogues, save the direct mail pieces you get in your mailbox at home, screenshots of landing pages that you think good or “speak to you,” and much more. This is a personal tool, so the sky’s the limit with “swipes.”
For ready-made swipe files you’ll discover many sources online that offer selections from their swipes, or copywriting gurus that use their swipe files as bonus gifts when you sign up for their courses. In other cases you can buy swipe files or subscribe to sites that feature directories of winning ads.
Good swipe file sources to start with:
Lawrence Bernstein’s InfoMarketing Blog
Why are swipe files and mash-ups so damn effective?
They put the power of the many at our fingertips. But to successfully use them we must acknowledge our own individual voice and contribution. Squish together as enthusiastically as when you were a kid molding mud with other organic “debris.”
In the last month or so Google has launched some nifty search results mods:
- Jump links added to the snippets
- Real time search boxes added for current event/news or trend-driven queries
- and I just read about the addition of site hierarchies, or breadcrumb navigation, to some search snippets.
Google is officially “design[ing] the way results appear on google.com.” Once upon a time the results were culled from the meta tags site owners attached to their html code. For many customizing the page title and description tags is a standard SEO task and potentially pretty personal. Now there is handiwork going on behind the scenes which is out of the control of site and page owners. Good? Bad? Ugly?
Beyond the jump-links, which offer deeper access to your site (at first glance) and the addition of “real-time” search, we know too that if Google chooses to it can also modify page titles and even page descriptions in the SERPS. Sure, in theory Google reports that all this functionality is intended to deliver better results for the searcher, but how do we really know this? For the truly uninititated web owner or the totally lazy, a Google-tweaked page title and description/snippet may be a blessing and a boon, but what about for experienced others?
Site heirarchies or breadcrumb navigation may now take the place of useless urls in a search result.
For example:
The green text at the bottom of the result correlates to the site’s bread crumb navigation posted along the top of the page to which this result links. URLs that clearly “help you understand the structure of the site and how the specific page fits into the heirarchy” are likely left untouched, reports the Official Google Blog. But URLs that offer no insight could be replaced with bread crumb-like heirarchy if the site offers such clear and best-practices navigation.
Redefining, relevant, and REAL-TIME.
Google’s sparkling new real time search capabilities are pushing Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, blog posts, news and more up into the SERP mix. Consider the content ramifications of this… What Twitter updates will make it? With millions tweeting about trendy topics seemingly layered one on top of the other (I’m picturing a gooey layered Twitter baklava), what kind of algorithm really decides which tweet makes the cut?
My screenshots of real-time search in action…. later.
Screenshots: Google Real Time Results In Action
Postscript: It’s “later” and here are my screenshots of Google’s nifty little “real-time” results in action. I searched for christmas, a hot trendy topic with likely a bundle of current commentary and buzz. And, yes, the results page was complete with a new Google real-time results box:
The real-time box scrolls with updated Tweets, news items, blog posts and the like within seconds of publishing/posting. If you see a result that catches your eye simply click “pause.” Here’s the box illustrating how Tweets are handled:
Will be interesting to see how this new search functionality works out. I clicked on one of the Tweets to satisfy my curiosity: it was from a Twitter user with a relatively unremarkable “following,” just appropriate to the query. Blink and you’re sure to miss a result, though….
Have you ever felt as though you were falling down the rabbit hole of life? I certainly will admit to that…a few points on my timeline during which I’ve experienced varying degrees of …. deterioriation. That includes personal and business points.
While I was wandering around in Barnes and Noble last week I picked up this book:
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzalez. It’s not new. It’s not made the New York Times Bestseller List (even though it should have). Published back in 2003, Deep Survival is about this: “Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why.” Heavy stuff it is.
It simply caught my eye from some non-descript shelf in a section of the store I can’t even recall right now. I turned the softcover over to read the back:
In Deep Survival Laurence Gonzalez combines hard science and powerful storytelling to illuminate the mysteries of survival, whether in the wilderness or in meeting any of life’s great challenges. This gripping narrative, the first book to describe the art and science of survival, will change the way you see your world. Everyone has a mountain to climb. Everyone has a wilderness inside.
Then I opened the book somewhere in the middle and read this:
By his third night lost in the wild, when Killip awoke amid the hailstones at the foot of Terra Tomah Mountain, he had arguably passed through the stages of denial (descending the wrong drainage), panic (climbing up the dangerous scree slope), and strategic planning (attempting to backtrack), and was well into the penultimate stage of deterioration. But he did not succumb to resignation.
That happens in a lot of cases (including big companies, troubled marriages, sick people, lost souls). There are great survivors and helpless victims on the curve of human ability. Most of us are neither. Most of us fall somewhere in between and may perform poorly at first, then find the inner resources to return to correct action and clear thought. If the object of the game is survival, that will do….
Killip pulled himself together….He made a fire and built a makeshift shelter…(both were things he should have done the first day…). For the next two days, he stayed put and attended to the business of adapting to the environment, keeping the organism in balance, the process called survival. Killip had entered the final stage that separates the quick from the dead: not helpless resignation but a pragmatic acceptance of–and even wonder at– the world in which he found himself….He had discovered the first Rule of Life: Be here now.
This particular guy–”Killip”– was rescued, but not until after he’d made himself at home in the wilderness and stopped expecting rescue. Gonazalez’s book is full of stories of disasters and near disasters, people who have fallen off the face of cliffs and even lost their way on what might have been considered a simple afternoon hike. But far deeper than the grit of the stories is the way he carefully dissects each incident’s set-up. His hypothesis: real “accidents” are rare. Our experiences, our emotions, the way we interact with our world, even our beliefs, all play key roles in getting us lost in the wilderness, involved in a mountain climbing accident, buried under 6 feet of snow in a slide, or lost at sea. Somehow we get ourselves there.
Gonzalez finally brings full circle the idea that many of the same emotional and psychological points of deterioration which often take place in an individual lost in the wilderness are some of the same that can afflict us during difficult times in our lives–(he parallels these to Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief). Essentially, we can approach our lives as survival situations.
Given the current state of …. things in the world, Deep Survival’s message is relevant, a primal spark in a dark forest. And it’s a great read. Here’s a “testimonial” from the front cover of the book (cuz it’s all about the testimonial and really this clinched the book buy for me):
‘I tore through Deep Survival like I’d been waiting to read it my whole life….’ – Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm
(It sucks that in this day and age I have to say this: I am not making money from this post, I have nothing to gain should you be compelled to go buy this book. Buy it, don’t buy it, borrow it from the library, whatever, but it’s a compelling book with very valid arguments that apply to my life…maybe yours too).
What exactly does Google think about poorly matched or missing meta title and description tags?
Did you know? Google has the capability to change/modify your site page tags–description/search snippet AND page title– if they can build a better search result…good? bad? ugly?
What do the TITLE and page DESCRIPTION meta tags look like in your page html? Here’s an example:
<title>Buy Bass Fishing Lures Online</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Search our online catalog and buy bass fishing lures, including crankbaits, spinnerbaits, and neon plastic worms. Blah, blah, blah…”/>
Ideally the title tag shows up as a keyword-optimized top line and the description tag — also keyword-optimized– as the search “snippet”– like this….
In this particular example, when your site is optimized and you’re driving traffic you are potentially well-positioned to rank well for the keyphrase,
buy bass fishing lures
buy bass fishing lures online
or something closely related.
Keyword-optimized page title and description are what Google “looks” for when matching a search query to your content. If your keywords are buried in the page, absent from your title and description tag, OR if you have no tags at all, Google could do one of two things:
1. ignore your content altogether because it fails to match the searcher’s query
OR
2. modify your title tag and search result “snippet” with content snagged from deeper within your page. “They” can replace your lousy or completely absent description tag with something the search engine deems relevant. Matt Cutts calls these “useful titles and useful snippets.” And apparently this has been a Google “policy” for some time.
Yes…they can modify title tags.
Here’s the official lowdown on “Google can modify title and search snippets” from Matt Cutts:
A few of the sources I’ve discovered in the last few days that could be fool-proof sources for copy inspiration (swipe files?):
Troy White, in his recent newsletter/blog post, talked about the J. Peterman catalog. My mother gets this because she loves the way the catalog looks lovingly put together. But when it comes to copywriting technique and strategy, this is a very effective approach. Here’s a snippet from the Christmas catalog:
High noon at La Côte Basque, circa 1960.
Red leather banquettes. Bright seacoast murals and bouquets. Thick silverware deployed with millimeter precision.
In the kitchen, the prep work has been going on since 6 a.m.; yes, the sauces are ready.
Babe Paley is the first to arrive, a chilled La Doucette please. Then Gloria Guinness, Diana Vreeland, C.Z. Guest, Slim Keith, Jackie and Lee…. (Well, perhaps not all at once.)
A ballet of waiters and sommeliers ensues, bites of Grand Marnier souffle and talk of indiscretions in high places. Mr. Truman Capote, surveying the scene, refers to the assembled as “the swans.”
He was a sad case, but he knew how to pick the right word.
(J. Peterman Owner’s Manual No. 71, Fall 2009)
This is the ad copy for a women’s blouse….
Another catalog inspiration I stumbled on late this summer, just after vacation. I was mindlessly flipping through a Bass Pro Shop catalog that belonged to a friend when a few of the product headlines just leapt out at me from the page. Here are a few:
“Get the same edge the pros have–brilliantly colored, ultra-flashy baits that dive to just the right depth!”
“Traditional designs that ALWAYS get results! The ultimate in simplicity…”
“Red hooks provoke vicious strikes!”
Then there are these belonging to my 10-year old nephew: Magic: The Gathering card game, his Avatar books (esp. The Last Airbender) and the 39 Clues books.
And, finally, this classic film ad for Hitchcock’s North By Northwest– very clever AND effective:
Four years ago, when I worked in-house writing and editing for a smallish mixed media and search marketing company, one of our key content strategies for ourselves as well as clients, was an online press release. We used them to build buzz AND boost inbound links to client sites. It was a key SEO/SEM tactic in our then cutting-edge list of such tactics.
Interestingly enough, I’ve noticed that the online press release is less and less in favor, despite its simplicity and relative ease of exposure:
- press releases are easy to get written–because they are one of those higher end content machines you can expect to pay more for a copywriter or shell out a few hundred to an online pr firm…or you can always cobble one together yourself if you have the time. If you’re going to write it yourself a word of caution: some of the more well-known online submission sites have stiff editorial guidelines and expectations. They’ll reject it in a skinny minute if it violates TOS — sounds too much like an ad– or is just plain lousy.
- they are a relatively easy to submit online
- dozens of online pr submission sites invite releases from FREE to many hundreds of dollars depending upon number of links and type of content.
I can still turn up press releases in online search for this now defunct company I worked for– we used them ourselves as a key strategy for building brand and market buzz, besides their usefulness as SEO levers.
Who IS Using Press Releases?
But the PR on press releases has been skewed in the last few years precisely due to the fact that their usefulness IS divided into 2 distinctly separate camps:
- the PR folks — and they’ve gone totally social media
- the SEO and marketing people (who might also include guerrilla marketers who will do any and all of it to generate buzz, brand, links, story, PR, debate, controversy, you name it…).
Illustrating the range of the “marketing”-driven press release consider the way StomperNet used a press release a few months back to herald a massive shift in their leadership:
They used the “press release” for a blog post– like this:
but they also sent it out to their email subscribers in the body of an email and Andy Jenkins posted it on his blog, as well. Of course a zillion internet marketing groupies “picked it up.” But did it actually make it to any of the traditional online news release sites, or was this a primo way to make a big announcement look more official and link-worthy?
I say it was a brilliant bit of linkbait if ever I saw one…
Divided Followers…
Ironically here’s a story posted on MarketingCharts.com almost one year ago, News Releases Not Just For Press, and based on a then current survey that showed — not surprisingly here, — that many SEO/SEM firms and marketers use the reliable online news release as SEO strategy as opposed to a traditional “press” release intended to appeal to journalists and the like. Apparently this was like new news or something (?). Does it really take a couple of years in Internet time to get results like this on a survey of “current” marketing techniques that for many are already …. old standards?
This former article juxtaposed with this most recent, Less Than Half of PR People Deem Press Releases ‘Useful’, serves to illustrate the press release great divide.
Reason Why You Might Consider Using Press Releases
1. Because these guys all say so:
2. Because few others are really taking advantage of these content tools to build links, site appeal, brand, news, reputation…
3. And because they remain a proven method for creating natural links back to your site or blog.
When we talk about keywords and keyphrases we talk about the commodities of an Internet financial economy. We talk about them in terms of position, density, broad match, exact match, and phrase matches. And we tally them up like wampum in Cost per Click values.
Imagine The Keyword Ticker Board….in place of a company’s stock ID you see, instead, a keyword, then a monetary figure that relates to the going value of each keyword “share,” followed by a + or – and another corresponding financial value, indicating profit or loss.
In the web markets, this is the distillation of words…
Any conversation about “keywords” is rarely about language, metaphor, and meaning. Rarely is it about WORDS. W-o-r-d-s.
We add “key” to the front of “words” and it instantly token-izes them, doesn’t it?
When we talk about keywords we haunt the online marketing forums hungry to ply AdWords and AdSense masters for “lists” of top paying keywords. We’re like keyword seagulls, diving in for scraps of fast food ditched on the beach sand. We leverage keywords for get-rich-quick schemes and the most uncreative inspiration for building a blog or website. We don’t talk about metaphors, flavors, nuance, poetry, sight, smell, pain, happiness, or any other connotations because that’s all very boring and non-scientific,
counter to cash-flow, and “doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.” Or does it?
Price of Pain – Meaning Behind Top Keywords
“Top paying” keywords tend to be utilitarian, wooden…and you might imagine quite lacking in meaning. Take these 3 I’ve listed below, for instance. I sat with them for a minute and thought about each. From that exercise I retrofitted my own free associations and discovered that as utility as they are, they are valuable for these reasons:
- “loan consolidation” — financially loaded, grabbed at by desperate people in desperate times, quick-fix, spam, credit crisis, oily money-hungry marketers
- “data recovery” — lost computer documents, stolen data, numbers and figures down the drain, anguish, frustration, fired, disaster, lost business, bottom line, irreplaceable, f#$%, help…
- “dui lawyer” –get me out of this quick, desperation, injury, death, embarrassment, arrest, jail, guilt, trauma, alcohol, loss of independence, seeking authority, grabbing at straws, quick fix, a way out…
Do you see any similarity among these high-paying, high CPC keywords? Once you begin to explore the motivation behind them, their “inverted” connotations, it becomes clearer that they share a very high pain value…
Think about it…Does High CPC = High Pain Value?
Furthermore, could you implement these loaded keywords more nimbly once you explore their meanings and motivations–the prickly stuff lingering in the shadows behind their drab, steely fronts?
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