Automated email can improve customer service, strengthen relationships, and help websites bypass search engines. But most messages fared poorly in user testing and didn't fulfill this potential.
Typically, you should deemphasize your company's name in links, but a new guideline recommends frontloading the name for search engine links under certain conditions.
Information foraging shows how to calculate your content strategy's costs and benefits. A mixed diet that combines brief overviews and comprehensive coverage is often best.
Active voice is best for most Web content, but using passive voice can let you front-load important keywords in headings, blurbs, and lead sentences. This enhances scannability and thus SEO effectiveness.
Introductory text on Web pages is usually too long, so users skip it. But short intros can increase usability by explaining the remaining content's purpose.
To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.
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.
Lower-literacy users exhibit very different reading behaviors than higher-literacy users: they plow text rather than scan it, and they miss page elements due to a narrower field of view.
Excessive word count and worthless details are making it harder for people to extract useful information. The more you say, the more people tune out your message.
Search engine ads are one type of Web advertising that can actually work. To create the best ads, do quick experiments and redesign ads based on usability principles for online writing. Doing so helped us increase ad click-through by 55% to 310%.
A website's tagline must explain what the company does and what makes it unique among competitors. Two questions can help you assess your own tagline: Would it work just as well for competitors? Would any company ever claim the opposite?
Corporations spend millions on PR, and yet the press sections of their websites often fail to meet journalists' most basic information needs. In our recent usability study, journalists found answers to only 68% of their questions across a range of corporate sites.
Regulatory agencies should not transfer their rules from the print world unchanged to Web content that is being read in a different manner. Instead, regulations should concern the usability of the actual information and whether users understand it.