Banner ads: no one really likes them. They’re not interesting to create, they look pretty horrible and, quite frankly, they can be very annoying.

So why have we just uploaded a new banner ad to promote our Reputation Monitor? 

These annoying little flashing ads really grab peoples’ attention and can drive traffic to the right pages on your site. More visitors hopefully means more conversions.

If a banner ad is a subtle and harmoniously designed feature that blends in beautifully with the rest of a page then no one is going to notice it. It has to be glaringly obvious to grab a visitor’s attention and drag them away from the content that they are/were originally trying to look at.

Bright colours, big shiny click-able buttons – rotating, flashing or twinkling elements help too. Banner ads are also very small. Imagine a crowd of adults talking at a normal level and just one child. This child my have to scream to be noticed amongst this crowd; this is effectively what a banner ad has to do, really SHOUT for attention. 

As there is a limited amount of space you may also want to use several frames that rotate to be able to get a few messages across to the visitor. However, people don’t have all day so make it as short and snappy as possible.

This banner ad was made using Photoshop.  Photoshop has the ability to make animated gifs using a number of frames and setting the amount of time that you would like the frame to appear for. The frames are created in layers and you select specific layers to be visible for certain frame lengths.  Here are the three frames we have used:

When uploading your banner ad with Google Adwords, file size is very important.  Banners may need to be as small as 50kb to be accepted.

To keep file size down, remember: 

• Complex images use more colours.
• Avoid big imagery
• Avoid long transparent fades between frames
• Stick to a small colour pallet
• You can also limit the amount of colours used when saving the file for web – this is a delicate process as too few colours can cause image quality to deteriorate too much.

Also, when creating ads for Google Adwords there are specific banner dimensions that must be considered.

If you design or use banner ads we would love to hear what works best for you.  We are always looking to improve our click through rate and would love to hear what you find really attracts visitors’ attention and converts well.

Finally, what was our banner for? Reputation Monitor helps monitor what is being said about your company and allows you to protect your brand online – visit our site to find out more.

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The last couple of weeks, I’ve used these linkbait posts to feature sites that have done well by creating content that their existing users love. MacLife and Outdoor Online are two great examples of this. However, content that your users love isn’t necessarily content that the rest of the internet is going to link to. In fact, in an interesting example that Will brought to my attention, sometimes the exact opposite can happen. Eharmony.com wrote a piece called 20 Movies That Make Men Cry. It only got 1.3 stars out of 5 from the internal voting system (for which you to be a paid up member). But it’s one of the strongest pages on the site, with tons of links and about a gazillion comments, (read: 1237).

If you get new linkbait ideas from looking at successful old stuff, whether it’s your own site or a competitor’s, you should be aware of this ‘phenomenon’. Rather than just using internal metrics (most starred or whatever), to get ideas, think more about what gets links.

Will found that eHarmony post using SEOmoz’s Labs tool Top Pages (only available to pro members- sorry!) and it got me thinking about how we could use it to make our linkbait more successful.

Pick a niche, any niche. No wait, scratch that. Pick your client’s niche. I’m randomly going to chose lifestyle blogs (researching SEM tends to get a bit self-reflexive in this sort of endeavor). Now identify some top players in that niche. I used Technorati, but feel free to determine your top competitors however you want.

These are mine: (I’ve linked to the ‘moz Top Pages tool reports because I know a lot of our readers are Pro Members any way. Sorry if you’re not! Hopefully, the post will still be useful)

1 – http://marenda.biz/ (Report)

Living Life Abundantly

Five of the pages in the top ten advise on earning or saving money. Tips on how to earn or save effectively within your industry is a great idea for some linkbait. It falls under the ‘resource’ hook and can be surprisingly easy to research and write. Say, for example, your client has a website that sells lamps. How about something like ‘Shedding light on surviving the credit crunch’.

2 – http://www.ecosalon.com/ (Report)

How do you go green without sacrificing style?

No single obvious theme sticks out as clearly within the top ten pages on this site. There are three stories that talk about food and health- each giving advice of some sort. Four pages reference ’science’ or ‘expertise’ in their title and five have a number in the title (three of those are lists). Recipe for success? Top 10 Healthy Beds, according to our Experts.

3 – http://happymundane.blogspot.com/ (Report)

4 – http://designersblock.blogspot.com/ (Report)

A place to share inspirations and ideas.

These sites are both beautiful design blogs. There are no common themes among the top ten posts (that I could spot anyway) apart from the fact that most of the posts were very short and simple. A prominent image, or collection of images, was used to tell most of the story. There were also a couple of ‘How To’ posts that did very well (another kind of resource). If your niche is design heavy, there’s a real chance that simply sharing beautiful images that you find will bring in links.

I’ll definitely be using this tool to help me come up with linkbait ideas in the future. For the record, my over-riding impression is that the most linked to pages are the ones that fall under the ‘resource’ hook.

One last note: as Richard Baxter pointed out in his youmoz post, there are loads of useful things you can do with this tool, one of which is to find strong pages that 404. I’d like to hold testament to this; I found a surprising amount of 404 pages in the top 10 lists of lots of sites. Definitely worth an explore through your own domains.

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This week I have come across a couple of interesting ways that the web is just a little bit broken.

Strange Cloaking from the Telegraph

The first is some strange behaviour from the Telegraph blogs area. Try viewing this page in the following three ways:

1. normally, with cookies enabled, via your usual browser
2. via a browser with cookies disabled
3. with cookies disabled identifying yourself as any of the main search engines’ crawler in your useragent

What you will see is:

1:

2:

3:

I have a few questions about this, but the main ones are:

1. WHY? If your site doesn’t break without cookies (as evidenced by the fact it works for search engine spiders), why stop people browsing without cookies? It can’t be to do with advertising tracking because the main Telegraph site works fine without cookies.
2. If you must do this, could you not at least return an error code on the page you deliver users telling them your site is broken? A “200 OK” breaks the internet. Really.

I’m not sure what I think about this from the search engines’ perspective. It’s clearly against the letter of the guidelines (treating googlebot et al differently based on their user-agents) yet in many ways it doesn’t actually go against the spirit of the guidelines as the search engines are served the same content that the majority of users see. We had a vigorous debate in the office about how we would treat this behaviour if we were a search engine. I’m not quite sure. I’d like to stop it happening (I feel it breaks the internet) but it doesn’t really feel bad enough to get penalised. What do you think? What would you do?

Unfortunate Geo-Delivery from the BBC

Try a Google search like this site:news.bbc.co.uk/weather and you will find the homepage has a title tag of “BBC Weather | United States of America”.

Strange, huh? For such a solidly UK-centric organisation to have its weather homepage US-focussed? That’s what I thought.

Browse there (at least from the UK) and you find a title tag of “BBC Weather | United Kingdom”. Not a perfect title tag, I wouldn’t have said (I would have wanted “UK” and “forecast” in there I think) but a lot better.

The BBC (the beeb! of all people) have fallen prey to what I called the world series spidering problem in an SEOmoz post last year – that since the search engines typically send their spiders out from the US, if you blindly geo-deliver content, you will end up with your US-focussed content being indexed.

Ironically, if the BBC really wants to geo-deliver US-focussed content to US visitors (while presumably being more focussed on the UK market, given their funding!), arguably they should be engaged in the kind of ‘conditional delivery’ the Telegraph is doing. Should they show the search engines their UK-focussed ‘primary market’ content while showing regular US browsers US-targeted content?

Incidentally, this results in all kinds of ranking confusions – I’ll leave trying out all the combinations of searches for weather forecasts in the UK and US from the UK and US to the interested reader.

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This week I have picked out three bits of linkbait with the common theme of travel and adventure. To recap quickly on the aims of this post (using some feedback from last week), I want to: highlight a few pieces of linkbait, discuss why they worked well and to think about what we can learn from them.

1. Bootsnall is a wonderful self-proclaimed ‘Travel Network’. They produce a lot of great content and this is just one example: Nine Most Disappointing Attractions in Europe. The piece got 27 SU reviews, 19 upvotes on reddit and just 2 Diggs. Yahoo Site Explorer reports 65 links.

2. Outdoor Online is a huge site that, again, bashes out a lot of great content. However, this week’s biggest hitter, this article, is really old. It was picked up and submitted to reddit by a writer who was researching “death by freezing“. The piece got 6 reviews on SU, 1593 upvotes on Reddit and just 5 Diggs. YSE reports 435 links but it’s obviously hard to tell which of these came as a result of the piece recently being linkbaited.

3. Lastly, dezeen.com, a design magazine, featured a tea house in Japan; it went hot on digg with the headline “The scariest Teahouse ever [pics]“. The piece got 7 reviews on SU, 40 upvotes on Reddit and 705 Diggs. YSE reports 208 links.

The Bootsnall is a similar example to last week’s MacLife linkbait. Good content, appeal to their target audience and in a list format. This post also gets a lot of points for controversy. Going against the grain is a well recognised technique of grabbing attention. This post taps into something more than that though. I think it has something to do with the use of ‘most disappointing’ rather than ‘worst’. People love to complain and you’ll notice that the experiences on this list are mostly ones that the majority of people reading this will have experienced some of themselves. The title brings out the camaraderie of its readers.

The Outdoor Online post is a bit of an anomaly but I think it’s definitely worth thinking about why it did so well on Reddit. Firstly, it was submitted well. Reddit’s a very sharp crowd but this is so obviously a genuine submission no-one’s going to object. Secondly, read the post. It’s extremely well written- you’ll get pulled in right to the end even if you’ve got a hectic day. This kind of magnetic content is gold-dust and obviously has a pricey time and effort bill attached to it. Lastly, it’s a very personal story. If you look at the comments on Reddit, you’ll see that a vast majority of them have some kind of experience of cold to share.

Lastly, the Dezeen post (which, I know, is not strictly a piece of travel linkbait). The images in this post are what makes it work. There are 13 of them on one page and very little text to accompany. The personal story of the tea house architect is told briefly along with some information about its construction. I really love this kind of post and actually find it difficult to do; I always want to ‘bulk out’ the images, when in fact, if left to their own devices, they’ll tell the story themselves.

Lots of contradictions today. I think the strongest theme between the three pieces is about connecting with the reader, whether it be through camaraderie, anecdotes or a catalogue of imagery.

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We’ve already seen demographic targeting for some time on Google’s content network but now they are taking a step further and offering behaviour-based advertising. By tracking your surfing habits, they will be able to display adverts based on your interests rather than the content of the page that you are reading. This area of advertising has been getting a fair amount of press recently due to Phorm, who have had trouble launching their service due to questions of legality. Opponents have claimed that the analysis of web users’ browsing habits is an invasion of privacy and the Information Commissioner’s Office has backed this up to an extent by declaring that “Phorm would only be legal under UK law if it were an opt-in service”.

Google is offering users the opportunity to opt out and so avoids this problem but there will still be many people unhappy with the move. Privacy online is a problematic area and Google already has vast quantities of data about our browsing habits. However let’s ignore the legal and ethical questions and talk about this new toy we have to play with and what its benefits are to us, the advertiser.

One of the problems that contextual advertisers have is that people can tend to become ‘snow blind’ to adverts that mirror the content that is being read. If you are reading about socks and then a sock advert comes up then, to an extent, this will not stand out and you will blank it out. With behavioural advertising you would be able to counter this by providing out-of-context adverts that are still relevant to the specific user’s interests. This should then jar with the reading of the page, catching the eye and, because the advert is relevant to their interests, should mean that the user is more likely to click and crucially convert. Potentially this is a powerful tool and could be a big boost to the effectiveness of the content network if used correctly. However it should be noted that this out-of-context effect does not work across all areas equally so there would still need to be a lot of analysis to get the most out of it.

Personally I look forward to testing this out. I think that for certain clients this will prove to be a really useful and productive avenue for advertising with the potential to raise clickthrough and conversion rates significantly. Although it seems like a big step forward in advertising, I think that, with the speed that the space is developing, this will quickly seem mundane and normal as newer and better tools and services create new debates over privacy and the power of the internet giants. For the moment though this is the ‘next big thing’ and it will be fascinating to see how it develops.

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The Search team at Distilled has a linkbait meeting most Thursdays. Sometimes it’s for clients, sometimes it’s for our projects and sometimes it’s just to talk about some of the awesome ideas we keep having. One of the ideas that came out of our last meeting was to trial a ‘Weekly Linkbait Roundup’. It’s obviously still in beta but I think this could be a really useful regular post (even though I’m not sure what it will evolve into yet!), and I’d love your feedback.

I have three initial aims for it, at least to begin with:

i) to highlight a few of the best or most interesting bits of linkbait produced in the last week. (We’re not trying to ‘call’ people out here. All we want to do is take a look at some of the great content that’s been produced and discuss why it fits the ‘linkbait’ mold.)

ii) to discuss why they worked well

iii) to idly wonder if we can learn from their success in some way

1. First up, we have a post from www.maclife.com. It’s entitled 50 Things Every Mac Geek Should Know. It went hot on Digg with 2251 diggs, did ok on reddit and got loads of stumble and delicious love. Links wise, Yahoo site explorer is reporting about 250 inbound links.

2. Next, here’s a wonderful post entitled Clever and Creative Bus Advertising from www.toxel.com, a design, inspiration and tech website that produces a lot of really great content. It has 1010 diggs, 60 points on reddit and has two Stumble stars (does anyone have a better metric than this? Apart from reviews?). 58 inbound links reported by YSE.

3. Lastly, we have this Hearing Test, (a follow up to the Can you hear like a teenager post). The latter did very well online, with 3268 diggs, a whole load of attention on reddit as well as 72 comments on the post itself. YSE reports 152 inbound links.

Right, so we know they worked. But how exactly. What is it about these three bits of content that makes them appealing to the social media crowd at large?

If you’ve got a well know enough brand that appeals to a niche there is absolutely nothing stopping you churning out regular, successful content. This is the case with MacLife. According to di66.net, the site had 16 stories go hot on digg in the last year and over half of those used something similar to the list format that works so well here. The Mac niche is a passionate one and this article appeals directly to that- challenging readers to “back up the passion” or “test your know-how against our list”. Irresistible. Beyond that, the post is nicely (although not that nicely) laid out and will have genuinely interested a lot of its target audience.

The Toxel post was successful for a couple of similar reasons: it was in a list format and was of genuine interest to its regular users. Its layout was much easier on the eye than the MacLife post with identical format for each example (big, clear header and wide, bordered image). Unlike the MacLife post, there is virtually no introduction to the content; the images speak for themselves much more capably than the Mac geek facts would.

The NoiseAddict post was successful for different reasons. Firstly, the title on both the page itself and the Digg submission is challenging: Can you hear THIS? and Do You Know How Deaf You Are? There is an explicit invitation to interact in both of these. Of course, the content must deliver on this invitation and, in this instance, it does. Importantly, the test gives you a verdict on your hearing age, which you can compare both to the norm and to other commenters. This kind of ‘benchmarking’ has a high hit-rate in social media.

So, to the last aim of this roundup, what, if anything, can we learn from this content. I’ll be taking three lessons away:

1. Great content. I know it’s been said before a million times but it’s Just. So. True. It’s particularly true if you can generate content that is aimed at your existing readership; get them on board and talking about it and you’re much more likely to bring in new visitors.

2. Lists work. Even if they’re not that pretty.

3. If you challenge your readers in some way, you MUST give them a space in which to discuss/dispute the results.

Hope some of that was helpful y’all. Comments and suggestions for how this sort of post could be made more useful would be much appreciated! Thanks.

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Over the weekend I spoke at Think Visibility, a good fun one day conference in Leeds. You can read my review over on SEOmoz. Below is my presentation for anyone who missed it.

Reputation Management – Tom Critchlow’s Talk from Think Visibility

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Design for the web is considerably different to designing for print. This post discusses ten ways they differ and explains how we at Distilled design for the web.

As a web designer, I’m constrained by the build. Not all designers and developers follow the constraints that I’m used to, but Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Accessibility and Usability are key features which dictate the conventions we use.

Firstly, for those of you who don’t know let me explain what these terms mean:

SEO – All our websites are designed and built with SEO in mind. SEO is the process of increasing the amount of traffic a website receives by improving its ranking within Search Engines. This optimisation primarily involves finding and using key words and building links.

Accessibility – We build with accessibility in mind to ensure that people of all abilities and disabilities can use our websites. This covers visual impairments, mobility and auditory problems.

example the Nike website
This website has especially poor accessibility, and people who use screen readers are likely to have javascript disabled so would consequently view this web page like this:

Nike website with javascript disabled

When it should look like this:

Nike website with javascript enabled

Usability – This involves making websites easy for visitors, without requiring them to need specialised training. Any visitor to the site should be able to use the website’s features and understand the functionality in seconds; a website should be self explanatory. Following certain widely used conventions will aid this process.

So, getting back on track, if Accessibility, SEO and Usability are high on your agenda take note of our Top 10 tips for Web Design (and how it differs to print).

In print any font can be used, but on the web specific fonts have been chosen to ensure the font is likely to be present on a wide range of computer systems. If a non-web-safe font is used then it is likely that it will just be substituted anyway. There is very little control over this so it is wise to choose from the limited choice that is available. Web safe fonts only apply to copy that is editable. If your copy is an image then it will not be visible in search engines which is a bit of a no-go when it comes to SEO.

On the web using lots of very large high quality images especially background images will cause excessively long loading. People get bored very quickly on the web so this increases the likeliness of a high bounce rate. There are still limitations for print design, but these concern different issues.

When images are prepared for the web they are all either squares or rectangles even if an image is visually an obscure shape it will be prepared as a square or rectangle. A perfect example of where this hinders a design is: Silvercube

The original design had copy coming up to the diagonal slant on the imagery, however, diagonal copy is very hard to reproduce within the build; each line would have to be in a separate box to create the diagonal affect. This is especially hard when working with content manager systems.

A separate text field would have been required for each line.

The design had to be changed so that the copy was in a straight column, this has left quite a strange gap, where there is no content:

If you think of website design in a building block fashion it really helps to make everything a little clearer. In print design images can easily have copy floating over them.

Diagonal lines on the web generally cause distortion because of the square format of pixels. Lines can often look jagged and appear to have notches within them as opposed to being smooth.

Notches created when the lines cross over pixels.

Below is an enlarged section of line ‘2′, enabling us to see where the line is distorted as it crosses over pixels.

Close up of pixels in example ‘2′

This is not always the case but it is something to consider when preparing the images for web that they are at a high enough resolution. Print isn’t concerned with pixels but instead dpi (dots per inch). Higher resolutions of 300dpi are used as apposed to 72dpi (for web); this ensures imagery is clear.

Print design allows you to design for any style format you desire. A4, A3 or a massive banner. Web design on the other hand has limitations regarding the width of the website this is usually between 800 and 1024px wide. Confusingly this width is ever increasing as the majority of the general publics monitors become larger with larger resolutions. The height of a website however is limitless but peoples patience with scrolling may be less so!

With print the use of subtle gray hairline thin copy is often seen as clean and minimal design. The web has been built as a user friendly environment catering for everyone even people with visual impairments. Some browsers have minimum text sizes to ensure copy is legible for everyone; this could alter your design significantly once it is live. Below is an example of how tabbing up enables people who are visually impaired to see a website in various sizes.

Original size

Larger

Much larger

When sending files to print you will have a relatively good idea of how the output will look and large print runs are proofed to ensure a high quality finish every time. The web on the other hand has limited control on how the user sees the final website. The design you see can differ considerably in different browsers, much cross browser testing has to be done prior to the launch to ensure websites can be viewed as consistently as possible.

Print. Whether it is a poster or a page in a book, usually the whole page can be viewed at once. Web pages differ. The fold limits what can be viewed at once. Everything above the fold can be viewed without having to scroll. The fold consequently means that all the most important elements on a website need to be positioned above this point, so considering the hierarchy of elements is even more important.

When printing block colour, difficulties can arise with colour banding and colour bleeding into non colour filled spaces. Web block colour backgrounds can hinder legibility. Why are there still websites out there that use bright red as a background colour! White text on a dark background creates an optical illusion making it seem bolder than black copy on a white background. This can be particularly confusing for people with learning difficulties, letters get jumbled and long blocks of text can become confusing.

It has been proven that people have a shorter attention span when searching for something on the web than they do when trying to locate something in print. This is really where usability come into play. Ensure you really organise information well and present users with choices in an obvious way (conventions can really come into their own here). Remember if people don’t find what they are looking for easily they will get tired and navigate away from your site very quickly.

Keeping these ten points in mind will help when designing a website, especially if you are looking at a career change from print to web. These points should minimise the difficulties often experienced when turning designs into a working website.

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A couple of words collided for me the other day. The first was conversation, which Ciaran wrote about recently, arguing eloquently that the word is being horribly misused by marketers. The second was controversy, which has, for a long time, been discussed (and implemented) all over the place as, in part, a means to generate buzz.

I studied a painstaking Latin module at uni and have never quite got rid of the need to break words down to be able to fully understand them. A form of versus appears in both conVERSation and controVERSy. Versus has several meanings, but the root comes from the Latin ‘to turn’. Now let’s take this with the ‘con’ of conversation and the ‘contro’ of controversy. Basically, con means ‘with’ and contra means ‘against’ So there we have it: conversation means ‘to turn with’ and controversy means ‘to turn against’.

I find it very interesting how these two words mean such different things in everyday use and yet how close they are etymologically. It’s difficult to have one without the other, particularly in a medium such as ours where so much relies on the communication of ideas. It’s all about the push and pull of engagement.

But of what earthly interest is this to all you marketers out there? What about a word that’s even closer to your hearts? Conversions. A word that is essentially made up of the same stuff as conversations and controversy. Turn with and against those you interact with and you’re one step closer to converting them.

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