Each day, thousands of people are going online
for the first time, naturally with little or no knowledge at all about the
Internet. "Great!", you might say. "That means more visitors to
my site." Well, not necessarily. Though the amount of Internet users is
growing at an incredible pace, knowledge of the average Internet user is
dropping.
You're wondering why? The reason is quite simple.
Connecting to the Internet is getting constantly cheaper (in some countries it's
even free) and so more people get an ISP. But these are people who generally
don't devote much time to surfing, and simply use the Internet from time to time
because "everyone else does it". And because they spend so little time
on the Internet, they also learn very little about how to use this information
highway. Let me illustrate the problem, as I think that will give you a better
picture of these users.
I've been monitoring some of the biggest portal
sites for a while now, and the search terms used by their visitors. After going
through the log files, I discovered that many of the most often used search
terms were complete URLs. What I mean by URLs being popular search terms is that
that they actually popped up in the log files more times than "baywatch",
which I think outlines the seriousness of it all ;-)
This means that there are lots of Internet users
out there who don't know that they actually can type the URL directly into the
"Location" field, hit enter and go directly to the page.
So what does this tell us? That we should put our
URL in our META tags? Well, that's actually not necessary since the search
engines glances at your URL as well, when searching for pages matching some
specific search term.
It does mean, however, that if you want any of
these surfing newbies to check out your site, you have to adjust it to them,
making it as user friendly as possible. The idea is to think back to those days
when you were a bit puzzled about the Internet yourself, and try figure out what
the newbie might be having trouble with at your site. Here are some things to
get you going:
Drop the
technical jargon
People react differently when there's something
they don't understand. Some just close it all out and decide not to care, while
others get angry. This isn't good for someone with a web site, because in both
cases, you'll lose visitors. Using too many acronyms or unfamiliar expressions
in site copy can also result in frustration.
Therefore, when writing articles or other types
of text for your web site, make yourself understood. If you have to use silly
acronyms, at least spell them out in parentheses, and explain them if you can.
And if you can't, you probably shouldn't be using that acronym anyway. Remember,
educate your readers - don't talk above their heads.
