Putting banners above the fold?

The first few seconds of viewing a website or blog are decisive in terms of whether the Internet user stays or not!  The area above the fold provides that first impression.

Couple that with the fact that the vast majority of Internet users dislike being blatantly advertised to means that the older style banner is generally not appropriate for an over the fold position on your home page.

The older style banner was brash, colourful and often flashed messages of graphics. They were mainly full page width, graphically based and generally slow to load.

Banners of this type were a popular way to monetize web pages not so long ago and still are in some niche markets. They can generated significant volumes of targeted generate niche traffic.

Monetization was generally provisioned on a pay per click basis and frequently managed by third parties who rotated the banners.

Can banners be appropriate over the fold?

We have used banners successfully in the past when placed over the fold to generate targeted niche traffic to affiliate sites; squeeze pages and generate pay per click revenue.

Banners work but their presentation and integration into a site has to be quite different from the older style.

Banners have to be subtle, visually in keeping and seamlessly integrated into the site. They must appear to be part of the site, not a bolt on component that doesn’t quite fit!

Enticing benefit statements with gentle invitations work well in conjunction with product based content. The same applies to page content based questions with banner based answers.

You can also combine content with a smaller graphical banner in a side bar as a combined page entity

Remember to incorporate keywords and keyphrases that can be read by search engine spiders and capitalise on in the text from SEO perspective.

The content of the page needs to have relevancy not only to your niche market, its keywords and phrases but also to the banner’s statement so the page has a cohesive feel about it and visually has a good fit.

Conclusion

In conclusion, banners can be used successfully above the fold, at the top of the page or in one of the side bars, preferably on the right hand side of the page

Plan carefully so the banner is fully integrated into the page

Banners still have a place and you will be surprised at how well they work and can generate niche traffic that you can direct to wherever you want it to go!

Kind regards Chris Nizzi

Create better content – reduce stopwords

The terms ‘Stopword’ or ‘Stopwords’, are used by Google and others to describe words that do not add relevant content in the semantic sense to a piece of text.

Generally these include adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions though this is not always the case! A few common examples are ‘and’, ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘is’, ‘to’, ‘why’ and ‘if’.

Some retrieval systems have far more extensive lists. The University of Neuchatel have extensive Stopword lists in many languages. For English look at the second table in the column entitled ‘Stopword List‘. There is also a table of the most frequently used English words which is also worth a look.

Natural language text or data is generally stored in text search and retrieval systems such as search engines and document storage systems.

Some systems however replace stopwords with tokens or markers in stored text to save on storage and speed up search results. When the retrieved text is returned as the result of a search, the full natural language version of the text is displayed.

Goggle indexes Stop Words.

What is regarded as a Stop Word varies from system to system, their sophistication and needs and this has a direct bearing on how we optimise text.

We all use keywords and phrases in the text we write for our blogs and websites.

The main reason we incorporate niche market relevant keywords and phrases is that we will increase the number of times our web page is found from an SEO perspective. The caveat is that our textural content has to be regarded as sufficiently relevant to the search to be included in the SERPs.

If we regard the textural content as our web site’s or blog’s real estate, how can we further increase its value?

Without doubt, we need to write in a natural flowing way for the benefit of our readers.

However, by ensuring that we use language and terminology that is niche specific, we can reduce the number words that are traditionally regarded as stopwords and increase our relevant and indexed content.

The result will be more concise posts or pages that are truly subject driven.

It is also important to consider how people search on the web. Search Engines allow researchers to specifically include stopwords by enclosing a search term in parenthesis or by using the + sign. Look at Google’s page entitled Use of common words

So we have to also think about where stopwords might have a valid place. Here are two examples but there are more:

• Page titles and headings
  • These should be in natural English and include stopwords. They are first thing the reader will look at when scanning a post or web page. It is also a likely place to include a key phrase or sentence incorporating keywords.
• Anchor text
  • Link text should include stopwords to make sense to the reader but also because it should match the destination from the SEO perspective.  (Will be the subject of another post)

If a post or page is focusing on a single keyword or phrase, we need to be wary of crowding it.

None of this means we have to spam keywords or phrases, or that we write in a stilted and rigid way.

It means we have to carefully consider how we achieve a good balance between textural optimization from the SEO perspective and general readability.

Part of our series on SEO Terminology