All Your SEO Work was for Nothing
By Dave Maloney
You're chasing your visitors away as soon as they arrive!
You did all this SEO work to "Get Found", and you do have valuable content, but nobody's staying on your site very long and few (if any) are return visitors. If your readers' first impression of your page is stimulation overload, subconconsciously they've already decided "nope, I'm not going through all that" and they're reaching for the Back button.
If you have Google Analytics set up to track the traffic on your site you can check to see if you have a high Bounce-Rate, or a lot of visitors who just click-through your pages without staying long enough to read anything. So why aren't they sticking around to read all your valuable information?
How to Prevent Anyone from Reading your Content, or Typography 101
It's easy to point out right away when someone else does it, but you can't help doing it yourself...you know all the content on your page is important, and you don't want your readers to overlook any of it. So you may be tempted to:
- Bold whole sentences or entire paragraphs; (the whole thing is important, so why not?) -Well, it's painful on the eyes and hard to read. Rethink what's really the most important part of the message, and only put that in bold; remember "Less is Really More?"
- Set the whole column in neon red to draw attention; (bright colors demand attention!) -Everyone is drawn to bright, shiny things, but keep it tasteful: Use colors that compliment your site's colors, or if it really needs the neon emphasis, just try to keep in mind that a little goes a long way.
- IF IT'S REALLY CRUCIAL, TYPE IN ALL CAPS. (or even better, all caps and bold!) -ALL CAPS IS YELLING IN TYPE! ALL CAPS IS YELLING IN TYPE! Aside from being painful to look at and really hard to read, nobody likes being yelled at, so please just stick to upper and lower case as nature intended!
(I thought about typing each of these in their "what not to do" format, but would you still be here?)
Emphasizing with bold, italics, alternate colors, etc, are all great practices to break up the typography on your page and add visual interest. If you're not sure if you're overdoing it, have someone else take a look at it to see if they think it's starting to resemble the Vegas strip.
It's like if you used a highlighter in your high school textbooks to remind you what to study for the test:
If you highlight the whole page, nothing is highlighted.