For Better Blog Design; Understand and Analyze Eyetracking Trends

Designing a blog is different than designing a home page for a website. A blog’s main content is transient; appearing on the home page one day and not the next. Various design tactics have been tried, including displaying static front pages that look and act more like standard websites and home pages. To know what will work for your enterprise or design, a little analysis in advance of wireframing is a best practice.

As far back as the late 1800s, reading was observed as a series of short stops, not a smooth sweeping motion as was assumed. Emile Javal, a French ophthalmologist, uncovered the fact that our experience of seriality as we read was, in fact, made up of saccades which are quick, parallel movements of the eyes as they scan in a succession of fixations and discontinuous individual movements. Later, in the 50s, a Russian psychologist named Yarbus showed that there was a definite correlation between the time the eyes are still during this scanning and the subject’s interest in the task. He also showed, maybe more importantly, that the task itself influences the saccades and fixations.

It would seem then that balancing visitor interest and site layout, while understanding the tasks required of the visitor is the key to successful corporate blogs. One of the ways interactive designers can try to visualize this balancing act is eyetracking. Much has been written about it over the last 10 years by authors like Jakob Nielsen and Jared Spool. For designers, it offers the chance to see through their users’ eyes and watch them behave. Of course, nothing can be precisely determined with tests like eyetracking because each visitor has different knowledge gaps and levels of tech-savviness, but inferences can be made and statistical models can be created.

The most recent report from Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox shows different corporate blog designs offering different layouts, different content strategies, and different business goals, all resulting in different eyetracking patterns. In the Blog Front Pages article, Neilsen lays out the parameters for success based preferred topics, tone of voice, scannability and layout, charts vs. tables, and how readers interpret links, as well as the use of summaries or full articles. From the scanning tests done, Nielsen’s group makes these general recommendations:

1. Encourage selective reading by using summaries, especially when the blog touches on many topical areas.
2. Blending longer articles with shorter posts keeps the visitor focused on your message, but allows them to move on to other things naturally.
3. Use site analytics to determine what visitors are doing and where their interests lie – formulate your design and content structure accordingly.
4. Blogs with regular returning visitors or subscribers should feature longer articles because their visitors are returning for the next installment.
5. Making the most recent articles and posts available in a nearby widget or call-out gives the returning user what they need to find what they missed.
6. Let your visitors engage with lots of varied content styles and types – be bold enough to redesign when the analytics suggest it.

As you can see some of these same ideas can be extended to the design of home pages, product pages, landing pages and microsites. If you have other styles of corporate blog designs, have other suggestions for designing practice, or have other eyetracking links to share, please send me an email and/or a comment. For more about designing blogs click the link or use the tag widget.

What Aspects Of A Blog Have The Greatest Impact On Search?

Survey most blogs and you will find the same kinds of design elements: logo – banner art – main navigation – right-column and/or left-column navigation – call-out areas – contact info – images and captions – content blocks – sitemaps – comments – footer info. Because these elements are so prevalent, they’re often adopted and/or visually transformed without really understanding how blogs work or how to make blogs work better.

Anyone who has landed on a blog knows that the most recent post is the first one you see at the top of the page. Older blog posts are found below the newest post and on the following pages. Most blogs force the visitor to experiment with menu offerings to find what they want or rely on search features within the blog itself. In order to optimize the design and the experience of the blog for visitors and for search, a designer must ask: What do the search engines see on a blog and how do they assign value?

Search engine optimization practitioners generally agree that when a new post lands on the blog’s home page, that post’s value for search is at its highest point. Because of the way search engines index each page with their robotic algorithms, as each new post lands and pushes the older posts down the page, the older posts have less and less value. Most SEOs think that, as a post pushes off the home page and into archives, eventually the search value all but disappears. This makes the SEO attributes of a blog and of each individual blog post all important.

A simple way to counteract the decreasing SEO value would be to increase the overall page volume of the blog by adding content. There can be no doubt that this helps a blog attain critical mass and keeps it fresh. But adding content without developing an SEO-friendly strategy based on keywords and keyphrases will never produce the results most of us want from our blogs.

Keywords and keyphrases are the structure on which everything else is predicated – from search-friendly post titles and matching URLs, to permalinks, to the naming of categories and tags, to the search-friendly blog content, and should even extend to paid search, landing page development, and, further, to social media campaigns. Strategizing for search is really surveying how visitors understand your key topics linguistically and then framing the site’s design and content around these terms. This is done by researching user’s search patterns on the web. By testing what search engines return for results on important terms and modeling competitors and like-organizations, determinations can be made for mapping these your terms across the whole website.

So now the question is; what aspects of blogs should designers (and developers) focus on to insure the greatest impact on search engine-friendliness, now and in the future? For a list of must-haves for blogs from a search engine perspective, go to the designforseo blog post entitled, 18 SEO-Friendly Blog Tactics For Designers. Don’t hesitate to join the discussion if you have something salient to add.