@Publish

Authorship photos might cause people to assume that the page is an article or a blog post rather than a product page.

most pages can be optimized by including images that serve as visual cues for where visitors should look next.

According to this study from the Nielsen Group, all across articles, e-commerce sites, and search engine results, people almost always browse in an F-shaped pattern that heavily favors the left side of the screen.

This dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F and has the following three components: Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F's top bar. Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F's lower bar. Finally, users scan the content's left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F's stem.

The F viewing pattern is a rough, general shape rather than a uniform, pixel-perfect behavior.

Users won't read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. Exhaustive reading is rare, especially when prospective customers are conducting their initial research to compile a shortlist of vendors. Yes, some people will read more, but most won't. The first two paragraphs must state the most important information. There's some hope that users will actually read this material, though they'll probably read more of the first paragraph than the second. Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content in the final stem of their F-behavior. They'll read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words.

Gaze patterns users commonly exhibit and accommodating these behaviors F-pattern Layer Cake Pattern Bypassing Pattern Spotted Pattern Commitment Pattern Scanning vs. reading, why people do it, and how to drive user behavior with your design

Kick effect: People look at the last result on a SERP before leaving the page. (The tenth organic result, on a page of 10 results, is the lowest result looked at in 12% of cases versus 7% combined for the seventh, eighth, and ninth results. In 59% of cases people looked no farther than the third organic result.)

Other patterns such as skipping, backtracking, love at first sight, zigzag, re-acclimating, and bypassing

79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word. (Update: a newer study found that users read email newsletters even more abruptly than they read websites.)

Web pages have to employ scannable text, using highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others) meaningful sub-headings (not "clever" ones) bulleted lists one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph) the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion half the word count (or less) than conventional writing

brands invest $44 billion in content every year.

The modern-day marketer balances left- and right-brain thinking. They use SEO and technology as an enabler and distributor, using content marketing creativity to build holistic content and SEO programs that result in measurable business outcomes.

SEO and content strategies need to be aligned for optimal marketing performance, yet the costs and time associated with training and development can negatively impact productivity, scale and revenue. This catch 22 makes it difficult to achieve such levels of collaboration, and divergence remains.

“Posting pictures to Facebook only works well, if the pictures are self-explanatory.”

Pictures outperform everything. Our friends at KISSmetrics put it the best way, showing that this counts for likes, clicks, shares and comments alike:

if you have created a Twitter following that you can use to validate your blogpost headlines and ideas, I think this is one of the most powerful ways to make sure none of your precious time goes to waste. You can of course use that same technique for Facebook too, in case Twitter is not your forte.

A new chart from Flurry, a mobile analytics company, shows that over 86% of the time spent in iOS and Android apps is taking place inside applications. That’s up 6% from just last year.

In print design, we’re told that serif fonts are considered the most readable. The serifs purportedly serve as aids to the eye, moving you from one letter to the next in a smoother fashion.

The bottom line is that the fewer details a font needs to convey a character clearly, the more readable it will appear on a broader range of screens.

the current consensus–at least as close as anyone can get to one–is that sans-serif fonts are still superior for screen body text, and serif fonts are best used for headings. For many users with newer displays, though, the difference is negligible.

100 characters is the engagement sweet spot for a tweet. 

a spike in retweets among those in the 71-100 character range—so-called “medium” length tweets. These medium tweets have enough characters for the original poster to say something of value and for the person retweeting to add commentary as well.

the ultra-short 40-character posts received 86 percent higher engagement than others.

Only 34% of websites use a serif typeface for body copy.

Two thirds of the websites we surveyed used sans-serif fonts for body copy.

the most popular font sizes ranged from 18 to 29 pixels, with 18 to 20 pixels and 24 to 26 pixels being the most popular choices.

Anything from 45 to 75 characters is widely-regarded as a satisfactory length of line for a single-column page set in a serifed text face in a text size. The 66-character line (counting both letters and spaces) is widely regarded as ideal.

The optimal line length for your body text is considered to be 50-60 characters per line, including spaces (“Typographie”, E. Ruder). Other sources suggest that up to 75 characters is acceptable.

In order to avoid the drawbacks of too long and too short lines, but still energize your readers and keep them engaged, we suggest keeping it within the range of 50-75 characters per line.

The optimal line length for your body text is considered to be 50-60 characters per line, including spaces (“Typographie”, E. Ruder). Other sources suggest that up to 75 characters is acceptable.

a recent study by Shareaholic found that post-click engagement with Facebook posts trailed far behind the results delivered by YouTube, and also lagged behind Google Plus, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Shareaholic examined six months’ worth of data from more than 200,000 websites reaching more than 250 million unique monthly visitors

YouTube drives the most engaged traffic. These referrals have the lowest average bounce rate (43.19 percent), the highest pages per visit (2.99), and the longest visit duration (227.82 seconds).

video watchers are especially receptive to links within video descriptions that complement the audio and visual content they just consumed.

Facebook's Newsfeed algorithm, formerly called EdgeRank

It's becoming apparent that there's a still a misconception in some circles around the idea that Facebook is an agnostic platform—akin to a public plaza—that doesn't systematically curate the user experience. Indeed, it's become safe to say that the Menlo Park, Calif.-based digital giant is tweaking its algorithm to highlight content in a fashion that's not unlike a newspaper or magazine's online presence.

just as Google has reworked its search algorithm over the years to the chagrin of SEO marketers, Facebook's maneuvers are now making publishers rethink their Newsfeed strategies. Whether more ad spend is the result of this thought process remains to be seen.

50 percent of social network users share or repost news stories, images, or videos, while 46 percent discuss news or current events on their networks, and 11 percent have submitted their own content to news websites or blogs. Pew reiterated its findings from a report earlier this month that Internet users who arrive at the 26 news websites it analyzed by directly typing in those sites’ URLs or via bookmarks spend far more time on those sites, view more pages, and return more times per month that Internet users who arrive via Facebook.

78 percent of Facebook users see news while they are on the social network for other reasons. Only 34 percent of Facebook news consumers like news organizations or individual journalists, which Pew interprets to mean that most of the news they see on the social network is shared by their friends. Facebook news consumers reported seeing entertainment news the most, followed by “people and events in my community,” sports, national government/politics, crime, health/medicine, and local government/politics. News consumers on LinkedIn were high earners and college-educated, while those from Twitter were younger than those from Facebook, Google Plus, and LinkedIn.

One-half of Facebook users get news there even though they did not go there looking for it. And the Facebook users who get news at the highest rates are 18- to-29-year-olds.