Monday, October 29, 2007

Passive Voice Web Headings

Passive Voice Is Redeemed For Web Headings (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

Summary:
Active voice is best for most Web content, but using passive voice can let you front-load important keywords in headings, blurbs, and lead sentences. This enhances scannability and thus SEO effectiveness.

Traditional writing guidelines are clear on the use of passive voice:

  • Worst: The passive voice should be avoided.
  • Bad: The passive voice should be avoided by writers.
  • Better: Writers should avoid using passive voice.
  • Best: Writers should use active voice.
When structuring a sentence, active voice ("Actor does X to Object") is usually better than passive voice ("Object has X done to it by Actor") because it more directly represents the action. As a result, readers don't have to jump through as many cognitive hoops when trying to understand what's going on. . . . .

When Passive Voice = $$$

. . . recent findings from our eyetracking research emphasized the overwhelming importance of getting the first 2 words right, since that's often all users see when they scan Web pages. Given this, we have to bend the writing guidelines a bit, especially for elements that users fixate on when they scan — that is, headlines, subheads, summaries, captions, hypertext links, and bulleted lists.

Just like newspaper headlines

Selecting the first 2 words for your page titles is probably the highest-impact ROI-boosting design decision you make in a Web project. Front-loading important keywords trumps most other design considerations.

Writing the first 2 words of summaries runs a close second. Here, too, you might want to succumb to passive voice if it lets you pull key terms into the lead.

The importance of good page titles and summaries goes far beyond traditional search engine optimization (SEO) and its narrow focus on getting a high GYM rating (that is, a high ranking on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft search listings). Usable and scannable results in your site's own search engine greatly impacts your website's conversion rate. And search usability is key for intranet productivity.

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Copyright © 2007 by Jakob Nielsen. ISSN 1548-5552

Friday, October 19, 2007

Acquisition of RootsWeb.com

Ancestry.com

San Francisco, CA – June 21, 2000 – MyFamily.com, Inc., the leading online family network, announced today that it has entered into an agreement to acquire RootsWeb.com, the oldest and largest free community genealogy site. RootsWeb.com, a San Francisco, California company, is among the most popular genealogy sites on the Internet. With more than 149 million page views in the month of May 2000, RootsWeb.com was second among genealogy Web sites only to Ancestry.com's over 187 million page views, according to Nielsen NetRatings combined home and work statistics. With the acquisition MyFamily.com, Inc. will add RootsWeb.com to its portfolio of Web sites, which includes MyFamily.com, FamilyHistory.com, as well as Ancestry.com, collectively recognized as the premier Internet destination for families. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Following the acquisition, the RootsWeb.com site will continue to be free to all users and will maintain its own unique Web site address, www.RootsWeb.com. The acquisition by MyFamily.com, Inc. will provide the RootsWeb.com site the financial backing to expand its focus on preserving, sharing, and exchanging family history research. As part of the MyFamily.com network of sites, the RootsWeb.com site will expand with additional technology tools, increased family research content and a greater range of genealogical resources.

With genealogy as one of the most popular hobbies online, the addition of RootsWeb.com extends MyFamily.com's offerings in genealogy research and further enhances its leading position in genealogy research and family services on the Internet. This new combination creates a central destination for the genealogy community online, offering something for every family historian. This move comes at a time when a recent Pew Internet and American Life Study reported that 54 million people belong to a family in which someone used the Internet to research their family history or genealogy.