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Applying onsite seo to website template (or why separation of code and content is a good thing)

Posted by Duncan Morris on Aug 29, 2008

Posted by Duncan Morris

There are lots of people who would class themselves as a developer and would say they can code in any given language. Often the difference between a good developer and a great developer isn't anything to do with the program, how well it works, and how few bugs there are. The great developers make programs that work but they make them in a way that isolates the various components from each other.

I want to run through a few examples and apply these very same thought processes to seo. There are a number of places where it would be beneficial to separate the various logical components of, for example a web site.

Many of you will have heard of the acronym MVC (Model - View - Controller), which is one example of a software pattern designed to separate the various components of a website. In this case the pattern is designed to separate the information storage (the model), from the user interface (the view). The controller manages the communication between the view and the model.

In a large development team you often find experts in each stages of the development, so you have someone who understands the model (which normally maps to a database) and all the business rules. At the front end (the view) you have experts in html and css. I've never quite been able to separate the role of the controller from the model, so I'll skim over that and hope you don't notice.

No matter what software pattern is used to code your webpage it is (and has been for a long while) good practice to separate the structure of a site from the presentation of the site. The HTML should contain no information about how to display the page. This should purely be the structure and semantic information required for the page. This is one of the major failings of websites that use tables for layout purposes, which in almost all situations has to place a lot of the presentational information within the HTML.

The final level of separation that most websites employ is to separate the content from the structure of the site. This is normally done by placing the content in a database, and embedding this in the HTML when the page is requested.

In fact we (and many others) take this one step further and store this content in a text based format with (the majority) of HTML stripped out, and replaced with a markup language called markdown. This means our clients don't have to learn HTML in order to update their website, but by following a few simple rules we can still have semantically marked up code.

The theory is all well and good, but how does this help you as an SEO. Just like a development team the main benefit is that you can have different people working on different areas of the site.

1. Technical site review changes

The vast majority, if not all changes we request early on in a project are found in a technical site review which should be implemented by the team working on the backend (or often the template of a site). This can normally be looked at completely separately from any content changes, and can be implemented as such.

Those of you without a templating system, will almost certainly know the heartache involved with having to update every page of a site to make a simple change. That was the way most sites were written 6,7 or 8 years ago, and is why most of those sites were rarely updated.

2. Content creation

In most large organisations its hard enough asking people creating content to think in terms of keywords. The last thing you want is for them to also be the ones creating the html. By separating the content from the template you can ensure that the content created by people with no understanding of html or semantic markup is still optimised.

3. Site re-designs

I'm certainly guilty of getting bored with websites quickly, and we have seen two major versions of the distilled site within the last two years, and there have been many more tweaks in the intervening times. All of this would have been much much harder, to the point of not worth doing if our content wasn't stored without any information about how it will be displayed in our content management system.

On a side note, one of my pet peeves is when I am digging around the source code and (I kid you not) you see something like the following.

<div class="blue-arial-14pt-bold">Text</div>

Creating class names like that does not count. Imagine your designer comes along and wants to change the style of the above elements to green text in 12pt verdana. You now have text labeled "blue arial 14pt", which is green and verdana. The guy who takes over updating the css is going to LOVE you for that.

Consistency

One of the issues with sites that have a large number of pages is that without a tool sat helping you it is impossible to look at the code of every page. With the confidence that comes with knowing the site was written using templates or a pattern that includes views, you can be confident that if a given page uses the H1 tag in the correct way then the other pages of a similar type will also.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that having good developers who understand not only how to write good websites (or tools, or programs etc etc), but how to write them *well* will make a huge difference. This isn't immediately obviously an SEO benefit, but anything that can make development easier, or content creating easier will, in the long run make your SEO efforts more effective.


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Whiteboard Friday: A Farewell to Pagination

Posted by randfish on Aug 28, 2008

Posted by randfish

Scott's out of town this week, hiking in Alaska, so I'm posting in his place. This week on Whiteboard Friday, I wanted to address the thorny and troublesome issue of pagination. I've talked about pagination problems in the past on SEOmoz, but it's one of those subjects that deserves some additional attention.

 


SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Solving Pagination Problems from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

 

For a good example of some folks who are building very good navigation systems on massive websites, check out Rotten Tomatoes' Movie Directory (which goes a little overboard to flow link juice down to all their movie pages, but is certainly effective) or Powell's Books' carefully built books directory system.

BTW - If you have WB Friday requests, you can always feel free to email me or leave comments in the post :-)


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Roundup Thursday for the Week of 8/24/08

Posted by rebecca on Aug 28, 2008

Posted by rebecca

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

Three star links:

Four star links:

Five star links:

YOUmoz entries:

Best of YOUmoz:

New events added to the Events Calendar:

Upcoming events:

New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

Featured companies:

United States/North America:

UK/Europe:

Asia:

Australia:

Featured resumes:

Happily employed:


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SEOmoz Introduces New Blog & Content Guidelines (in a Good Way)

Posted by randfish on Aug 28, 2008

Posted by randfish

In just a few weeks, the SEOmoz blog will be celebrating its 4th birthday (the tools and some of the content has been around since 2003, but we think of October 2004 as the formal inception date). In that time, we've come a long way and attracted many of the best and brightest from the search community to participate and communicate through the Blog & YOUmoz. Up until now, though, we've never had any formal rules governing that participation.

To be honest, it's something we wouldn't do if we didn't have to. We love the small, close-knit community feeling of the site and the freedom from formal policies and legalese. In fact, even with the introduction of the blog etiquette policy, we're still striving towards guidelines that provide as much liberty as possible while still serving the best interests of everyone who participates and reads. The goal with these is really to provide some clarity and create the right sorts of expectations. Drama and controversy are, thankfully, rare, but if and when they do arise, we want everyone in the community to have insight into exactly how we'll respond.

Most of the rules are self-explanatory and obvious, but I thought it would be interesting and valuable to run over them briefly in a blog post, just to make sure we're all on the same page :-)

NOTE: The below are not the formal guidelines (those are in the actual document), they're just my thoughts on each section.

You'll also find our unchanged Blog Disclaimer regarding the SEOmoz post content, on the Etiquette page. If you've ever got any questions or concerns about any of these, feel free to leave a comment in this post and we'll get back to you (or just email us).

SEOmoz is growing; it's true. But that doesn't mean we can't still try our hardest to maintain that fun, small company vibe (and at only 16 people, we really are still quite small). Hopefully we'll never get that teenage stereotype applied to us - "Hey man! You used to be cool... What happened?" - fingers crossed :-)

BTW - Coming next week we'll have something on a related topic - our Guiding Principles (you can read more about these from Jim Collins, if you're curious).


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Seven Things That Reality Could Borrow From The Internet

Posted by Jane Copland on Aug 27, 2008

Posted by Jane Copland

The Internet, as fragile, infuriating and enigmatic as its features can be, certainly does some things that I'd really like to see implemented, at least for beta testing, in real life. I am not a programmer, so this is piecemealed together from things I do know... but in my ideal world, I'd be able to solve most of my problems with a couple of simple instructions and a hard refresh.

1.  Redirecting phone numbers. When I moved to Seattle (two years ago last Saturday), I acquired a local number. In the days before Facebook became microchipped into everyone's forehead, I had little means of getting in touch with everyone I knew and letting them know that my number had changed.

I would like to take the hassle out of changing my phone number. I should be able to text my service provider with this:

Redirect 301 3456 1-206-555-2387

This would be far more convenient than trying to email everyone in my phone book.

Additionally, upon receiving a new number, it came to my attention that the number was only one digit different to that of a large parking garage in Seattle. No, I cannot help you get your car out of the Union Square garage at seven a.m. on Sunday morning.

2.  To deal with the people who'd abandoned their cars in the garage whilst out drinking in Seattle, I'd like to text in:

 if ($question=="parking garage")
echo "Your car has been impounded.";
else
echo "Hello.";

3.  Another thing I found infuriating upon moving to the U.S. was your addresses. In New Zealand, we have addresses like:

23 Smith Street
Wadestown
Wellington
New Zealand

I shall not entertain the idea that New Zealand may have, in the time I have been away, instigated postal codes. Here, and in various other countries too cool for simple addresses, you've made things far too complicated. In the United States, they number street addresses like it's a contest to count to one-million. I've not lived at a street address below 1000 since I came here. And Britain: what is with those postal codes? EC1M 5UJ? W2 1JU?

I would like to be able to rewrite a complicated address, sending this on a postcard to the post office:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^30 Brown Street Seattle $ComplicatedAddressLongPostalCode

4.  Real life should also be programmed such that I don't waste my time trying to get into bars and clubs that I'm not going to be allowed into. It's just a risk you take when you're underage: you can guarantee that some bars in some towns either aren't going to ask to see identification, or they'll let you're in because you're a female and you're wearing lots of make-up. But most won't.

A simple system of cue cards would save us all a lot of time. A bar that will definitely ask you for ID posts a 401 on their doors. Those that will also not fall for fake IDs should make it clear with a 403. A simple 502 indicates that the bar is at capacity.

5.  Unplugging and re-plugging-in anything that doesn't work properly should immediately result in it working again.

6.  I would like to be able to establish a secure connection to my pizza delivery place. Encrypting the information that I send to the person on the phone at Palermo's would make me feel a bit better when they repeat both my name and my credit card number aloud in the store whilst taking my order. Fantastic work, telephone guy. Now everyone knows all my basic financial details, including my card's expiration date and my middle initials and my address.

7.  Given how many friends I have living in different time zones, it would be useful to employ IP delivery on my mobile phone. If someone calls my phone from Australia or New Zealand, they're delivered the me who knows how to pronounce words like "g'day" and who says "eh" instead of "huh." When my grandmother calls, I can serve up the version that passes all the Safe Search requirements. Americans are served a Jane who says "soccer" instead of "football." Without such a feature, speaking the correct version of English at the correct time is far too difficult.

If someone would get onto that, I'd appreciate it. Especially the bit about cleaning up my language around my grandmother.

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The Vast, Pacific Horizon

Posted by randfish on Aug 26, 2008

Posted by randfish

Sunday night. Rays of sunshine are pouring in heat through the skies above Los Angeles, penetrating the plane's interior despite the drawn windowshades. Mystery Guest is next to me, reading a book we picked up on the Santa Monica pier today, and a Macromedia Flash document is calling to me from the desktop tray, but I'm in the writing mood, so it'll have to wait a little longer.

SEOmoz has been a strange place to work over the last 9 months - not because we've moved offices or doubled our staff or shifted around the management, though those milestones have certainly had an impact. No, what's really odd is that we've been in a state of constant anticipation - working towards the biggest launch we've ever had and salivating in anticipation of the release. If you've ever smoked a brisket or braised lamb on the stove, you know the sensation. Every minute spent waiting feels like an hour. The olfactory assault teases you; the glances at the clock are too frequent, and your stomach voices its opinion that the time-space continuum is moving at a less-than-optimal rate. Stretch that over the course of a year and you've got a good idea how we all feel.

Rewind to the Fall of 2007. Seattle's having a rare sunbreak in late October and I'm at lunch with Michelle (our board member from Ignition). "What's my big idea?" she wants to know. The one I'm dreaming about - the one I'd build if resources were no constraint and time was, for once, on my side. "Well," I say, "there is this one thing." Yeah - but that one thing is going to take a lot more time and resources than we've got, even without outside investment. It's so ambitious that even my usually optimistic friends in the industry don't see it as a real possibility in the next half decade. The thing is - they don't know about my secret weapons (and until January rolled around, actually, neither did I).

It turns out that with the right connections, the right partnerships, a half-crazy CEO, a pair of equally over-optimistic, never-say-die engineers (Nick & Ben), and the dedicated SEOmoz team, my pipe dream might actually have a chance in hell of bearing fruit.

February of 2008 and some early testing gives us a roadmap, but it's an expensive one and it's going to mean tying up nearly all of our dev resources for 6 months (and adding a handful of pricey, new talent to the team). That means virtually no new tools, no new projects, no time to patch up the parts of the SEOmoz site that aren't scaling so well. Big risk could spell big rewards, but only if everyone in the SEO world thinks this product is as amazing as I do. Otherwise, the burn rate is going to catch up too fast, and that means... Well, it won't be pretty.

Looking up from my laptop, the sunlight's gone and the dark rainclouds of Northern Oregon obscure the last wisps on sunset. That Flash document - a slideshow of wireframes for our new product, still hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. The visualization of all our new stuff is proving to be a massive challenge, so I'm attempting to re-skin the graphs and charts to help clear this hurdle. Some of the concepts are so new and unfamiliar that they require a great deal of education before they can start to provide value and insight. SEOs are smart, and they learn fast, but we don't have the luxury of time on our side, and in a down economy, marketers need actionable data, not inaccessible brain teasers.

In May, I remember getting my first glance at an early Alpha version of the product - by then it was affectionately called "Carhole" internally. If you don't watch the Simpsons regularly, the name's a nod to this brilliant bit of dialogue. Every SEO project I worked on that month and every question I answered found some use for "Carhole." And every time I didn't use it, I thought of how, when the final product launched, I'd be able to solve all the missing pieces of the puzzle. But the doubts were still there - what if no one else realizes how amazing this will be? What if the data is too complex to be accessible to a large audience? What if we run out of money before we can launch?

This, I think, is a startup CEO's life - half driving, mind-numbing, teeth-chattering fear. And, half wild-eyed, frenetic, obsessive passion. Nothing's good enough, yet everything is amazing. Nothing can be launched fast enough, but rushing out the door is fraught with peril. Today the world will rejoice at the mere thought of your product; tomorrow, it's too complex to get traction. How do we survive this institutional chaos without going mad? I don't know - I know that some of us don't. I just wish I knew whether it was luck or wisdom that kept the successful ones afloat in the maelstrom - and whether I have enough of either to make it.

Tonight I'm back in Seattle. Mystery Guest's still next to me, but she's given up on her book and has fallen asleep on the floor next to the computer in our spare apartment bedroom. In 18 days, we'll be married - another event nothing can prepare me for, and one that takes up every spare second of an already overburdened year. Has ambition outweighed common sense? Has Rand finally succumbed to his own driving neuroses? Only time will tell. I do know that the next 60 days are going to be some of the defining moments of my life, both personally and professionally. I just thank the stars that even if things don't turn out perfect on the professional side, they've never looked brighter personally. And deep down, I know that's the one that really matters.


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Headsmacking Tip #6 - Test with Paid Search Before You Target with SEO

Posted by randfish on Aug 25, 2008

Posted by randfish

This may seem like old hat to many SEOs, but it's a tip that never fails to get an "oh yeah!" during client meetings. The concept is simple - in any given search engine optmization campaign, you are naturally going to form a list of high-traffic, (perceived) high value keywords that are an idealistic goal for your site to dominate. For a site like SEOmoz, those might be the highly competitive terms like "SEO" or "Search Engine Optimization," while in a field like BuddyTV's it might be "tv shows" or "tv news."

The problem is that while these keyword searches seem like no-brainers, ranking for them can take a remarkable amount of effort on both the content and link building side. To warrant that investment, you need to know, from a business perspective, that financial returns will accompany the rankings. One great way to do this is to use paid search to investigate the likely ROI of visits from those keywords. Buy the keyword traffic for a few weeks or a month and measure visitors via a segmented tracking campaign (check out this post on action tracking to learn more). If the visits that arrive via those searches convert well and produce value, you know that a serious investment is warranted. If, however, they turn out to be tire-kickers and have a low propensity to produce returns, you can re-focus on higher ROI targets.

There's just a few valuable tips to bear in mind when you're pursuing this process:

That's it for this week's headsmacker. I've got a very personal post I worked on during my plane flight back from LA this weekend coming soon (hopefully tomorrow), and we're also launching our new blog etiquette guidelines and some explanations this week, so stay tuned!

BTW - If you somehow missed it, go back and check out Danny's brilliant post from last week on analyzing the Top 100 Blogs. It flew under the radar a bit, but is worth a thorough examination.


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Beware Pay-Per-Performance Agreements: SEM Sues Pop Phenomena ‘The Secret’ for Unpaid Share of Web Revenue

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire on Aug 25, 2008

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire

May It Please the Mozzers,

In November 2007 I blogged about a wacky lawsuit involving the movie/book/TV phenomena called "The Secret" and an SEO, Dan Hollings. Several months have gone by and both parties have been busy.
Background Summary

The Secret (and all the international conglomerations and people that have a finger in ownership of The Secret) sued Hollings for trademark infringement and violations of his alleged duty of loyalty. The Secret's Complaint accuses him of profiting off The Secret's trademarks by selling his own merchandise under the brand, cutting unauthorized side-deals with vendors of authentic merchandise, and generally using his SEO knowledge for personal gain.

Hollings denies all the allegations against him in his answer to the complaint.

It is worth noting that Hollings and The Secret had been engaged in a dispute about money before The Secret filed suit. Hollings had informally accused The Secret of withholding compensation that he was owed. It is possible, although improvable, that The Secret proactively filed a suit against Hollings to pressure him to drop his informal complaints about unpaid compensation.

If that was its intention, it didn't work. Hollings filed a lawsuit against The Secret in May 2007.

Hollings' Allegations Against The Secret

Hollings filed a lawsuit against The Secret in May 2007 alleging that he was supposed to be paid 10% of gross revenue from the web-based marketing campaign. The parties did not have a signed contract. However, Hollings claims to have an email written from Rhonda Byrne, one of the key people in The Secret conglomeration, promising to pay him:
US$8,000.00 per month to broadcast plus a share of 10% of gross margins of all revenues from The Secret website. The revenues you will receive from this, in fact, will exceed the Nine Network's revenues as they have 10% of Prime Time's net profits, which will come after your share.
Hollings claims he never received his 10% share of "gross margins of all revenues" (whatever that means), an amount that he believes is over three million dollars. Hollings also alleges that The Secret sent "numerous communications" assuring him that his portion of the gross margin would be forthcoming and instructing  him to set up an LLC to receive the large sums of money.

Concluding Thoughts: Beware Pay-Per-Performance Contracts

It goes without saying that I don't know who is telling the truth in this matter. However, I do know that both parties are spending a fortune on legal fees. There have been extensive jurisdiction and discovery disputes. Is The Secret trying to outspend Hollings? Did Hollings get greedy? I don't know. But I do know the lawyers are doing quite well.

I've written before about the dangers involved in commissions-based or pay-per-performance contracts. There is tremendous potential for gain, but also tremendous risk. If you decide to take the plunge, make certain you have a solid, written and signed contract. If the SEM in this case had a signed contract, he might not be in his current unenviable situation. Remember to get it in a signed writing!

There haven't been any rulings in the case yet about whether Hollings owed a duty of loyalty to The Secret by virtue of his relationship with the company. Generally, an SEO/M probably isn't an agent or fiduciary of his or her client. However, it is possible for an SEO/M to become an agent with special duties of loyalty depending on the nature of the relationship and the agreement between the parties.

To avoid unintentionally having a duty of loyalty to a client, expressly state in your contracts that you are an independent contractor, not the client's fiduciary or agent. Clarifying your relationship with clients helps them understand that you can work with their competitors and have no legal obligation to further their interests to the exclusion of others.

Best Regards,
Sarah

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Using Your Whole Business to Build Links

Posted by willcritchlow on Aug 22, 2008

Posted by willcritchlow

In my opinion anyone working in marketing should be reading Seth Godin's blog. Seth is a new marketing expert and his brainstorms and thoughts regularly give me new ideas. I am in the middle of reading one of his books - Meatball Sundae - its contents won't surprise anyone who reads Seth's blog; it's premise is that mass market products are "meatballs" and the new marketing (in which he includes SEO) are "sundae toppings". Trying to add sundae toppings to meatballs results in a mess, and organisations need to be built from the ground up with new marketing built in.

We'll get on in a second to situations where this isn't exactly true, but the basic premise is certainly tempting:
There are a few situations where I would disagree with the conclusion that you always get a mess when you add new marketing to old businesses - particularly in SEO - understanding the basics of SEO (not even linkbait etc. but just keyword research and basic technical on-page SEO) can be enough to form a valuable sales channel for old-school businesses.

There are "meatball" businesses like Tesco (our largest supermarket in the UK) who have broadly understood SEO (although they have a long way to go in some areas, they are miles ahead of the competition) and who are now popping up as competitors across many many verticals.

I therefore think it can be possible to translate old-school success into SEO success with some creativity, and it is still possible to start up in traditional ways in many sectors and at least gather local search traffic through basic SEO techniques. Even when the website is effectively an afterthought to the core business.

However...

It is an analogy that has great use for those of us who have to sell SEO and even more so for those of us who have to explain to over-enthusiastic prospects that SEO is not a magic switch we have under our desks marked "Google rankings".

Link building

What do you mean by link building? How do you do link building?

We know from Rand's question and the enthusiasm for various linkbuilding tips that acquiring links is something many SEOs struggle with.

There are a variety of ways of 'building' links - some to be recommended and some definitely not:
These are all the ways normally discussed of getting links (OK, OK, I'm sure I've missed some that are technically different but almost anything will actually fit into one of these categories).

But meatball sundae teaches us that there is another way:
For most of us working on the agency / consulting side of SEO, it is hard to make business model changes (certainly fundamental ones) to our clients' businesses, but if I was starting a new business, you can be sure this would be a priority of mine. Even in established businesses, it can pay to think like an entrepreneur when looking for ways of shaping the business for links.

Lessons we can apply

I am a big advocate of looking for ways that clients' businesses can support link acquisition. For those of you at the expert seminar this week, this fits closely with Rand's presentation on enterprise link building strategies. It became clear at the seminar that there are a lot of in-house SEOs who read SEOmoz and for you guys (or agencies working with larger clients) I think a critical success factor will be exactly this.

In no particular order, here are a few ideas I have had on this subject (I'd love to see more in the comments):

Partnerships and content syndication and all other ideas from Rand's presentation

Rand's presentation at the expert seminar this week talked about this and a variety of other enterprise link-building tactics. I have tried to avoid re-using his ideas (apart from the unicorn link, below). All of his ideas belong in this list as well. If you weren't there, they'll all be out on video soon...

Releasing financial information in link friendly ways

Obviously this is closely regulated, but within the confines of what you are allowed to do, consider carefully how financial information is released as there are many places that are guaranteed to cover it, so some basic linkworthiness and keyphrase research goes a long way.

Allies and internal partnerships

You will have a PR and marketing team. Making friends with them and getting them on your side means that your budget just effectively grew. Both advertising and publicity can attract links if done in the right way. The best advice I can give here is not to preach but rather to help them look good to their boss. Just like any networking interaction - think what you can do for them. Internal networking is no different.

Use your homepage

If you create linkworthy content, and you have a big brand, then you don't need social media to begin the process of spreading it. If your homepage gets tens of thousands of visitors a day, then hitting your own homepage can be as good as hitting the digg homepage (remembering that your content is going to be a lot more relevant to your average visitor than the average digg visitor). Integrate your linkbait into your business.

Use your email list

We've been talking about this one quite a lot at Distilled HQ and maybe it'll be the subject of its own post sometime soon, but the power of building (what Seth calls) a permission-based relationship with people whereby they not only subscribe to your special offer newsletter but also want to hear when you launch new pieces of linkbait is hard to overstate. Think this is crazy and no-one would ever do that? Consider viral ideas like 10 reasons it would rule to date a unicorn. I think a lot of the people that appealed to would love an email when the next one in the series is released.

This is not an exhaustive list (and hasn't even really covered the ways your business can be linkworthy in itself) so I'd love to see your ideas and thoughts in the comments...


Quick note to say thanks to everyone whose hard work went into the expert seminar this week. I got a lot out of the sessions and the networking and it was especially good to put faces to avatars when meeting so many people I've spoken to online but never met before.

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Keeping People Away From Your Website: A Beginner’s Guide

Posted by Jane Copland on Aug 22, 2008

Posted by Jane Copland

Many of you have probably set your SEOmoz account settings such that when you comment on a blog post, we email you whenever someone adds a new comment. One thing we don't do is include the contents of the new comment in the notification email. Why not? Because then you would have less reason to click through to see the comment in its natural habitat and you'd be less likely to reply. The same goes for SEOmoz private messages and replies to Q&A questions.

Some people really don't like this. Having the message provided in the email is certainly the quickest solution, but it drastically reduces the chances of a person clicking through to a site. In a limited sense, this isn't too much of a problem, but over time, this surely could result in a noticeable drop in traffic.

I've noticed more and more sites steering away from this model lately. Most recently, I have seen photo comments in Facebook notification emails containing the text of what the person wrote. Facebook notification emails already show the text of wall posts and private messages, but up until now, photo comments could only be seen on-site. To reply to any of these messages, one needs to visit Facebook, but people often don't. Consider this recent conversation I had with a friend:

Jane: Ooh you have a message!
Stephen: Nah, from a mate I used to work with. Read it in Gmail already.
Jane: I always do that and forget to open it. Then I get all excited. "A message!" And I've already read it.
Stephen: You should write a book about your tragic life.

Ignoring how tragic it is that I get excited about Facebook messages, it's true that I read messages in Gmail and, unless they warrant immediate attention, usually resolve to reply later. Later, I'll go to Facebook and notice that I have a new message. However, upon going to the inbox, I'll remember that I've already read it. Unless I need to reply, I'll frequently delete it without opening it again. My not clicking through means that Facebook serves at least two less advertisements than it would have otherwise.

Adding the content of blog and photo comments to notification emails seems even more dangerous. If a person is simply interested in keeping up with a conversation and not adding to it themselves, they can easily read everything they need to in their email accounts.

We know what it's like with sites like Facebook, too. I'll think I'm just going over to reply to a message or look at a photo comment, and I get distracted. I go to the home page and look at the news feed. I click around. Not following a notification email kills a lot of potential ad views and actions for Facebook or for any site which gives out too much information over email. My eyeball-time is given to Gmail instead.

If this practice is popular enough that companies don't want to get rid of it, would it be better to include only a snippet of the content? Perhaps a set number of words or a percentage of the text. After all, people are more likely to be interested in reading the rest of the message if they're only presented with half of it:



Many other sites, including Twitter and LinkedIn, follow this model. I'm not sure about this tactic because it is so convenient to read things via email. This is especially true with Gmail or any email system that threads email messages. However, it just seems vaguely counter-intuitive.

Some have likened these emailed messages as being like the difference between ordering delivery and eating in the restaurant. I disagree, because you still pay for the meal if you have it delivered. In fact, in some places, you pay more. When I receive the message elsewhere, I don't see any advertising (aside from Gmail's!), so a website whose revenue comes from ads is essentially giving me my meal for free.

A far better analogy is that of RSS feeds: People who prefer to read articles and posts through feed readers could easily digest everything a site puts out without ever visiting the site for themselves. A similar argument regarding RSS is whether or not sites should provide the full text of their posts in RSS.

Is the mostly positive user-experience of "delivery" messages a good one? I quite like reading my messages in the environment from which they were sent and I don't view that extra clicks as a bother. What do you think is the correct balance between ease of use for site members and creating an environment where people are most likely to visit a site?

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