From Accessibility to Zope

A way of supposedly increasing the conversions from your site is by adding calls to action, links or banners or buttons nudging people away from simply reading and towards taking action - purchasing your products, enquiring about your services and so on.

The practice of including calls to action is taken straight out of the advertising industry. Advertisers have a small list of things that they need to include in an advert, and a call to action is on that list. However a website is not an advert. Users browsing the web are mainly in a mode where they will read and compare and research a purchase. Who would click the first "buy this now" button they see when they can hop onto another site and check out alternatives and price first? In this context, calls to action may not be very effective and can be intrusive. It's even less effective if your call to action is not something as passive and easily handled over the web as just "buying", such as "Enquire now about our calibration service".

In the UK we also like our calls to action implicit. Watch TV ads for a few minutes and the number you'll see that include an explicit call like "Sofas half price at DFS until Monday! Come down to DFS showrooms today!" are small compared to the number that run more along the lines of "The sun is shining and this man in trendy clothes is laughing with a group of attractive women. What's that he's drinking? Oh, Coca-cola."

So include calls to action, make sure they are seen, but keep them understated and out of people's faces and users may find your site that much more appealing - easily enough to outweigh the effectiveness of intrusive calls to action.

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

So, my sentence is this:

"Spring Deer is almost like drinking flavored water; there's tons of flavor in a creamy and velvety package."

The book is Sake: A Modern Guide by Beau Timken and Sara Deseran (ISBN 0-8118-4960-0).

I've discussed previously how the SEO industry constructs its advice. But I now want to take them to task on actual advice I've received from SEO companies. SEO companies make claims that are poorly scientifically verifiable, because it's very difficult to distinguish causal factors in changes in search result positions.

To validate these claims we could imagine a study where we compare the rankings of two groups of websites, distinguished only by whether they implement a given SEO suggestion. If the hypothesised recommendation does affect ranking we would expect to see a statistically significant amelioration of search engine ranking.

I don't believe this is possible. For one thing, there are too many factors, given the complexity of the web, to be able to extract a clear picture, so any results would be unlikely to be "statistically significant". This means any effect noted would not be as great as the margins of error of the experiment. The results would be too muddied by independent and much more important considerations like inbound links and accessibility. Also you can't get a very good appreciation of how much a rank is affected: you only see the order of results, not how much better one result is considered than the next. Statistically that should widen the margins of error.

I am skeptical about a lot of these things. I don't think I can disprove them given the doubts I've expressed above, but I do contest them. I believe they are unlikely and I believe SEO people believe them for invalid reasons.

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