Axandra news archive: 1 April 2008

This week, we're taking a look at the readability of your website. Is your website easy to understand? Or is it too complicated for most readers?

In the news: Google announces a robots.txt generator and combats click fraud, where do people go after visiting Wikipedia and more.

Table of contents:

• Facts of the week
• Search engine news of the week
• Articles of the week
• Success stories
• The winner of our raffle
• Previous articles

Are you sure that your website visitors understand the text on your web pages? If your web pages are difficult to understand, you might not earn as much as you could with your website.

The readability of your web pages influences your sales

Many websites use technical language that is very difficult to understand for the average web surfer. In addition, some webmasters like long and complicated sentences.

Long and complicated sentences are not a sign of professionalism. They just show that the author of the sentences doesn't care about the readers.

The more complicated the text on your web pages, the more likely it is that a web surfer leaves your website. Web surfers are impatient people. If they have to labor to understand your web pages, web surfers will go away to find an easier site than yours.

How to check the readability of your web pages

There is an official standard that you can use to specify the readability of your web pages. The Flesch Reading Ease test is a United States governmental standard to determine how easy a text is to read. It measures the approximate level of education necessary to understand the web page content.

Higher scores indicate that the text is easier to read, and lower numbers mark harder-to-read texts.

You can use IBP's Top 10 Optimizer to check the readability of your web pages. In addition to many other factors, IBP calculates both the Flesch Reading Ease Score and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level.

A high Reading Easy Score means that a text is easy to understand. The Grade Level shows the number of years of education that are required to understand the text.

Make sure that your web pages are easy to understand. Do not require too much work from your website visitors.

Make it easy to understand your web pages, make it easy to navigate them, make it easy to buy on your website. The easier your website is to use, the more you will sell.

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Google releases a robots.txt generator

"[Google's generator] is designed to give you an easy and interactive way to build a robots.txt file. It can be as simple as entering the files and directories you don't want crawled by any robots."

"Fraudsters know that clicking on a certain ad will create anomalies in the data that will trigger further investigation of their IP addresses, methods, or the targeting of a particular advertiser's ads.

So they try to 'even out' the anomalies by creating more impressions to balance out the clicks, and other attempts to make the fraud seem more 'real.' But all this does is dig them in deeper, creating other anomalies."

Will you be sued over your ad copy usage?

"There are ads running on Google right now using the exact trademarked term. In fact, a substantial number of ads use various trademarked terms. From the people I talk to, the vast majority of them rely on Google to tell them which words they should not use. This case could set a dangerous precedent of advertiser suing advertiser and ignoring Google's trademark complaint process."

Search engine newslets

• The IBP manual is now available in Spanish.
• Google Calendar outages anger users.
• Google's Asian homepages.
• Google still doesn't know where to place related searches.
• Google throws $1M at Comsenz to dominate Chinese market.
• Google ad viewership up 3 pct on comScore.

"Results took only a couple of weeks and sales continue to increase."

"I have found IBP an important part of our web promotion strategy. Our focus is on customer service and I do not like to spend a great deal of time with web promotion.

IBP has helped tremendously with this. Time has been saved AND improved results noted for all of our sites, particularly our main site. As a non-computer expert, it was surprisingly easy to use and apply. Results took only a couple of weeks and sales continue to increase. My company, Orman Institute for Active Wellness is sold on this software for the life of the company."
Dr. David Orman, hghplus.net

Share your success story with us

Let us know how IBP has helped you to improve your website and we might publish your success story with a link to your website in this newsletter. The more detailed your story is, the better.

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• How Yahoo's phrased based indexing affects your website rankings
• Get top 10 rankings on Google & Yahoo with the all-new IBP 10
• Seven things you can do to improve the link structure of your website
• View all past issues...