It’s the New Year; full of new budgets, new campaigns, and ultimately, new landing pages. Below are three rules you can apply to your landing pages to achieve success and higher ROI for the coming year.
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Google’s Search Makeover
In March 2012, Google announced through the Wall Street Journal that its algorithm and search results will be undergoing a makeover using semantic search technology. It is the biggest change in the company’s history and could affect millions of websites over the next few years.

Semantic search refers to the process of understanding the actual meaning of words. It can help associate different words with one another. Right now, Google is like a librarian that doesn’t know how to read the language in books. By implementing semantic search technology, it will have the ability to make thousands of associations with a word the way the human brain does. For instance, “Jaguar” could mean an animal or a car. So when you type a search query, the results won’t just be a list of blue web links. More relevant facts, information, and direct answers will appear at the top of the search results page.
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“The fold.” Clients are concerned with it, advertisers want to be above it and web designers continue to argue its existence. Though this term makes sense in the newspaper industry, when it comes to web design, our philosophy is that “the fold” is dead. Hierarchy of content, a well-defined design strategy and user habits now dictate a successful website, ultimately leading users to discover the content that falls, as we like to call it, “below the screen.”

In its original application, “the fold” described which stories appeared above or below the fold in a newspaper, where content above the fold was visible to a potential buyer. Though newspaper content is bound to the preset sizes, content for a website is not, and as Three Minds accurately notes, “not everything on a web page needs to be located within an 800 x 600 layout.”

This leads us to the guiding light of our “No Fold” philosophy: a hierarchical structure of web content. Simply put, the most important content should come first and engage the user. If the first piece of content on the viewable screen does its job, users will be encouraged to scroll down the page to continue the interaction and see what other important information is provided.

Hand-in-hand with hierarchical content is design strategy. Based on advances in technology and hardware, what falls “below the screen” is different for every user, which means a well-defined design strategy cannot be ignored. Utilizing design cues, including images that anticipate more content, anchor links that jump further down the page and cleaner layouts, will encourage site visitors to explore the page. In support, according to research done by ClickTale, scrolling has become a natural practice among users and is associated with forward-thinking web design.

Finally, we believe the infamous “fold” no longer dictates a successful website because users are smarter and will search for the information they’re looking for – even if it means venturing “below the screen.” To help prove our point, CXPartner’s research shows that users don’t mind scrolling the page and that heat maps show a strong concentration on the scroll bar. Furthermore, when there is less content on the viewable screen, users are more likely to explore what is below it.

The only exception to our “No Fold” philosophy is advertisers. They have the right to be “above the fold” because ultimately their dollars help pay for the design, whether it is fold-centric or not.

Moving forward with our philosophy in hand, we will encourage clients and fellow agency folk to realize that newspaper is, in fact, the only thing that physically folds. Web pages are a different medium and capable of much more when coupled with a hierarchical content structure, design strategy and the realization that users intelligently seek out content to discover what lies “below the screen.”

The beginning of 2010 has already shown us a lot of exciting potential for the social world, including Apple’s iPad and Super Bowl XLIV ad campaigns’ interaction in social media. But what we’re most intrigued with are two recent articles from Caroline McCarthy and Joe Marchese. Both articles discuss the emergence and dispersion of noteworthy media content (you know, the stuff people actually care about) through social media and the role of monetization.

Mindgruve believes this: RSS and traditional news sources in their current form are a dying breed, while entertainment and “valuable” content are getting easier to share. People are also spending more and more time on social networks, but rather than seeing a constant stream of mostly random, rarely significant tweets and Facebook updates, meaningful content – content that is shared by friends you trust – will rise to the top (it’s already a top driver of news media traffic). The remaining issue: money is key to making this work.

Offering consistently valuable content is a huge step forward for the digital world, but how do you do it without spamming your audience? We believe it should be done strategically, creatively and with respect for the users.

So, why focus on money and friends as it pertains to social media content? Simple. The two go hand-in-hand. If your friend suggests a story on the most recent Haiti relief efforts, you’re more likely to read it and share it again with your network. In time, as you spend increasing attention to specific outlets like Facebook, the less time you want to spend outside of it searching for content, resulting in a willingness to pay for the links that your connections suggest or you subscribe to. Content producers are more than excited by this prospect. Their goal now is to make content as easy as possible to share, while installing simple profit centers in which you can fund more content.

Of course, some people would prefer to keep their social networks cost-free. Invading “personal” space with requests to buy, buy, buy will likely cause revolt among certain audiences. Everyone has seen the Facebook backlashes and we wouldn’t be surprised if some individuals who are bombarded with media content dig their heels into the sand and say, “Enough!”

Ultimately, getting socially-attuned people to become early-adopters of the social media, media frenzy means taking careful steps not to overwhelm, while also providing a perfect balance of consumer cost analysis with content desire. It will be different for every single content provider (and each one is truly different) and a lot of fun to perfect.