Archive for the ‘Usability’ Category

Search engine marketing is an intense game of strategy, analysis, and patience. But, it’s also a game with multiple, sometimes even conflicting, goals. Depending on who you talk to you, some will tell you SEO is about rankings, while others will tell you it’s about conversions. It’s a classic political struggle trying to answer the question, “what will bring in the greatest profits?”

You need exposure to get the traffic that leads to new business. But, you need to be user friendly in order to convert the traffic you’re getting into new business. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

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We live in a digital age, but haven’t quite gotten to that mythical paperless society that we’ve been reading about for the past couple of decades. Those of us that make our living via websites still rely on good old fashioned compressed wood to fulfill a number of our daily tasks.

One of those tasks that often takes us away from our computer monitors and into the world of post-its, index cards, and cork boards has been when working on a site’s information architecture. This can be a big task, that often requires a lot of table or wall space.

Depending on the size of the site, there can be a lot of data to sift through, so you have to be able to make notes and move things around easily. Post-its, index cards, and cork boards make for great IA tools, as they allow for easy rearranging of your data at will. But, not everybody has boards large enough to handle the big jobs. And, some of us would rather do away with the paper all together.

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Below is the second set of questions from an interview I had given late last year. If you started this series with the introduction, you already know that the answers here differ from the answers given in the interview. One of the reasons I like written interviews is that it gives you a better opportunity to provide a more thorough and thought-filled answer. While these may not be life-changing questions, I hope they are at least thought provoking for the small business owner who doesn’t know a lot about SEO.

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All right, I’ll admit, the title is somewhat over dramatic. But, when you don’t have much to offer, hype it up anyway! Kinda like the movies!

This post started from talking about How NOT To Do An Interview: The Basics. What was originally going to be an intro paragraph turned into a full post. When this happens, I just do what I often do… take one idea and make multiple posts out of it. Love it!

What follows are 15 questions I felt were important for a business audience to know about SEO. And, now that I know what I meant when I wrote them (see introduction), I can provide the answers I intended. Here are questions 1-5:

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This series is pulled from a presentation given at SMX East. Part I of this series covered the problems duplicate content creates. Part II covered some of the causes of duplicate content. This post covers some of the solutions that will help you fix your duplicate content problems.

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I’m not trying to coin a new phrase here, just looking at SEO from a different perspective. See, I never really liked the term Search Engine Optimization. That seems like the job of the math geeks behind the search engine algorithms. Its their job to optimize the search engine, not mine.

To be more accurate, SEO should be called WO, or WSO: Website Optimization. That’s what I do, I optimize the website in order to help it gain more exposure, increase traffic and get more sales.

But what are we optimizing the website for?

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Ever see one of those movies where some secret government agency has a super high-tech office in an old, dilapidated building in some rundown part of town? The camera starts on the outside, looking over a ghetto as it moves down the street. It zeros in on a rundown building that a squatter would be embarrassed to live in. Then, as the camera moves inside we are shown a state-of-the art facility worthy of a Manhattan high-rise office in the 22nd century.

Sometimes SEO is just like that, but the opposite. A lot of time and energy is spent on the “exterior” (search engine rankings) while ignoring the interior (building a great website.)

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In the world of marketing and campaign measurement, the web has been a goldmine. Almost every conceivable metric can be measured online. But of all the things you can track, measure, weigh and analyze, the only metric that truly matters is conversions. Click through rates, page views, time spent on site, number of pages read, entrance and exit points, abandonment; all of these metrics are fantastic, but if you’re not using them to improve your conversion rates, then why bother?

Most people look at their website as a whole but in reality it is a collection of many parts. These parts (web pages) are essentially individual steps on a path that should lead your visitors to a specific goal: the conversion. If your site as a whole, and web pages individually, are working properly, you should see an increase in conversion rates and sales. If anything is broken along the way your visitors are led the wrong way at the wrong time and you open the door to having them leave before they’ve reached the conversion goal.

Each entry point of your site (wherever the visitor lands first, not just the home page) needs to be treated as the starting point that will lead your visitors step by step toward the conversion goal. In order to guide your visitors from this starting point to the end point, you need to make sure each step along the way is aligned with the next; in sync and unbroken.

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I’m going to start this article with the conclusion, so if you read no more than this first paragraph you can walk away knowing the most important thing this article has to say. And here it is: Fix your broken links.

That’s it, you’re free to go now. The rest of this article is just stories, opinion and my thoughts that reinforce the point above. But if you need more convincing, read on.

So many times I see businesses investing thousands of dollars building their websites, tinkering with SEO improvements, or increasing/improving their content, only to neglect one of the most basic problems that may be a significant contributing factor in reducing their conversion rates: broken links.

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If you run a blog you probably already know all about RSS feeds. If you read a blog, you probably do too. If you don’t know what an RSS feed is then I’ll give you a few minutes to go read Wikipedia’s RSS page. Go ahead, just come back here when you’re done.

OK, everybody caught up? Good.

So now you’re wondering what this has to do with you. Perhaps you “just” sell products. Or maybe you “just” have an information site. Or you “just” do some other thing that doesn’t require an RSS feed. In your line of work you don’t really get into the whole blogging, news headlines, audio, or video thing, so this post isn’t for you, right?

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