Warmest Greetings,

:: Tuesday, December 02, 2003 ::

Usability news:

Report recommends a focus on the usability of public e-services

"Given the importance of usability to most users, the report says service developers should design websites that are easy to use, with improved navigation, content design and site design.

However, as webmasters begin to address such issues, the report predicts a move away from usability improvements to a focus on process integration. It concludes that webmasters should consider optimising the underlying workflows, automating and simplifying processes, and improving coordination of information internally and between different content providers."

SEO news:

Chris Ridings reviews a new meta-PPC engine called Yixe.com

"It's a nice idea, the related search feature is great and it's a terrific way to perform commercial searches (e.g. if you want to buy something)."

Things aren't sunny in "Florida".

Update Postmortem-- sifting through the rubble

"I doubt that a human being at Google gave a moment's thought to the impact of the recent update on any specific site, except perhaps in researching the impact of the update."

"However, playing devil's advocate for a moment, if Google has ideas it wants to play with that could rock the boat commercially, or cause a storm of bad press (as the current thing has dominated all forums) then surely the impending IPO could indeed be a spur for reasons other than financial."

"My boss came over to me last night and asked me if I knew why Google was broken. He was looking for HTML tutorials and all he could find was "junk", as he put it."

"I've been alternatively using AltaVista, AllTheWeb and Inktomi Pure Search."

Google Bayesian Spam Filtering Problem? An anticensorware investigation by Seth Finkelstein
"At the moment, Google seems to have adopted the following rule: If a simple search has spam-related keywords, penalize high-spam-scoring results."

SEO Help for adjusting to Google's changes.

What "new google" means for SEO Planning...

"If you're in a competitive sector and suddenly find that your referrals from Google have just dropped off the planet, go to you log files for last month, extract the keyword that was delivering the traffic, go to Google and type it in keyword and view the results. Then open another window and type in keyword-aerts leaving the string -aerts.

This will show you if Google is filtering the results for your keywords (i.e., a listing that appears using the query keyword-aerts, will not be appearing to users of Google)."

If you don't want to wade through over 3000 posts about Google in WebmasterWorld's Forums, it's much saner at Cre8asiteForums and you don't need to pay money to get to the cooler stuff.

How many people look past the first page of search results? How many visitors move past the 1st page of SE results?

"On the assumption that most users will not change the default number of sites / page (10), then the answer to the question is 31%. In other words, 69% of the users click on one of the first 10 sites in the category."

Zeus Internet Marketing Robot by Cyber-Robotics has been busily re-educating Zeus users on how to use the linking software in today's search engine environment, and they've released a new free demo.

Other:

Guild of Accessible Web Designers - Invitation and launch

"If you have a weblog or news site, please mention that the Guild of Accessible Web Designers is now inviting new members. We are 'open for business', and we need as many enthusiastic, members as possible. Consider this as our 'soft launch', a milestone on the way to our official launch date early in 2004.

The Guild of Accessible Web Designers is a world wide organisation of web designers and developers committed to helping each other, and promoting the message that accessible web design is 'good for business'. "

One year ago. Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch.com predicted.

"It's long overdue for search engines to do a better job of looking at our queries and delivering up more targeted results. "

"For search engine marketers, while free editorial results will not go away, you're going to continue to see the cost of paid listings get more expensive and probably results weighted to more heavily favor paid inclusion listings, especially for commercial queries."

More from Danny's crystal ball >>> Ten Questions with: Danny Sullivan

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 12/02/2003 09:32:17 AM

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