Warmest Greetings,

Usability and Search Engine Optimization Tie The Knot  

:: Wednesday, June 23, 2004 ::

It's official. The press release is due for release tomorrow, but I let the cat out of the bag early to my SEO friends, several of whom have joined forces with me, providing a team approach to design and promotion.

The UsabilityEffect.com site emphasizes the "marriage between SEO and Usability". Why? Several reasons. The first one is what drove me to care so much about web site and software usability. I could design a site to be easily crawled, or I could optimize a site to rank well, but I learned that for several web sites this wasn't enough.

Those web sites weren't converting traffic to sales. Why?

They were confusing to use. Or first-time visitors didn't believe their claims. In some cases, customers just couldn't find the shopping cart.

I didn't "get" the whole usability thing until VerticalNet switched me from being a User Interface Engineer to a Quality Assurance Usability/User Interface Engineer. Which is a fancy way of saying, I tested our Internet based software applications. I was taught by someone with her Phd in Human Factors.

Now, I could finally help my freelance SEO clients take the next steps. When I went out on my own as a consultant, I decided to leave the search engine submission and marketing work to my friends in the biz and I'd join forces with them to provide the web site "tune up".

That double whammy kicks butt. Ask any of my partners, or SEO friends who have seen my usability reviews, like Andy Beal of KeywordRanking.com.

For those who want to learn more about building visitor and customer friendly web sites, UE offers Research, Resources and a Free Testing Center.

Okay, Elsewhere On Earth


To Pop up or Not to Pop Up. They're still weighing in on this. It appears as though Opera users have it easier.

For those wondering how to get more people to place comments in their blogs...Commentary

     "A conversation on a comments section might serve you in two ways - more words for the search engines to pick up, and may make people return to participate or watch the commentary in its own right."

Usability and Human Factors, after a trip to the pub...HCI flava

On the Geico/Google lawsuit...Geico sues Google and Overture

     "Google has ended their hipocracy and is now permitting ads to run on just the term "google" -- based on official word from Google Adwords, and confirmed by my actually doing it."

Going global? How to...Internationalisation

     "Ideally, we want each version of site to be indexed by the appropriate engines for the language it is written in. We want the French version of the site spidered and listed by French Googlebot (BotDeGoogle?), the English version spidered and listed by the google.com and .co.uk, and so on."


My horoscope for today says "Say hi to other extra-aware people."

So, hello. And, thank you.

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 6/23/2004 10:24:46 AM

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