Do SEO professionals use eyetracking usability studies as a link-juice fad? Can eyetracking tests yield useful information about Web searchers?

Related Topics: Channel: Content | Search & Usability

Search engine marketers spend a large portion of their marketing strategies on keyword research. One method is to seek words and phrases that are most likely to be used by searchers to find a particular website. What may be ignored or overlooked is understanding the user intent behind these searches. It’s one effort to provide pages that come up in search results for particular words, but a very different approach when you want to understand why they are searching and what they’re looking for. An enormous number of studies and research has been done around the globe on search quer [...]

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If you only had 30 seconds to explain search engine optimization (SEO) to others, how would you do it? Would your explanation be different for user experience professionals? Here’s how I explain it.

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"I love Jaguars!" When I ask you to understand that sentence, I’m requiring you to take on a pretty significant undertaking, although you do it hundreds of times each day without really thinking about it. The problem comes with the ambiguity of words. "I" is pretty straightforward. I’m referring to me. Not much ambiguity there. "Love" is a little more difficult, but not much. Given the grammatical structure and syntax, we can easily reduce the possible meanings of "love" (of which there are 28, according to Dictionary.com) down to a subset that have slightly different meanings, [...]

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Why do SEO professionals believe that technical architecture is more important than information architecture (IA)?

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In my last Just Behave column, I shared the first half of my conversation with Jacquelyn Krones, a senior product manager from Microsoft that spearheaded a large scale user study that explored how we use search. In that column, we laid the foundation for what should be a significant shift in user behaviors. Krones said one of the goals behinds the research was to understand how search fits in the context of our every day activities. More and more, we find search as a relatively inflexible connector between our intentions and our desired actions. Search has struggled to continue as a one siz [...]

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Part 2 of a two-part interview with information architect and author Louis Rosenfeld about search analytics that can (and should) be used for optimizing your website.

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Whenever I’m asked what usability is, I get tongue tied. "It’s about humans and computers," I may say, but they’ll picture robots and talking cars. "I help make web sites that work," is closer, but vague because technically, if it’s on the Internet, it’s working. Then I’ll hear myself try to make it clearer by bringing up the "abilities", such as credibility, understandability, accessibility and findability. Of them, the most nods vote for understandability. It’s in our nature that we all want to be understood. We each want that something that fits us just right. We all [...]

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[caption id="attachment_85751" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Jacquelyn Krones (Photo: Annie Laurie Malarkey)"][/caption] I first met Jacquelyn Krones, a Senior Product Manager from Microsoft, at a search show. A mutual friend on the Bing team, Product Manager Stefan Weitz, introduced her to me and said, "You have to meet Jacquelyn. You speak the same language." Stefan was right. Jacquelyn started talking about the research project she was then actively engaged in. She explained about the ethnographic approach Microsoft was taking to understanding search behavior in a broader co [...]

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Interview with information architect and author Louis Rosenfeld about search analytics that can (and should) be used for optimizing your website.

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The leading cause for website or software application failure is not having a requirements document prepared and shared with everyone attached to the project. Typically, business and functional specifications, along with possible web design guidelines are gathered. What do most requirements documents miss? The purpose of a formal requirements document is to be sure that everything that appears on the website or application is supposed to be there. In cases such as ecommerce or application driven sites, there’s a better chance that managers from several departments, plus content writ [...]

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In 1997, a computer called Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Headlines triumphed about the victory of machine over man,  as we humans were "conquered", "vanquished" and, as a result of our defeat, "stunned." Checkmate...Finally! [caption id="attachment_82078" align="alignright" width="320" caption="Kasparov and Deep Blue"][/caption] The real question isn’t why we finally were defeated by a chess playing computer, but why it took so long. Chess is a game that computers should excel at. The whole point of the game is analyzing possible moves and picking the one that [...]

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Keyword research tools are great, but they do not provide enough context for understanding searcher behaviors. Usability test scenarios can help SEO professionals better understand their target audience.

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It is no surprise that the high-level Social Media search traffic is focused on advertising and marketing needs. With a combination of a little over three million searches a month, the Marketing/Advertising search traffic is overshadowed by the ten million informational searches that sometimes ask questions, but are mostly vague in nature. This analysis of AdWords data suggests that business people are really still trying to learn and sort out what Social Media is all about. But when you look specifically at user intent, you can plainly see what aspects are important to them. Consider the [...]

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If you ever need a topic to discuss at a social gathering, just ask everyone, "What do you find the most frustrating about using websites?" There are so many common complaints and issues raised by everyday Internet users and yet so many websites are still driving us crazy. Websites contain oversights. It happens to even the most esteemed companies and organizations who have an online presence. It happens to small businesses with small staffs and brand new websites. It happens by professional web developers and those still learning. Typically, navigation is the area where most end user [...]

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Every single search engine has, at the heart of it, a dynamic tension that must be respected. It needs to balance user experience with revenue opportunities. Getting this balance right is incredibly difficult, as Ask, Yahoo and other engines that have seen their market shares precipitously fall can attest to. There was a time when Yahoo (and MSN, in a previous incarnation) used to routinely show 4, 5 or even more results in the critical "North" ad position (top of page, above organic results). As these engines boosted revenue (because showing more ads will almost always boost revenue) they [...]

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Is your website’s URL structure based on the perceived logic of your boss’ teenage son? Or even worse, a software engineer? Search-engine friendly labeling systems are critical for long-term search engine visibility.

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEO | Intermediate | Search & Usability

It's a great time to start a company. Incubator labs are springing up all over the place, sponsored by venture capitalists and universities. Universities are teaching entrepreneurial skill, and have programs to sponsor student startups. Massive layoffs over the past two years have forced new college graduates, and experienced former employees to strike out on their own. The emergence of social media and mobile platforms are providing thousands of start-up opportunities, and you can see them showcased at "network and launch" events such as the Web Innovators Group and Mass Innovation Nights. [...]

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It wasn’t long ago that knowledge about our world came from newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, and of course, person to person gossip, storytelling and family gatherings. The Internet changed all that. Today, a person wanting to know the latest buzz studies social awareness streams (SAS). In the Just Behave column, we’ve discussed information architecture as it is used for search engine marketing and usability. One of the points mentioned concerns the gathering of terms and words that are used for taxonomies, link labels, category setup, navigation labels and content development. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search | Search & Usability | Search Marketing: Search Term Research

Over the past several months, I’ve been trying to crystal ball what the future of search might look like. I’ve had fascinating discussions with several visionaries in the industry, including Stefan Weitz (Microsoft), Shashi Seth (Yahoo), Hampus Jakobsson (RIM) and John Battelle (Federated Media). In my last column, I started to sum up the overarching themes that emerged from these conversations. Today, I wanted to wrap up the journey I started almost a year and a half ago. Searching From Different Devices One of the biggest catalysts of change in search has been the adoption of differ [...]

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