Kim Krause Berg
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About Kim Krause Berg

Kim Krause Berg is the SEO/Usability Consultant for Cre8pc. Her work combines website and software application usability testing with a working knowledge of search engine optimization.

Kim Krause Berg's latest articles

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The Value Of Testing Website Usability & Search Engine Performance

For one day during the holiday shopping period in December, customers could not use a well-known retail giant’s website. Heads rolled. Jobs were on the line. Searchers were puzzled. How is it possible, you may wonder, that a website representing a popular brand could experience a day of lost sales during the busiest shopping time […]

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The Ultimate Secret For Successful Marketing & Web Design

We’ve just experienced another season of roundups in the sports, music and movie industries and throughout it all, I noted interesting things about marketing and human behavior. Super Bowl It began with the TV commercials during the Super Bowl. Usually my favorite part of this final game of champions is watching the new commercials that […]

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Recent Findings On Captcha & The User Experience

The opinions on what makes a form or Web application user friendly may vary but most everyone dislikes Captcha fields. Some Captcha’s are so difficult to decipher they actually increase form and page abandonment. Along with the freedom the Internet provides humans, it is unfortunately humans who also created barriers to our free flow of […]

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Why User Experience Design Needs Search Engine Marketing

Most articles in this column focus on the how’s and why’s of usability, persuasive design and search engine marketing. We sound like a broken record. SEO needs UX. What about the other way around? There’s just as many misconceptions in the usability and user experience design industry towards search marketing and organic SEO. One of […]

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Why Blending Usability & SEO Really Matters

Whenever the phrase, “usability and SEO”, enter a conversation, there’s a very good chance it goes in one ear and out the other. Corporate management interprets it as “We need more money”, and middle management fixes their poker face until they’re free to run to Google to look up the term. Though there is improvement, […]

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Keys To Understanding Search Marketing & User Intent

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 […]

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Does This Website Usability Fairy Tale Have A Happy Ending?

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 […]

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6 Commonly Ignored Website Requirements & 10 Tips To Remember

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 […]

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5 Website Tips To Decrease User Frustration

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 […]

PPC

Using Social Awareness Streams To Learn What People Care About

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 […]

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Usability & Internet Search Marketing: A More Unified Approach

For years there were two camps – website usability and search engine optimization. Rarely did they acknowledge each other, let alone work as a team. Each side argued they knew best how to make web pages findable in search engines. They’re both right. The website usability house is focused on human behavior. They follow along […]

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Google’s Farmer Update Plants User Behavior Seeds

Over the last 10 days, the world of Internet search has swarmed around any source for news on Google’s “Farmer” algorithm change that affected nearly 12% of USA search results. Any company generating its revenue by producing low quality content rushed to wrestle up new rank and ad revenue data and discuss the damage. As […]

Apple

User Considerations For Web Design And Online Marketing

The most difficult group entity we design for, engage with and market to is commonly referred to as “users”. Some of you know members of this group as people. A few use the term without thinking it through. The term “users” has an official formal name in some industries, which to be honest, only serves […]

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How To Avoid Clunky Web Design With Holistic SEO & Usability

There has been a dramatic increase this year in exploring the close relationship between website usability, web page search engine optimization and internet marketing. While some of you still meet resistance from site owners, far more of you report that clients now insist on a site designed for the best user experience that should also […]

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Web Site Usability For Improving Online Forms

You’ve heard it said a hundred times. Search engine marketing leads to a dead end if the web site isn’t designed to deliver what it promises. Many an anchor text, meta description and advertisement text have sent users into a house of horror because the landing page is a complete disconnect from what was marketed. […]

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Why We React Strongly When Web Sites Change

A new tactic to get web site traffic I’ve seen lately is to make a drastic change that will create a buzz. Whether a web site undergoes a complete redesign or removes a previous function, we know that no matter what the change is, some people are going to hate it. Several of them will […]

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How To Rescue Poorly Converting Web Sites

Twice this year I got the call too late. Two online businesses were in their final death throes. Their owners begged me for emergency help with sinking conversion rates. Both believed that I could find what was “broken,” repair it with some magic usability tape, traffic would flow again and sales would return. Though I […]

Apple

Site Navigation & Information Architecture Fundamentals For SEOs

One of the most confusing skills to teach someone who practices organic search engine optimization is called “information architecture” (aka “IA”). I’ve given several talks on the topic in an effort to chip away at some popular misconceptions. Each time the audience has people who refer to themselves as an SEO, IA or usability professional. […]

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Discovering Web User Types & Habits Via Search Queries

Not long ago I asked my twenty year old daughter where she goes to get information. Without hesitation she replied, “Google.” I thought this made sense. Her generation grew up with Google. They were taught to use it in school for research and to get images for projects. For comparison, I asked my 73 year […]

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What Skills Do Successful Website Teams Require?

If you have the role of quoting jobs for clients or working out budgets for outsourcing to contractors, you know it’s no easy task. There are many things to consider, from staff to skills to job requirements. Your client, however, wants to know just one thing: how much is it going to cost?

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Information Behavior & Mental Models

Last month I wrote about emotion and web site design in Creating An Emotional Response From Your Web Site. How often do you have a happy, fun, relaxing and utterly satisfying experience while browsing an online retail web site? Do web site designers know or even care what puts us in the zone? What does […]

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Creating An Emotional Response From Your Web Site

I hadn’t seen my artist friend in nearly a year, nor was I even sure he was still painting. But there I was the other day, standing with him in his art studio, chatting about the new things he wanted me to add to his web site. Suddenly he led me to one large 80″ […]

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It’s A Fatal Mistake To Copy Successful Web Sites

At a search engine marketing conference, several of us gave a session on website usability topics ranging from usability and SEO to site architecture and requirements gathering. Afterward, there was time for questions by the audience. Someone asked, “Why don’t we all just copy Amazon.com?” I replied, “Never, ever copy what Amazon does.” The audience […]

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The Algorithm Chasers

When the Fort Hood, Texas shooting rampage hit the news, a small staff of news folks were trying to determine which words to use for their online news stories on the topic. The goal was to get Google News to find and rank their article higher than their competition. They struggled with the difference of […]

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Want Better Web Design? Watch Real Users

I’ve been in web development since 1995. For me, and many of you, it’s easy to forget that people don’t have the computer equipment to use the web sites and Internet applications we build. I’ve always found it interesting that TV show web sites are Flash based and loaded with images and video. It’s as […]

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Of Conversations And Conversions

If you could have had a crystal ball in 2004, would you have known that the power of online marketing is hiding within conversations? Did you consider that the content you put on your homepage holds little salt with readers unless it can be backed up with outside information? People still want the same thing […]

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The Importance Of Knowing Your Customers’ Language

While doing keyword research for a company, I started to think about something that has always been in front of me. Where usually I think in terms of “trigger words” such as “sale”, “free” and “limited time offer,” I realized there is another layer to the wording we use to communicate to customers and Internet […]

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How User Behavior Influences Search Results

If you wanted to research something—the musician Johnny Cash, for example—would you go to a search engine or a library? There are many studies on search usage. It’s safe to say that at least 50% of people now turn to search engines for information. That number increases for certain types of searches, such as shopping […]

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The Impact Of The Internet On Human Behavior

CNN’s online news site recently posted a poll that asked, “Are you tired of social networking?” When I had checked their results, it showed that 74% chose “YES.” Yet according to Inside Twitter by Alex Cheng, Mark Evans and Harshdeep Singh, after analyzing information disclosed on 11.5 million Twitters accounts, 72.5% of all users joined […]

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Is Your Web Site Credible?

In Lance Loveday’s Just Behave column the other week on Designing For The Subconscious Mind, he described his experiences when showing two different web site pages to an audience a half second apart. He then asked the participants which web site they’d prefer to do business with. The “professional” and “credible” page won over the […]

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How Does Your Web Site Make Visitors Feel?

I’ve been exploring and researching the relationship between computers and people. More specifically, I’m fascinated by web sites and how, or if, they affect us emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually. As a web site designer, what special power do you hold in your artistic hands? As a blogger, what kind of reaction are you seeking […]

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Finding The Right Balance Between Search Marketing & User Experience

Yesterday a colleague asked me to find information on software application response times. I responded with some qualifying questions to refine my assistance but what it boiled down was this: the corporate powers wanted to know how much they could fudge things so that an ecommerce software application could roll out into “production” even though […]

Apple

The Extended Brain, Search Marketing & User Experience Design

When Google went from being just another new search engine to the search engine, I couldn’t stop comparing the company to the cartoon series, Pinky and the Brain. In my mind, the conversation between Larry and Sergey was identical to the two lab mice: Larry: “Gee Sergey, what do you want to do tonight?” Sergey: […]

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The Biggest Web Site Usability Mistakes You Can Make

When you built your first web site, didn’t you just want to promote it everywhere with big bold letters saying, “HEY EVERYONE! COME HERE AND LOOK AT MY WEBSITE! ISN’T IT GREAT?” Or, when you submit your web site to forums for web site reviews, what do you typically ask for? You may write, “Tell […]

Apple

The Secret Influence Of Search Behavior

Did you know that Rachel Ray grounds up toasted pumpkin seeds, adds some herbs and uses the mixture to coat chicken?  Me neither.  One day, after my daughter mentioned this to me, I started thinking about how people’s eating habits are changing everywhere.  More fast food restaurants serve healthier, lower fat meals. Today’s families use […]

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