Deadly Sins Against SEO: Part 2
More egregious mistakes that website owners, web designers/developers, landing page experts, and others make to prevent qualified search engine traffic and conversions.
Contributor
Shari Thurow's latest articles
Deadly Sins Against SEO: Part 1
Are you getting bad or conflicting SEO advice from landing page and conversion specialists? Keep your ears open for these deadly SEO sins.
Information Architects Are From Venus, SEOs Are From Mars
An SEO professional's spin on information architecture can lead website owners down the wrong path. Learn 3 mistakes to avoid when creating an effective IA.
A Principal Goal Of SEO Should Be Customer Loyalty
How search engine optimization (SEO) professionals can measure customer loyalty as a part of a successful search experience.
Is Social Media Ruining Search Results?
I preferred search engine results pages (SERPs) before other forms of social media became the rage. I think the commercial web search engines are giving social media items far more attention and validation than they deserve. Do you?
Understanding Orienting Search Behaviors For SEO & Conversions
Website owners and search professionals alike often overlook finding behaviors after a searcher clicks on a link to a website from a search engine results page (SERP). One of those finding behaviors is called orientation or orienting. Orientation is a search behavior that no SEO professional, search engine advertiser, or website owner should dismiss. Quick-and-easy orientation contributes to a positive brand experience, increases conversions and sales, and makes content easier to find.
SEO & Searcher Mental Models
Do search engine optimization (SEO) professionals architect websites to match searcher mental models? The answer might surprise you.
SEO And The Scent Of Information
To truly understand web searcher behavior, search engine optimization professionals should know how searchers locate and follow the scent of information.
Commercial Intent & Web Search Behaviors
When do web searchers have commercial intent? What types of search queries do they try before actually making a purchase?
Optimizing For Re-finding Search Behavior
Re-finding search behavior is common in web search, image search, and video search. What is it, and how can you make it easy for searchers to re-find your content?
The 3 SEO/SEM Conference Personas
I recently returned from the successful SMX-Advanced search engine optimization and advertising conference, and I had an epiphany: as a speaker, usability principles are applicable to these conferences. Which usability principle, you might ask? Before usability professionals create an information architecture and corresponding interfaces, they must identify and address various personas or profiles. The primary […]
Search Behavior: The 4th Building Block Of Search Engine Optimization
SEO is actually optimizing a website for people who use search engines, both web search engines and site search engines. The key ingredient has always been searchers -- their characteristics and behaviors.
Don’t Forget SEO For Navigational Searches
During search engine optimization (SEO) consultations, we search professionals often see and hear things that make our jaws drop. Even after years and years of knowledge distribution through email newsletters, blogs, forums, and other forms of social media, we still witness companies making really stupid optimization mistakes. Since I am a strong believer in learning […]
Hey Usability Professionals: Get With The SEO Program
For over 10 years, I have been trying to convince my clients, colleagues, friends, family, and my 2 cats that SEO and website usability go hand in hand, that they are intricately related. And I have even chastised colleagues and clients for not considering users during the optimization process. I have seen many of my […]
SEO Vs. Web Site Architecture
If you ask web professionals what their interpretation of the phrase information architecture is, you will get a wide variety of responses. A search engine optimization (SEO) professional might launch into some grand scheme about indexation and PageRank sculpting. A web developer usually views information architecture in terms of fields in a database—how each field […]
Are You An SEO Hybrid?
During search engine optimization (SEO) consultations, have you heard any of the following statements: “I didn’t hire you for website usability. I hired you for SEO.” These statements, and the sentiments associated with them, come in many variations, such as: “I didn’t hire you to redesign my site. I hired you to get my site […]
Why User Experience Is A Crucial Part Of Good SEO
Have you ever heard a search engine optimization (SEO) professional use the term user experience during a presentation, in an article or as part of a sales pitch? On the web, user experience (commonly abbreviated as UX or UE) is a term used to describe the overall perception, experience, and satisfaction that users have as […]
The Most Dreaded Keyword Phrase
In website usability, one of the hardest obstacles to overcome is the mentality of “This is what I would do.” Whenever we hear Person A (or B or C or D, etc.) say this phrase, it means that Person A is not focused on users. It means that Person A is superimposing his or her […]
SEO Ethics Are In The Eye Of The Beholder
True story. I was sitting at one of my computers, a bit flustered because I was trying to solve yet another CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) browser incompatibility, and I received the following email: I would be pleased to buy some text links on your website. Let me know if you are interested so we can […]
When Keyword Research and Search Data Deceives
As search engine optimization (SEO) professionals, we obsess with search data from a wide variety of resources. Which one is best for our clients? Which keyword research tool reveals the most accurate search behaviors when rebuilding a site’s information architecture? Does our web analytics data validate our keyword research? And, more importantly, did these tools […]
The Inmates Are Running The Search Engine Asylum
For search engine marketers and clients to communicate effectively, they must utilize a shared, common vocabulary. Some search engine marketing terms and concepts are easy to explain, such as query terms, commonly referred to as keywords or keyword phrases. And some concepts require a little more clarification. For example, it might take me weeks or […]
So, You Think You’re A Search Engine Optimization Expert?
A few years ago, I wrote a three-part article series about the different levels of SEO skills: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. I placed copywriters at the beginner level, information architects and interface designers at the intermediate level, and web developers and programmers at the advanced level. At the time, I was pretty confident at the […]
Meta-Tag Optimization Tips: A Search Usability Perspective
I know. I know. Seasoned search engine optimization (SEO) professionals might yawn and roll their eyes when the subject of meta-tag optimization comes up, as they might think, "Meta-tag optimization is SO 1990s." Personally, I think meta-tag content gets a bad rap because, in the past, many SEO professionals and website owners exploited meta-tags to […]
What SEO/SEM Professionals Should Know About Website Usability – Part 2
In part 1 of What SEO/SEM Professionals Should Know About Website Usability, usability experts Peter Morville and Susan Weinschenk answered the question, “What should SEO professionals know about usability?” For this installment, website usability guru Jakob Nielsen and Kim Krause Berg share their observations and perspectives. Enjoy! Jakob Nielsen’s formula for website success “The main […]
What SEO/SEM Professionals Should Know About Website Usability
In an effort to differentiate themselves from competitors, many SEO/SEM firms come up with interesting unique selling propositions (USPs). Some SEO/SEM firms emphasize search engine advertising and create quite useful tools to help manage PPC campaigns. Some SEO firms specialize in training, again creating tools that help newbie and experienced SEO professionals optimize existing web […]
You’d Be Wise To “NoFollow” This Dubious SEO Advice
For the past few months, I have been listening to some of my colleagues talk about the nofollow attribute and how to use it to sculpt a page’s PageRank. I heard this SEO advice first at SMX in Stockholm and most recently at SMX in Santa Clara. Stephan Spencer wrote about it in a recent […]
SEO & SEM Outside The U.S.—Tips & Advice
As many SEO/SEM professionals already know, marketing to people outside of the United States presents many challenges. Search usability is quite different due to language nuances, variations in color psychology, and allocation of screen real estate, among other things. Where are the best places for a search engine optimizer or a Web developer to place […]
Understanding Search Usability – Part 2
In part 1 of Understanding Search Usability, I looked at search usability and the wide variety of search behaviors it addresses. SEO professionals tend to focus on query-related behavior, and web site usability professionals tend to focus on browsing behaviors. When both groups open their eyes and realize that all of these search behaviors are […]
The “Design” Part Of Search Engine Friendly Design
For the past few years, I have been silently listening to and observing other search engine optimization (SEO) professionals speak and write about the topic of search-engine friendly web site design. I’m the one in the back with the black wig, sunglasses, mustache, and trench coat. All joking aside, I am genuinely interested in how […]
Understanding Search Usability
The term “search usability” is widely misunderstood throughout a variety of industries: Web design/development, search engine marketing (SEM), online advertising, information sciences, human-computer interface (HCI), and usability industries. Even the term “usability” is misunderstood by search professionals. Every time I hear an SEO professional claim that his or her firm implements web site usability best […]
Black-Hat SEOs Are Worthless, Shady Criminals
Black hat, white hat, blue hat, new hat… why should anyone care which color hat any search engine optimization (SEO) professional labels him- or herself? This was a question presented to me by one of my colleagues, Bill Slawski at SEO by the Sea, at the last search engine conference. I have been thinking long […]
Don’t Abuse Users’ Search Experience With 301 Redirects
Linkbait, link juice, PageRank, paid links—all of these terms are commonly associated with one of the fundamental building blocks of successful search engine optimization (SEO): link development. One of the problems with link development gurus is their obsession with 301 redirects. Heck, I have even heard search engine software engineers tout 301 redirects as the […]
The Right Way To Think About Site Maps
If you asked one hundred search engine optimization professionals to explain a site map and show you what an effective one looks like, chances are you will get 100 different answers. To many SEO professionals, a site map is an XML site map that one submits to Google containing URLs to every web page on […]
Understanding Search Engines Duplicate Content Issues
I admit it. I am a search engine geek. Because I have a passion for understanding search usability, one of my particular interests is duplicate content filtering. If you want to really irritate searchers, present the same content to them in all or most of the top 10 positions in search results. In the past, […]
Term Highlighting and Search Engine Optimization
One of the reasons I tend to focus on “organic” search engine optimization (SEO), as an online marketing strategy is that the majority of search results come from the natural spidering process. Admittedly, searchers tend to look at and click on the top results from both the paid and unpaid listings. However, after carefully evaluating […]