As an in-house SEO, where does the legitimate scope of your activities end, and those of somebody else begin? Are you being a useful and valid contributor, or simply poking your nose in where it doesn’t belong? What is rightfully within your scope may surprise you. Successful search engine marketing requires you to collaborate with […]
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 […]
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 […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
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 […]
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 […]
Below are Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular stories from September 2008:
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]