Searcher Behavior In A Multiplatform World Presentations from SMX West, March 2011 Understanding searcher behavior is one of the central pillars of effective search marketing. And more than ever, it’s important to not just understand what people are searching for, but how they are searching — using a computer, television, mobile device — because this […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Forrester Research Publishes 1st Report On Enterprise SEO Automation Tools Today, Forrester Research unveiled a 6- page report on the utility of SEO automation tools for use in larger enterprises. Six […]
Clickability, or perceived visual affordance, is a key element of search-engine friendly website design. How do searchers and search engines perceive clickable and unclickable elements?
SMX Boot Camp: Search Engine Friendly Web Design Presentations from SMX East, October 2010 "I’m not designing my site for search engines," is a common designer objection to SEO suggestions. But when search engines collectively have more users than either Internet Explorer or Firefox, how can you afford to ignore how they interact with your […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: A Roundup Of 2009’s Best SEO Books Time was when someone asked me to recommend a good book on search marketing, there were only a few available—Search Engine Visibility, by Shari […]
Ten years ago today, I had the privilege of organizing the first ever search marketing conference. On this anniversary, a look back at how things were then and have they’ve changed in a decade. In 1999, search marketing itself was about five years old. People had been doing search engine optimization to generate traffic from […]
Tuesday at Search Marketing Now, Shari Thurow and Andrew Hally will present a webcast, “Making Online Marketing Relevant and Responsive: Tactics and a Tool for Success.” The webcast will be in two parts: Part I covers how to segment your target audience via keywords, user response, geolocation and more. Part II looks at a new […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Live Search Adds Sports Stats & Scores I’m a little surprised that Microsoft is rolling out newish functionality on Live Search given that the Kumo launch is immanent. But the Live […]
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 […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Coming back from our SMX Advanced conference last week, I found myself doing some soul searching. How was it that some people could wonder if advanced SEO means spamming search engines? And have I been contributing to this confusion? For the record — no, advanced SEO doesn’t mean you have to spam. Not in my […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
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 […]
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, […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web:
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 […]
Our newest Search Engine Land column, 100% Organic, launches today. 100% Organic will appear every Thursday, featuring columns from Greg Boser, Todd Friesen, Shari Thurow, Stephan Spencer, and Jill Whalen and will cover issues related to being listed in the free, natural or “organic” listings in search engines. Today’s debut features Shari Thurow on Term […]