[wp_youtube]Sd7t115jj0A[/wp_youtube] Who is your web site for? It’s supposed to be for your customers, but sometimes company web sites look like they were designed for someone else, like the shareholders, the marketing department, or the CEO. Uh-oh. And what about web sites for mobile users? Ian and Karl visit a few sites to see who’s doing it right. Read the companion post – A Big List of User Experience Best Practices
Interlinking and link building are essential parts of an effective SEO strategy so anything that could have implications on the effectiveness of these tactics is a core organic search marketing concern. On May 11, 2010 a six year old Google patent application was approved that will change the way link juice is passed from page to page, both within a site and across domains. One month later, the implications of this new patent are starting to get the attention of the SEO community. Dubbed the Reasonable Surfer Patent by SEO Bill Slawski, this new link analysis methodology anticipates which links on a page are [...]
[wp_youtube]KvS3MHs4MyM[/wp_youtube] It’s been a while since our ancestors were hunters and gatherers, but some habits die hard. Our brains became hardwired to find the shortest path to the best patches of food. Online, that same instinct is called “information foraging”. In Episode 3 of the Expert Eye, Ian and Karl talk to Gord Hotchkiss about writing for the web and guiding your visitors with the alluring scent of relevant information.
How many of you fill out a login form and press enter to submit it rather than clicking the login button? I do 99% of the time. So when I was trying to enter the AirMiles Spring Surprise Contest, I typed in my email address and password, checked off the “Remember Me” box, and hit enter. But I wasn’t taken to the contest. The page reloaded and my password was gone. Herein lies UX problem number one – lots of people will just press enter instead of clicking the Login button. I did a little bit of searching to try [...]
Why bother creating a website if you’re not going to use it to give people what they want? In the first episode of The Expert Eye, Karl and I talked about how “content is king” on a website, and brought up two best practices: Give them what they want Eliminate the fluff Give them what they want For the most part, people coming to your website are going to have a specific intent – they’re going to be looking for something in particular, whether it’s information, products, or phone numbers. This means that they’ll be looking for “information scent”, stuff [...]
Google announced some new paid ad formats at SMX West – I was reading about them today in this post from Search Engine Land. If you want to know why these new formats will be good for your business, read that post. I want to tell you why they’ll be good for your customers. Get deeper faster Google introduced organic site links way back in 2006 – those 8 or so links going to deeper content beneath the first organic listing. These are great because they let your potential customers get closer to what they want to find faster, and [...]
You have a user experience whether you like it or not, and regardless of whether you’re doing anything to optimize it. From the first exposure a potential customer has to your products or services – whether that’s on a billboard, through direct mail, by word of mouth, or on a search engine – you are providing that customer with an experience around your brand. In the age of technology, and for most of the people reading this, you ultimately want people to end up on your website – this is where you can really sell yourself, because you’re not constrained [...]
Making a sale relies a lot on knowing who your potential customer is and what they need. That means that you have to do your research. We got a call yesterday from a gentleman who noticed that Enquiro “is a sponsored link on Google” and was sure we’re “paying good money to be there”. He was calling because his company has “the ability to take clients’ websites and put them on page one of Google, organically, in 90 days or less.” He did his research a little too late. About 30 seconds into the voicemail, he suddenly realized that search [...]
If you’re interested in the academic side of search, chances are you’ve come across the work of Marti Heart, a professor at Berkeley’s School of Information. Her work covers everything from search engines, search interfaces, social technology, information visualization and web usability. Her book, Search User Interfaces, came out late last year and is a great resource for anyone interested in the information seeking process and how users interact with search and search results. Better yet, the text of the entire book is available free online. If you are interested in usability, the chapters on the design, presentation, and evaluation of [...]
Google just ran a Super Bowl ad, something Eric Schmidt said in a tweet yesterday means that Hell has frozen over. Regardless of the current atmospheric conditions in the underworld, one of the more subtle things about the Google ad that caught my attention was a mention in the Google blog that, “our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact.” Google and its proponents have always made a point of emphasizing the user experience of search – that’s why the Google start page isn’t covered in [...]