I leave for Chicago SES next week to join the Usability and SEO panel. I’m very excited about this panel because after a conference call, it’s clear we will all compliment one another very well. The topics each of us will discuss focus on SEO and User Experience Sesign, the reasons why this powerful relationship works and how to implement practices that will provide long term successful results.
Our panel is moderated by Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner & Founder, Beyond Ink.
Panelists for SEO and Usability: Two Wins for the Price of One
Jordan Kasteler, Senior SEO Analyst, Overstock.com
Randy Pickard, VP Product Innovation, User Centric Inc.
Matthew Bailey, President, SiteLogic
Kathleen Fealy, President, KF Multimedia & Web, Inc.
Kimberly Krause Berg, Owner, UsabilityEffect.com
News and Good Stuff for this week:
Colleen Jones leads off with Ten Recipes for Persuasive Content
Most people find someone who seems genuine more persuasive than someone who seems like a hypocrite. I believe we can imbue content with a genuine quality by maintaining a consistent tone, sticking to a consistent message or focus, and ensuring our content is consistently accurate.
Usability is important because:
* It drives down production costs.
* It improves sales.
* It enhances brand loyalty
Love Flash? Visit Flash Essential for a knock out collection of how-to’s, examples, and more.
Jill Whalen takes a look at Why Usability and SEO Go Hand-in-hand in the Organic SEO column at Search Engine Land.
Search engines aren’t looking for the pages with the most keyword density or the most toolbar PageRank or the most anything else. Search engines are looking for the best, most relevant pages that most meet the user’s search query.
These rock!
35+ Social Media Tools That Make Life Easier and 31 Incredible Resources And Inspirations For Designers Like You To Discover
Sometimes though it seems that you are doing all the right things, and yet people are not leaving comments. Why? Stop trying so hard. Think about giving and place no expectation on getting. That’s the secret.
I totally get this. Cultivating Conversations
What’s the average reader to do when faced with a glut of comments that precede them? Is there a way to make comment threads more useful, and more usable?
White paper – Search Engine Optimization and User Behavior
Shari Thurow gets into Why User Experience Is A Crucial Part Of Good SEO
Search engine optimization is all about the user experience, because the idea behind SEO is to get users to their desired information and destination(s) as quickly and easily as possible by using the users’ language (keywords). Searchers type in keywords at a commercial web search engine. Searchers’ expectations are validated in search results pages and, hopefully, after they click on links within those search results…a perfect, seamless user experience.
I love easy! Easy PHP Photo Gallery by Joe Dolson.
Also from Joe, WordPress to Twitter with Cli.gs. Easy, free plug-in.
A well written example of how to design a site that meets SEO, usability and web standards: A Great New Client Site And A Chance For Us To Do It All!
Always good reading, Search Engine Land’s Just Behave column.
Tools
Selenium, web application testing
The Website Marketing Mind Map: Internet Marketing Made Easy
The Women
Mary Bowling from Blizzard Marketing
Virginia DeBolt interviews Jill Whalen at Web Teacher
Blizzard Marketing’s Carrie Hill writesConversion Immersion – Making the Most of Existing Traffic for Visibility magazine.
Debra Masteler’s Search Engine Land columns are a hit with Getting the right kind of links by MSN.
Babbling with Jessica Bowman is a fun interview by Rebecca at SEOMoz.
Still Cooking
Congratulations to KeyRelevance on their new hire, Chris Silver Smith this week. Story: KeyRelevance Targets Economic Recession “Sweet Spot” With Universal Search Optimization Guru
Kim Krause Berg launches Akesana.
Holler if I missed something really cool.
See you later next week!
Congrats on the Akesana launch Kim!
hi cre8pc, thanks for your post. Web usability is something that needs to be analyzed to make sure that the search engine robots have an easy time reading a website and do not jump ship prematurely.