Shari Thurow wrote a two-part articles series called
What SEO/SEM Professionals Should Know About Website Usability. In part two, she devotes the entire piece to comments by myself and Jakob Nielsen.

Rather than give her own opinions and perspective on the merging together of search engine optimization and marketing techniques with user experience and usability design, of which she is a speaker, writer, business owner, book author and trained practitioner of both, she let’s others do the talking.

Nielsen is more technical. He commented that,

“Narrowly considered, SEO might be thought of as the goal to rank as highly in SERPs for important keywords,” Nielsen continued. “While important, these rankings are only half of the ‘V’ element of site success. Besides ranking high, you also need users to click the listing, so clickthrough provides the other half of ‘V.’ Clickthrough is determined by usability considerations; more specifically content usability, in form of the guidelines for writing for the Web.”

I was more free flowing in my feedback. My favorite quote from myself was,

“We don’t remember sites because search engines rank them well. We remember and return to websites that work for us and give us what we want, when we want it.”

I was thrilled at the honor to be invited by Shari to participate. I was also joined by Peter Morville and Dr. Susan Weinschenk.

Other Have-to-Reads I Recommend

My friend, Jimmy Atkinson, blew me away with his 100 Killer Web Accessibility Resources: Blogs, Forums and Tutorials. This resource jumped to number one of my favorite sources on Accessibility for fast guidance.

Capture their attention with a giggle - Layering the Customer Experience looks at studies on humor and the web user experience.

The experience ratings of participants booking travel on a non-humorous site depended more directly on the outcome of the interaction. If the site was usable and the outcome was good, participants were satisfied. If the site was usable and the outcome was disappointing, the participants were disappointed, overall.

When humor was present, it helped to mitigate disappointing outcomes. Booking on humorous, usable websites led to more positive ratings, even when the outcome was ultimately disappointing.

Joe Dolson spells it out in plain language, in Best Practices: Writing for Accessibility.

A sentence can be punctuated with perfect correctness but still lose clarity when spoken by a screen reader.

Ramble

I got a tasty hint in my mailbox today that tells me the next issue of Search Marketing Standard magazine is soon to arrive! In this issue’s Usability Column, I wrote about blog usability. I can’t wait to read what I said.

It’s getting down to the wire here at home and also a bit tense. Some strange health issues are popping up with my loved ones, causing a bit of anxiety. Plus, there’s my eldest graduating high school, her prom, senior week chaos and getting set for college. The middle son goes away to Penn State for football camp, while also playing on two baseball teams and ramping up for high school freshman football. For track last Friday he won first place in shot put with a 40.2 throw. He’s almost at the record for his school. The youngest child is likely going to be living on Mars or the Moon someday. He strikes me as the type who would help figure out how to do it.

I’m working on a web site for a brilliant local artist named Nathan DiStefano (Nathandistefanoart.com). It’s not finished yet. I have more to do and I have to re-do how the images were done and displayed. It’s a project I took over and am not charging for because I’ve known him for a long time and I’m hopelessly hooked on his paintings.

Please bear with me. The next two months will be crazy.

There are countless reasons why someone from the search engine marketing industry operates a blog. It can be to share news, promote one’s services, create community, converse with clients and the public or raise awareness of issues.

I seek out positive thinking people and those who, in the face of negativity or peer pressure, continue to do their thing with class and integrity. Their reasons for doing whatever they do are often deeply personal and self fulfilling to them. For example, when an experienced marketer supports talented newcomers, or sometimes an industry leader gets into legal or reputation trouble and despite a harsh judging environment, they continue to work, learn and grow.

By now, in the year 2008, I figure that there are enough experienced web developers, search engine marketers and usability consultants out there who are taking their expertise and putting themselves into places that benefit something besides their business or work. These are the folks who volunteer, take up causes, teach, write books and articles and get involved with local events where their skills are helpful. They’re rarely paid, but money isn’t the point. Helping others is.

An excellent blog piece came out last night, written by Miriam Ellis of Solas Web Design. It’s an example of someone using their company blog to highlight an issue dear to their own heart, raise awareness and for Miriam’s family I think, express profound personal grief over a great injustice.

White Buffalo Inc. To Massacre Last Axis Deer - Shame and Infamy is her heartfelt sharing of a park system intent of killing off an entire species of deer. In an age where protecting animals is so important, it’s impossible to accept that a US park would not find alternatives to problems other than simply killing animals that live in our parks.

As Miriam wrote,

I am sorrowful to report that the last remnant of the Axis deer family will be destroyed during this week of Jan. 28th - Feb. 1st. They will be rounded up and driven into a hole by gunmen piloting helicopters who will then open fire into the hole.

I deeply respect Miriam’s decision to stop her daily routine of work and family to signal the world that something is terribly wrong in her neck of the woods. While her effort may not save the deer, she is helping to bring awareness of a situation that exists and it’s a sad reminder that humans still don’t know how to share this planet in peace.

Cre8asiteforums Discussion - An Example Of What Matters

Every day my blog posts are ripped off, cannibalized, reposted and credit is not given to me as the original writer. It’s done by “scraping” content, scripts that insert keywords and a new form of my post is spit out, either in full or in part.

In many cases credit to this blog, the original source, is not given. Not my name, not my domain. No link. But my sentences are there on their blog.

A fellow blogger has inquired about this practice at Cre8asiteforums, in a thread called Is This Blog Calling Me A Personification Of Evil? She describes a blog that has reposted her original content but in a way that is nothing like what she wrote:

Their post contains the following colorful language:

“admin excreted this detailing eBay

this quite hilliarious author

I can implore this personification of evil to dig deeper into what their niche may be writing about eBay.“

We recognized the practice and informed her that her blog is being scraped. The author of the blog who scraped her blog discovered our thread and wrote this in defense:

Congrats, you found my little experimental “AI” blog.

Yes, the “article review” category is auto-generated, sort of like the old ELIZA program. Like ELIZA, which was a parody of a non-directional psychotherapist, the generator program is a parody of a rambling and ranting blogger.

It reads the Google Blog Search RSS feed based on keywords and generates a random article. I manually select which articles to upload based on title quality.

Unlike the typical “here’s a quick excerpt” splog, which you and your friends at Cre8asite Forums have no doubt seen, I don’t generate bothersome trackbacks. That’s both useless and annoying. You get a free backlink out of the deal, which is always helpful to your site.

There’s nothing intelligent about stealing and there’s no possible credible excuse for taking someone’s original blog content and reposting it without permission or without proper credit. In my own case, my blog doesn’t host ads, but my content is used on other blogs that do.

Every day I find links to my own blog posts, digested and thrown back out in some insane new format credited to names I’ve never heard of, in some cases not linked here at all, and hosted on domains that are no more than a keyword puzzle-game.

What is the value to original blog authors to get a link back to their own work from a version of it that inserts content they didn’t write and in some cases, credits someone else for writing it?

This is yet another example of links hysteria and page rank score greed gone too far.

Okay.

Here you go.

Have at it.

I wrote this one just for you.

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Example of my blog post, shortly after being posted today. This screen shot is from an adoption scraper site.

As a volunteer reporter for Barry Schwartz’s Search Engine Roundtable blog, I’m often asked, “Why do you do it?” My consulting work is focused on usability and Internet application testing. Why am I out chasing sessions at search engine marketing conferences?

To begin with, my work began in web design and consulting/online teaching search engine optimization in the 1990’s. Therefore, I know many “long-timers” in the SEO/M industry. It remains an area of strong interest for me, which is why I continue to keep another volunteer, non-paying project, Cre8asiteforums, going. Discussions there cover web design, development, usability, accessibility, search engines, marketing, and much more.

This daily involvement keeps me well informed, which makes me unique to companies and individuals who wish for usability consulting from someone who can see the whole picture. I need (and want) to understand the code behind a page, the behaviors and habits of people intended to use those web pages and the ways in which the final product may be marketed.

Knowledge Fortifies and Enhances Skills

Since in today’s web environment, more and more people are finding web sites from social networking sites, I felt it was important for me to truly understand how advertising, marketing and public relations companies are applying social media to their clients’ marketing campaigns.

This is why I chose this particular conference as my next volunteer reporting “job”. Being there in person allows me to meet industry leaders or speakers who are teaching attendees. The entire time I’m at a conference related to marketing, in my mind, I’m weaving what I learn into what I know about human factors and user centered design.

For example, one of the messages that came from this conference on social media was that success comes from participating in social networking. It’s not something you can pretend to know from the outside, looking in. To truly understand who uses Facebook, Stumbleupon, or the hundreds of niche micro community sites popping up, marketing teams learn and apply campaigns by first getting involved with social media/networking communities.

When a client comes to you, seeking the right profitable course for their brand, a skilled marketer will know which social networking site is the best fit for your company. This may absolutely NOT be Digg, Reddit, MySpace or Facebook.

Choose a marketing company that takes the required time to study your target market and understands their behaviors, language, interests and their favorite ways of communicating with one another. This includes understanding the importance of usability, accessibility and persuasive web design and where these fit into web site promotion and social web behavior. Once again, I’ve reinforced my long-held belief that usability and seo (and all the related tie-in skills to these two areas), are able to join forces and provide a united project plan. A team such as this understands and values your brand reputation management.

They are also well aware that the Internet never sits still. Consider hiring employees and consultants who invest time in keeping their skills and knowledge current. Additionally, make sure to budget for continued education for your present staff. A poor choice in marketing or web design can absolutely crush your business.

This is why I place such value on reporting conference sessions and why I invest my own money to do it.

I want to be sure that those who hire me are getting the best person for the job.

Coverage by Search Engine Roundtable, Rather Than My Own Blog

Another key reason I’m tied to SER is because I’m a contributing writer for that blog. I do that, and conference reporting, because he’s been a great friend and strong supporter to me. So yes, a bit of simple loyalty and friendship certainly comes into play. Barry doesn’t put any pressure on his reporters. He’s always grateful for the help. I’m crazy enough to work for a smile and a hug sometimes…

It’s our tradition, at SER, to get the session information posted quickly. SER was the first blog to try and reach every SES conference and bring it to those who weren’t able to be there in person. Several years later this remains a volunteer project, where reporters offer to help Barry Schwartz (and now Tamar Weinberg), blog sessions. In cases like SES, where there are 3 - 4 days with 4 tracks of sessions, the result exceeds the exceptional when his volunteer reporting team produces nearly complete coverage.

Everyone has their own style. Perfect copy is not a requirement, nor a demand. (I tend to push out the first draft and then go back and edit for clarity and errors.) While the lack of perfection has been sometimes criticized, I feel that many people don’t realize that none of us are paid to do this. We pay for our own rooms, food and travel expenses to “give back” to the community in this way. We try to not make mistakes (like when I got dates wrong on Tuesday), but when we have a chance to breathe, someone from SER manages to go back and catch the errors readers haven’t already pointed out.

Lastly, I do this work wearing my jeans and sneakers if I wish to. (Thanks so much for that!)

Barry’s Recap of Sessions is here

SMX was a two-day, one track conference. The following were covered (all sessions except the last one on Wednesday, which was a clinic. We also don’t report Q & A, which follow each session.)

Social Media Marketing Essentials
Linkbait - Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites
A Marketer’s Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging
Keynote Q&A: Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us & Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon
Effectively Leveraging Social Networking
Evangelist - The Marketer’s Role in SMM
Micro Communities
Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers & Answer Sharing

I also linked to additional coverage and photos in Photos Are Up for SMX Social Media NYC

As I’ve mentioned, this is the last conference I can afford to volunteer for. It’s been an honor to serve the Search Engine Marketing industry in this way.

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Related:

SMX: Was it worth it? Did I learn anything? Will I go again? by Brendan Picha.

Photos from Liana Evans’ SMX Social NYC 2007 pictures set.

For those of you interested in some of the topics on blogs and journalism or the influence and study of social media behavior, here is lead I got to a blog post that digs into some of it. Weinberger NCF keynote: users take back power are Paul Gillin’s notes on a talk that sounds like it was fascinating and filled with food for thought.

The Web is a permission-free zone.

Marketing, business and media are all about fake, phony voices. Conversations are open and honest.

Blogs aren’t journalism. They’re blank pieces of paper. The fact that they’ve been judged in the context of journalism is because the media can’t get past itself.

Bloggers with just a few people linking to them are little knots of community. Every blogroll link is a little act of selflessness. The Web was built out of these little acts of generosity.

Hatip (thank you!) to Lipsticking for pointing me to Paul’s book, The New Influencers and thus, the Wienberger piece.