The small group of search marketers, plus one usability imposter person, who gathered in King of Prussia, PA last week has proof they did, in fact, take over a section of the bar at Bennigans. If you have the urge to splurge, the next gig is targeted for June 28.

Liana Evans’ coverage of the latest gathering of Delaware Valley and surrounding areas SEO/M’s (and the usability person who crashes the party.) She’s the one wearing innocent white.

View the pictures!

Here’s one:

No matter how hard you try, there is always something wrong with your website. There is always a critic. I have a friend outside the USA who thankfully alerts me of my 404 error pages, which I appreciate, even though I told him over the weekend he was making me scream at my own inability to be perfect.

You don’t want to be caught with your pants down when trying to present a professional site. Since my work permits me to see a great deal of websites and Internet applications, I can note common problems. This list is not about the common ones. This list is for repetitive web design practices that drive site visitors crazy because we keep driving them crazy.

Here’s what we do:

1. There is not enough persuasive or value oriented information to convince visitors to stay on the page. I compare this to car shopping. Automobile’s in a showroom have a sheet of paper taped to the window that lists every detail you could possibly imagine about that particular car. How often do you actually stand in one spot, directly in front of the window, squinting to read the tiny words on the page? Usually you are spotted by eagle-eyed car salespeople who leap to your side and begin telling you all the reasons why the car is cool. They ask what you had in mind too, and from there, start to narrow down matches that fit your requirements. Write as if you are a car salesperson for your homepage. Cut a deal. Introduce the manager. Offer a test drive.

2. Don’t place 100 links to the inside pages from your homepage. It is not a playground where you run screaming out onto the area trying to beat the first person to the swing set. A homepage should be married to your site requirements and especially your visitors’ top tasks. This could be price checking, searching for part numbers or clearance items, finding your contact information or finding the only baby items that are not pink or blue on the planet.

3. Quit talking about yourself so often. Nobody cares how great you are. What they do care about is what you have for them that’s worth their time and money. If you’re the All Powerful Oz, you can slip that in, but just remember that even OZ lied to Dorothy. If you need help with your ego, try the We We Monitor.

4. Feedback and email newsletter forms are some of the funniest things I’ve witnessed on the web. Why would you demand a phone number from someone who is just letting you know your links are broken? If you want general feedback or better yet, sales leads, your form should scream trust. Start by trusting that if site visitors want you to call them, they’ll enter their phone number. Requiring one is something managers tell you to do. Ignore them. Consider your prospects that desire email contact only or impress them with customer service clues with a choice of either email or phone contact. Never require a phone number for free newsletter signups, but if you insist on this unheard of practice you invented, offer a sample of the newsletter that requires that phone number and by all means, tell us why you want to call us.

5. If your navigation only goes forward, you didn’t learn to dance properly. The actual steps are:

a. Move forward
b. Move back if your partner doesn’t like that move
c. Continue forward if your partner really liked where you landed and trusts where you want to go next.

In other words, don’t rely on the “Back” button to go backwards. Guide your visitor’s steps backward, forward and side to side with breadcrumb navigation, embedded text links, buttons or links that continue a task’s forward momentum. Design navigation to be fluid and effortless. Your visitors should be able to glide along the dance floor and not get lost or spun around into dizzying loops.

6. Application functionality. If you only knew what exists out there in web site land. For example, there was a travel site for camping that only lets you book hotel rooms because the campgrounds weren’t programmed into the options anywhere. There was the application with many parts in the process, however, no matter what link or button was pushed, it only landed on one of those parts. An application is only intuitive if you program its brains properly.

7. Mystery links confound visitors. Non-descriptive labels force us to guess where we will end up. While I love a good game of hide and seek as much as the next person, when I think I know where you’re taking me and you take me somewhere totally different, I stop letting you drive.

8. Related to this are Absolute Shock Links. These are navigation links that take you to PDF files without any warning. Since it takes time for the computer to go pull Adobe out of the kitchen, rev it up, load the file and then I swear you have to resize the thing from 200% down to something that doesn’t make you get the shakes reading, well, you can see how a little warning is appreciated. The other form of visitor link shock treatment is linking to a totally new domain, with new layout and brand new navigation and no way back because it opened up a new window and cut off all ties to where you were. At least, if you plan on dumping your visitors off somewhere new, work out a nice little warning system and arrange visitation time with the Mothership site.

9. If you want to capture someone’s attention, do it above the page fold. Large monitors didn’t signal the end of browser laziness. We still like an incentive to use the mouse to scroll, hover or click. If half the page is needed to describe how to use a contact or sales lead form, what is doing business with you like?

10. If you have a FAQ, there had better be a good reason for making your visitors go to a page that displays a long list of questions and answers. They want you to answer the question when they have the question. I remember when I used to show horses and entered jumping classes that required me to memorize the course I’d need to guide my horse around. I could never understand why they didn’t put directions inside the show ring itself that said “Turn left here”, “Weave around these scary high jumps” and “Slow down, the judge usually stands about here.” A FAQ is nice for backup if you have a complicated process, but user instructions during the actual task are far more considerate and easy to remember.

Finally, don’t despair. Web site surfers are often the most incredibly patient and forgiving people, especially if you offer something they want. Just remember to show them where you put it.

Paging through the latest issue of Search Marketing Standard, I landed on the colorful two-page layout devoted entirely to the search marketing conference lineup for 2007. I’ve decided that somewhere along the line, someone decided that all SEO/M’s are millionaires with marvy travel budgets who live in small isolated parts of the world like the USA and UK.

Reading down the nice colorful blocks of type and dates, I realized that there is a conference that I’d love to attend every month. I enjoy covering sessions. I revel in watching all the important star power getting tanked in the bars. Someday it could me on the cover of SEOMoz Rolling Stone.

What I can’t figure out is how anyone in the industry gets any real work done. Many companies send the same people to every conference to present a talk or be on panels. Or, they rotate by letting the spouses decide because truly, somebody must be getting an earful about never being home.

Just in case anyone gives an SEO a hard time about their profession being dinky and part of the “Why don’t you get a real job?” category, you can proudly note the glaring fact that there is a marketing conference of some niche or angle featured in a big city somewhere in the world several times a month, except in the case of Australia, South America, Africa and most of the other side of the planet.

Speaking of South America, the only possible nearly naughty fun place for any of these conferences is Las Vegas. One wonders why there are never any held in areas with beaches, sand, thongs, outdoor tiki bars and cheap hotels. I would so go get another credit card, wouldn’t you?

This year marks the exploding trend for niche conferences on verticals like travel, local search, affiliate marketing, PPC, and social media. Other enticing ideas consist of an event where you get to tour China, or gather in smaller groups where you can talk to and flirt with the presenters. Not that I do that. But if I remembered to do that, I would, because the opportunities for flirting are growing.

The touring High Rankings conferences are going to London in October. SMX will be in Stockholm later in October. October also is the hot month for a conference in Colorado, New York, and China. Okay, I just checked and three of these are SMX, so if you are a speaker for them, write a reminder card of your kids’s names now, so you’ll have it handy when you finally get home.

Conference schedules remind me of candles on a birthday cake. There’s one for every year you survived, plus one to make a wish with. That’s the one you hope pays off in the long run. Practically speaking, there’s also the law of economy, where you actually pick one or two to travel to. Yes, there’s always the risk you’ll miss the conference with the party bus and pole dancer. Life isn’t always fair.

To get to as many of these events as possible, I had the crazy idea that we could experiment with parallel realities and our other selves could attend some, while we attend others. In fact, one of our selves could stay home and earn a living. How cool is that?

I like the smaller conferences and am usually happy to wait for one of them to hit close to home. It’s odd how many parts of the world aren’t on the list though. Washington, DC is one. Australia. (Poor Australia. To their credit, they did have one of their own not long ago, but nothing is on the docket for this year yet.) Kansas. Idaho. Hawaii. Japan. Alaska. Italy. Surely there are marketers in these areas.

Finally, as if the schedule isn’t already hectic enough for anyone who is a speaker in demand, December takes the prize for making SES and Pubcon duke it out for the first week of the month. That’s right. Two big conferences, both popular and only one of them has the Blue Man Group theater nearby.

Seemed like a no-brainer to me.

I’m an avid reader and since my wireless laptop screen washes away from the sunshine, having a magazine comes in handy while sunning outside. The Summer issue of the print publication, Search Marketing Standard was shipped and many people and companies are receiving their copies. The lead story, written by the energetic David Temple, is on search marketing training and certification.

As David notes, training opportunities are “springing up like wildflowers”. He’s right. Not only is there increased awareness of the value of marketing to search engines, the skill sets involved require both creative and technical experience. It’s not easy to find someone able to handle every facet, especially if you include site design audits that focus on usability and application functionality. SEO companies that include the latter remain in the minority, and yet it seems logical to assume that a website must not only perform in search engines, but also must be able to meet its design and business objections once found.

The article reviews some of the popular educational and training offers that exist now and which are deemed the most credible and worth exploring. Only one of them, Search Engine College, offers a course on basic web site usability. It’s a self-teaching course I wrote to inspire interest in user centered design and how even a little foundation can go a long way in fortifying marketing campaigns. Other training is niche oriented, or offered by companies and organizations devoted to search marketing. While forums and books are helpful, and indeed, most search engine marketers are self-taught, marketing companies that target large and prosperous web sites and specific competitive industries require or desire proof of expertise.

While the Summer issue seemed on the thin side, it continues to deliver thoughtful articles that are intended to be referred to at any time. One of my favorites was written by Jaime Sirovich, where he describes in easy to understand terms exactly why search engines struggle with FLASH, images and AJAX technology. He provides example code workarounds to help search engines read the text on a page even with typical obstructions.

Eric Ward describes the logic and lack of logic behind linkbait. The Industry Analysis section included two usability oriented articles; one written by me called “Persuasive Web Design” and another written by Barry Welford titled, “Mobile Marketing and Usability”. This was the first time I made it into a print publication of this caliber. It was both exciting and an honor to be asked. Other Industry Analysis pieces were contributed by Chris Boggs, of SEMPO and Avenue A Razorfish, and Tom Dahm.

Marketing and usability weren’t the only topics highlighted. Blogging was covered in a piece called “Cultivating Your Blog Community in 10 Easy Steps” by Joe Whyte. Patricia Hursh covered local search advertising. There are two interviews, a conference guide and a nifty set of Internet statistics provided by Marketing Sherpa.

To learn more or subscribe, visit Search Marketing Standard, so you’re not left out on the latest industry coverage written by those in the actual industries.

I’m big on volunteering my time to organizations and if I can’t actually be there in body and soul, I can be there in other ways. A meme going around by search marketers is a bit of a linking way of lending a hand. The idea originated at SEORefugee. I was tagged by Andrey Milyan.

The idea is present the links of the one who tagged you, and add your own (and you can add those of others you see in the list at SEO Refugee if you wish, or get ideas there.)

Here are some places I’d like to give a shout out to:

A Million Thanks - Shauna Fleming rounds up letters of thanks for Troops
One - Fighting Aids and Poverty
Louis Braille School - My personal tribute to Elizabeth Able on her and her mother’s devotion to the blind.
A Woman’s Place - Protecting women from domestic violence in Bucks County, Pa
Bpeace - Business Council for Peace helps women in areas of the world in conflict and post-conflict to rebuild communities and strengthen families.

Andrey chose the following non-profits to promote:

Medecins Sans Frontieres / Doctors Without Borders - Humanitarian Relief
American Red Cross - Emergency Preparedness
AMREF - African Medical & Research Foundation - African Health Development
DOROT - Programs for Elderly
Feed the Children - Protect Children

Get inspired here if you wish.

I prefer to tag all the generous moderators and members of Cre8asiteforums because many of them are strong advocates for non-profits. And,
Sophie Wegat
Jennifer Laycock
Lisa Barone
Bill Slawski
David Temple

Cre8 Peace (PC)