Apologies in advance to my friends who are “working” in Las Vegas and Chicago at the two popular search engine marketing conferences and one user experience show - all going on this week. I’m at home, all warm and cozy and haven’t yet had to race to a press room or freak out over a dead laptop battery. Sheer heaven.

For those of us who stayed home…

Donna has an excellent how-to on creating social site profiles - Using Social Profile Pages To Your Advantage Why?

They often show up prominently in the search engine results pages. If someone searches for you by your brand name, or nick, there’s a very good chance your social network profile pages will show up in the top 10 results. The reputation management / branding aspects of this alone makes the act of creating profile pages a worthwhile endeavor.

Scott has been doing some keyword “research” in much the same way I do people watching, only he got into the math, whereas I would never get past the “cool shirt” stage. According to Blondes ARE the most popular… (Bah!), blondes are searched for the most, as are cats and Hentai, the latter of which up until today I had never heard of.

When I’m Not Doing SEO

I was tagged by Barry (aka Rustybrick) because we’re both at home lounging around eating bon bons while everyone else is blogging conferences.

I’m no longer an SEO (officially), but I refer work to my SEO Partners and follow the industry because when they need usability help, they may want somebody besides Shari and Matt. (giggle) So, being officially tagged, when I’m not doing anything for Cre8pc, UsabilityEffect and Cre8asiteforums, with the few remaining ounces of energy I have left I:

1. READ. I read an enormous number of books. Usually I have several going at once. They’re in my car, backpack, every room of the house and my office. For fun, I drive to Borders just to read there, instead of here.

2. Sports. As in spectator. Working from home allows me to attend my son’s sporting events in football, wrestling, hockey and baseball. I’m the equipment carrier, snack/water mom, taxi, and start to cry whenever he does something amazing. I’m pathetic that way. Related sport: Trying to keep an eye on daughter and her boyfriend.

3. In Winter, when I’m not working, nothing makes me happier than baking bread or preparing a meal with the kids, who have a knack for and interest in food and putting together fresh/whole/organic dinners. I love making big pots of homemade soup on cold days. Spring, Summer and Fall I have the gardens to tend to for flowers, herbs and veggies. I weed, rescue hockey pucks from the beds and thank my vegetable plants for producing for us as well as they do.

For “When I’m Not Doing SEO”, I tag:

Sophie Wegat
Barry Welford
Elizabeth Able

I Am One of 50

One of my articles on usability and seo has been chosen for The Top 50 SEO Posts of the Year. The beauty of this is discovering a new blog with business advice. Thank you for the honor!

The Perpetual Super-Novice is the perfect article for those who are looking to understand the big picture. It talks about product design, what people want from it, and what motivates them to keep using it. In addition, it touches on how people look for help or more information on it. This is where search comes into play, among other things. Much of the relationship between seo and usability has to do with understanding user behavior. As the article states:

Now let’s think about how people behave when they’re intrinsically motivated to learn more about how something works. What do they do? They do things like

* asking other people
* searching reference content
* searching the Web
* browsing forums and other archival sources of information

Finally…I just love this latest from Jeffrey Zeldman…Stealing design. At the moment he has 10 comments for a blog post that consists of one full sentence.

The man is brilliant.

Hot on the heels of my earlier post about reputation management and terms used to label successful people come signs that I’m in no way alone in my questions about the authenticity of claims and accuracy of press releases. Control of information is a growing concern.

Not long ago I met someone in the search engine marketing business who told me about being frustrated with search results on his own name. Being “Googled” brought up information that was incorrect and he was desperate to change it.

An article written by Matt Creamer was referred to me by a friend, who thought I’d be interested in his story. I was. Optimize Me: A Reporter’s Journey into the World of SEO and SEM is about his experience hiring a firm to perform SEO services to improve his reputation in search engine results. He disliked what a search for his name brought back in search results.

The firm he hired used social media marketing to turn his personal “brand” around. He writes,

Reprise created for me no fewer than 13 social-media accounts that would link to each other and, where possible, be loaded with keywords including my name and words like “advertising” and “Ad Age” that would turn them up high in relevant searches. The overall effect, ideally, would be a web of content that would push to the top of my search rankings — and, in the process, drive traffic to my stories on Ad Age, all the while pushing the impostors out. The hub for my brand would be MattCreamer.com, a brand-new blog that hosts links to my work for Ad Age as well as posts about news in the marketing and media world.

Success in social media, I quickly discovered, is being comfortable with the proposition that every single waking thought and feeling you have is important enough that other people will want to read it.

Now, after all this was done, a search on his name brings back a friendlier, more accurate portrayal of who he is.

I can understand wanting to have your best possible professional self facing the public, but what he had to do scares me. I can’t imagine handling 13 separate social media accounts. And couldn’t the same tactics of building out sites with controlled content to build up someone, also be used to take them down? Is there no type of web site that’s safe from being used as an SEO tool?

Turning Lemons Into Lemonade

Bryan Eisenberg also brought up the “expert” label topic this week. He, too, is uncomfortable with it and has another idea. In his blog post called, In How to Leverage “OPM” (Other People’s Mistakes), he asked, “Have you ever taken bad Web advice from a so-called expert?” His company is writing an ebook on that topic.

While conversion has something to do with usability, multivariate testing and web analytics, the bigger overarching issue is almost always marketing (read: persuasion)-related. When our clients have a challenging search-related issue, we refer them to a search marketing firm we trust. Are there really any social media experts yet (although we may be getting there)?

* Did you get blacklisted from a search engine for following bad advice?
* Did you spend a ton of money on a tool no one uses?
* Did you do a “redesign” and get poor results?
* Did you create a “viral” campaign that nobody noticed?
* Did you invest in the latest and coolest Web 2.0 initiative only to see a small return?

He mentions “social media experts”. I think someone like the above journalist, Matt Creamer, might feel the company he hired falls into that category already. I’ve seen the phrase “social media marketing expert” and not understood exactly what it means. This is similar to “usability expert”. What, exactly, to these experts do? Each industry, whether it be usability, social media, web design or search engine marketing has branches of related skill sets. Sometimes there are specialties within each genre and the approach is a team effort for a client.

Matt Bailey wrote a different angle on this, in When Bad Reviews go Good where he describes,

Business owners are horrified at the prospects of someone leaving a horrible review of their business. The helpful and positive reviews aren’t even considered because of the potential of a bad review.

His article offers examples of how a supposed “bad” review of a product or service may, in fact, be someone else’s “good” point. It’s interesting food for thought.

It ties back to reputation management and what we can, and can’t control. User generated content may be a creepy unknown, uncontrollable risk factor of doing business on the Web that we may have to learn to live with.

Credibility, Trust and Customer Satisfaction

A new web site called MyWOT (WebofTrust) has jumped on this. The site’s purpose is to help Internet users identify web sites they can trust doing business with.

What if you’re not even online yet? Should you be concerned about your reputation at the conception stage?

The answer is yes, if positive customer satisfaction is a priority. The Repertory Grid: Eliciting User Experience Comparisons in the Customer’s Voice offers an advanced perspective from the user testing angle, but offers this as food for thought.

For example, during the business intelligence phase of a project, when a product team is defining the business goals and objectives for a product, business stakeholders usually have their own perspectives on how a Web site or application fits in the marketplace and what customers’ perceptions are. However, their experiences and constructs are likely different from those of their customers. Therefore, what stakeholders think is important might not be important to customers at all.

It’s not enough to have good intent. The more public an individual or company is, the more likely there will be something negative written or said somewhere about them. How strange to consider that we may need to worry what a search engine displays about us and I wonder…

How much longer will we have any real say anymore?

When I decided to teach myself HTML in 1995, I did what many others did back then. We studied source code by copying and dismantling what someone else did. In those days, there was only one background color - gray. Creativity felt limited, but that didn’t last long.

Today, there’s no end to what web designers can do. If you can imagine it, someone is inventing a way to do it. The pace is fast. We call it things like Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. What excites me is that the quiet pioneers in emotional design (captology) are more visible these days. I’ve long felt we can do more than static, one dimensional web pages. Internet users rely on the ‘Net for so much that usage is an extension of our selves. Many people need the ‘Net and demand it to enrich their lives.

More and more people approach web sites expecting to feel something from the experience. This is where we’re going. This is what’s next with software application design and web page presentations.

Social media plays a part in our expectations and our interest in experiences that touch us. Video games, online video sharing and virtual Internet worlds also opened our eyes not only to what we can do to satisfy ourselves, but made us want more. Whether you noticed it or not, what you feel while using a web site matters. How you respond to it matters. You can vote. You can comment. You can recommend. You may find yourself loyal to certain web sites because of how you feel when you’re interacting with them. They may make you feel content. Happy. Safe. Included.

I think Flash is going to find itself in more and more web sites, and developers who teach themselves how to make Flash pages and scripts accessible will be setting the stage for greater adaptation of web site usage by a wider range of people. Personalization is going to become specialized and eventually, individualized based on, again, how we feel about our experience.

As content producers, some companies will want to cause experiences. They’ll learn to create reaction.

Influencing the customer experience through the internet by Mona Patel, executive director at Human Factors International, discusses emotion and trust, and how these influence our decisions and choices on the Web. She writes,

Whatever a site’s conversion goal, it is now more about people than product or services.

How do you design to reach out and touch someone? How do you test to see if you have done so? What types of web sites may want to explore emotional connections and trigger reactions that convert?

Health care sites, beauty (hair, skin, weight), dating, clothing, jewelry, non-profit charity organizations…are just a few. I like to take the ideas and apply them to harder situations, such as furniture sites, educational institutions or food. Anything we search for in a search engine can be found. But getting us to choose, commit, try, buy, recommend, or get in the car and drive to the store takes more than playing with color contrasts, table-less CSS and long shopping cart processes.

Do you make purchase decisions based on a certain “something” that’s kind of undefined but you know it when you feel it?

That’s what fascinates me. Designers and developers are learning how to inspire us.

Here’s another article that may inspire you…

Monday Inspiration: User Experience Of The Future

Below we present some of the outstanding recent developments in the field of user experience design. Most techniques may seem very futuristic, but they are reality. And in fact, they are extremely impressive. Keep in mind: they can become ubiquitous over the next years.