Making SEO and Usability Work Together

This was a great little session, but it would have been nicer to be a full hour. I am NOT a fan of the 25 minute sessions in this year’s schedule.

Bill Leake, Apogee Search
Kelly Meacham, Expero

Leake: Have a website that gets you traffic and lets your traffic do what you want. The way SEO is often done is often antithetical to usability.

Local search is very easy to optimize.

Good SEM will drive the right users to your website. Traffic for traffic’s sake is worthless.

Once they’re there, you have to keep them engaged, satisfy their goals, pay it forward.

90% of sites are initially found through search engines. Most visitors hit the site and bounce right off. One of the big myths of SEO is that it’s all about what you say on your pages. It’s how the rest of the web is voting for you, how they’re linking to you, how they’re talking about you. The SEO industry is caught up with horrible ideas like keyword density. Don’t get suckered in by "we’ll write new copy for you."

How true. I have seen some really AWFUL copy written by supposed SEO experts, that would definitely make it harder for regulars to use the site, no matter who it drove in the front door.

Put your keyword in your title tags, put them in your meta keywords file. Write for your users. Have a keyword density greater than 0.

The 4% keyword density ratio is worthless. Google is 80% off-page. 20% blowing your own trumpet. I’m leaving out stuff like age of domain, etc. About 40% of your 20% is your title tags. About 30% is your other tags and using your keyword in your copy.

My industry spends 90% of their time on 6%….using the keyword in copy.

Meacham: Writing for the web. By writing content to be read by people, not by spiders. Write in an inverted pyramid.

Leake: Organic search means people come in from anywhere.

Meacham: Forms must have benefit statements. It increases your conversion rate.

Leake: Better Business Bureau privacy policy tests very well.

New topic:

Leake: Google Checkout is really great. No merchant fees. From conversion, usability credibility really increases your conversion. Put it in your AdWords. But, Google Checkout requires a Gmail account, so know your audience.

On a big content site, your internal links matter as well. So link to yourself as much as possible.