Track Santa

I guess I'm just a kid at heart. Every year I go to the Norad Track Santa website and watch Santa's progress as he delivers gifts to all of the good children of the world (hopefully myself included.)

This year, MSNBC is running a neat commentary on Santa's travels. Then, if you really want to get into this, you can go to the SantaGPS site and get some tracking software for your computer. I haven't tried that yet, but let me know if you do.

Have a fun & peaceful Chistmas!

Happy Holidays!

Wishing You A Peaceful Holiday!

Claudiadot Search Engine Marketing

Btw, Search Engine Roundtable is tracking all of the holiday search engine logos. Enjoy!

Snow In New Mexico

We don't often get a lot of snow here in the Albuquerque area of New Mexico, but today we did. Reminds me a bit of Wisconsin, where I lived before moving here in 1989.

Site Usability and SEO

• Is your website interface easy to use for your potential customers to use?

• How easily can your customers find your products and complete a purchase?

• Does your content answer your customer’s primary questions, clearly explain what you offer and what they can do on your site?

• Can a visitor to your website quickly and easily find what they are looking for?

What do these things have to do with SEO? I am finding that strict SEO falls short of providing all of the results that a website owner wants and needs. SEO is valuable in sending quality traffic to your site, but what happens once they get there is just as important. Is that traffic going to stay and convert or is it going to leave when it can’t easily and quickly find the information it wants?

As an SEO professional, if I look at the Big Picture, I have to look beyond traditional SEO and include Site Usability in my service toolset. It’s not enough to simply optimize a site for a high search engine position and drive traffic to a website. Site owners want conversions – sales, registrations, leads. If the traffic does not convert for the owner, it hasn’t done any good at all. I strongly believe that it is also my responsibility to include specific website usability optimization elements that will increase visitor satisfaction and increase customer conversions.

In the future, I'll be looking at this issue more in depth, but in the meantime there is a lot of excellent information available on website usability issues and I will list some of my recommended sources here:

- Jakob Nielsen’s Website has a huge wealth of information from the “king of usability”.

- Netmechanic.com has a useful Web Site Usability Checklist.

- WebsiteTips.com has a good Usability Section with articles and tutorials.

- Steve Krug has published a great book “Don’t Make Me Think – A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability” that is a fast read and worth every minute of it. You can purchase his book on Amazon.com (make sure you get the updated 2^nd edition).

New Google Update - Is There or Isn't There?

The big question looming right during the Holiday shopping season is if Google is in the process of updating. At least two forum threads are discussing this possibility: DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld , where Matt Cutts (kind of) denies anything big happening. I personally don't see any significant changes to Google ranking for any of my client sites, so I'm inclined to think that this is nothing to make a big deal about. But, we will see.

By the way, here is the link to Matt Cutts' blog (where there isn't any mention of a Google update).

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