When marketing your products online different methods could be used and different tactics could be implemented. One more way that is stated in the research published at TechWeb is for sure not new but I have never paid appropriate attention on it.

Using consumer generated media rates as one of the resources that will ensure visitors to buy that or another product and to return to your site again and again is not bad idea. If we turn to numbers we’ll make sure that the idea is not just not bad but very good as numbers say that 77% of online shoppers read consumer reviews and 22% of those who post to forums and other feedback places tend to buy online more. Not bad statistics, I’d say. It’s obvious – users rely more not on the experts’ opinion about the good or service but rather on the opinion of such consumers as they are.

The conclusion is if you are selling something online why don’t you think of adding the feedback possibility for your buyers to enhance your sales?

Yesterday at the SEW Blog RustyBrick posted about the first six videos Matt Cutts launched with SEO tips. Well, Matt released two more videos today, and they are worth a listen to (not necessarily a looking at).

* Quality of a Good Site - 5 minutes and 40 seconds
* Myths, Large Site Launches, and Google Images - 4 minutes 10 seconds
* Optimize for Search Engines or Users? - 4 minutes and 25 seconds
* Static vs. Dynamic urls - 4 minutes and 30 seconds
* How to structure a site? - 4 minutes and 46 seconds
* Supplemental Results - 4 minutes and 12 seconds
* Does Webspam use Google Analytics? - 5 minutes and 11 seconds
* Google Terminology - 4 minutes and 40 seconds

ENJOY!!!

Google shares its world wide web perfection philosophy by giving the free access to Google Analytics. According to the announcement made recently in Google Analytics Blog no more invitations needed and no time to wait for the possibility to use the handy and useful analytic tool produced by Google.

Now anyone whether he owns a big site or a small one can have Google Analytics account immediately and for free. The account can be accessed either by clicking an “Analytics” tab in Adwords account or by visiting google.com/analytics. Due to Google it becomes easy for you to gather and access all information concerning visitors activity on your site, ways they found the site and other information that could be used to improve your ROI and lessen marketing expenses.

It is very pleasant news and we recommend those who haven’t used Google Analytics before to try it.

The implicit war between search engines for the search share continues and this time Microsoft is making efforts to improve its search algorithms.

According to a new Microsoft study the search results can be improved by 31 percent by implementation of new techniques based on the user behavior data. Such information as how long a user stays on the site, where he clicks and which queries sets can significantly influence the ordering of top search results.

As click fraud and spam increase search results based on users’ behavior are what will help Microsoft eliminate the problem. Here is what a study co-author Microsoft Research representative Eugene Agichtein says about the new algorithms:

By examining click-through and browsing patterns across a large number of users, we are able to learn a great deal about how people interact with search technologies and thereby improve our accuracy dramatically.

The research is published already and proved the efficiency of user behavior-based approach to websites ranking. I wonder how fast will the study be implemented into the algorithm.

The search data released by AOL serves different ways. First a searcher was identified with that data and now a new keyword tool is created.

What distinguishes this Keyword Suggestion Tool from the others of the kind like Wordtracker or Overture is that the reports are given for three major search engines. The estimates of search traffic for Google, Yahoo and MNS are based on the reported search share of these engines and given for the month period. The tool uses data of 20million queries performed in a 3 month period from March to May, 2006.

We could only guess if the estimates based on AOL data are accurate or not but the tool itself is quite handy and easy to use.

Rather often the necessity of exploring a site, getting to know the number of links and pages indexed arises among the webmasters. Yahoo met webmasters wishes half-way and by creating a new tool enabling users to easily find all the necessary SEO information about the site from Yahoo index without running different queries. The tool is named Site Explorer and this week Yahoo announced the redirect of certain queries to that tool. Below I’ve listed the queries that are now redirected to Site Explorer:

• site:ysearchblog.com
• link:http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000341.html
• linkdomain:ysearchblog.com

At the same time according to the announcement in Yahoo Blog certain queries will not be redirected:

• ysearchblog.com
• ysearchblog
• site:ysearchblog.com webmasters (looking for ysearchblog posts mentioning webmasters)
• link:http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000341.html Danny Sullivan (looking for links to the article mentioning Danny Sullivan)
• linkdomain:ysearchblog.com site:yahoo.com (looking for links to ysearchblog from within yahoo.com)

We encourage you to test Site Explorer and share your opinion on how useful you find it.

How many times a day you meet or use a word “usability”? The term has gained such a wide popularity nowadays, but what meaning should we give it?

Usability is a general concept distinguishing how easily a user can use/interact with an interface; the difinition given to the term “usability” by Wikipedia reads the following:

Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal.

As defined this includes many factors from how easily a user can get to one or another page of the site to how fluently he can read the text proposed.

Which factors are important for proper information architecture?

1) Linking. People should easily access the page they need. Besides with proper linking strategy you could make your visitors to go to pages you want and to read information you need them to read.

2) Breadcrumb links. They provide a sense of place and easily give the users an understanding of where they are in a web site.

3) Site map. It is good for both user and search engine and should be a compulsory part of information architecture.

4) URL structure. Improper URL structure can hurt your site’s rankings only indirectly but providing accessibility to the important pages and documents URLs structure plays significant role in the overall usability.

5) Text structure. Very important is how easily the user can read the page. To be more precise, not to read but to scan, as users first scan the page with their eyes and then decide is it valuable enough for them to read or not. The text should be divided into logical parts with clear structure abstract after abstract.

Site’s usability is important, but not less then SEO and a sites ability to be properly indexed. So a balance needs to be found, where SEO and UI can be brought together. Users and spiders should be able to coexisist peacefully.