The news around town is that Yahoo! is failing. With the growth of Google, the resources the company had once it went public, it’s not totally surprising – that growth had to come from somewhere. But even considering that, Yahoo!’s marketing efforts have been markedly poor from the start. They failed to differentiate themselves from Google, as Google continued to become more and more dominant in the market. Years in the making, and Yahoo! didn’t seem to take on the task of becoming a real competitor to Google. They still aren’t. As an internet marketer, I consider Yahoo! a place to go to advertise once it looks like you’ve maxed out your exposure on Google. They are a source of a little extra traffic that can come at a reasonable cost because they aren’t overrun by spam and because they have a pay per click advertising system that works relatively smoothly. If their market share continues to drop, it won’t be worth it to advertise with them any longer. Yahoo! ought to be concerned about being displaced by MSN or some other search engine as Google’s primary competitor. Read More

Thanks to Jon Battelle for getting me thinking about this again. Jon argues that Google has “no reason” to buy a Yellow Pages company. Actually there is a very good reason for Google to purchase a Yellow Page company: visitors coming through Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) sources have different behavioral characteristics and expectations than visitors from AdWords visitors. Read More

Today was looking like a good day. I had a few fun projects on my docket and the weather in Michigan was breaking records for January, 61 degrees! But my day was going to get even better very soon.

Arriving at the downtown Ann Arbor offices of Pure Visibility, a little sleepy eyed and still nursing my first cup of coffee, I sat down, booted up my mac and went to my iGoogle home page. Looking at my rss feeds I spotted Barack Obama’s name in the Web Creme feed. How odd I thought. I’d been to his site before and found it to be functional at best with well coded CSS and SEO. Overall I thought it was nice but nothing extraordinary. When I saw the feed, curiosity made me click and what a surprise! Barack Obama’s redesign (www.barackobama.com) took my breath away! Excellent composition, a beautiful palette, and calls to action made the designer in me excited. I have built plenty of sites in my years and this one really hit home. Here are some of the highlights.

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Shari Thurow’s recent article on Usability is a pretty good overview of usability concepts, but at the end she makes an either/or distinction between sites that are usable and sites that are findable. She states:

Nevertheless, usability and HCI professionals need to face reality: people search. People use the commercial web search engines for research, shopping, browsing, and entertainment. Just as SEO professionals should not ignore other types of search behavior, usability professionals should not ignore querying behavior.

I’m not sure what reality HCI folks need to face. As long as you adhere to certain coding fundamentals to your site’s technical design, any strategy that makes a site more usable should also improve its inherent organic findability. At the end of the day, Google’s primary goal–the goal of all search engines, really–is to create relevant, valuable results. Google outlines what they consider relevant in no uncertain terms; it is almost the same now as it was over a year ago. A usable site is generally well organized, clear, and uses text to guide users. Search engines LOVE sites like that. Usability spawns SEO, not just the other way around.

This isn’t to say that usability is an easy task…
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