Looking for the keywords used to search lead to a better knowledge of the prospective visitor. That helps understand its personality and build a persona out of it… Do you follow me?

Enter persuasion architecture (PA) which look for a visitor to act according to a pre-planned scenario, a path of sucessives call-to-action and interactions to engage him into a dialogue.

Take 5 minutes to evaluate yourself: Take the Keirsey Temperament Sorter II

Who is the inner self?

Tonight, I have been playing with RSS aggregator scripts.

Namely two: rss2html and feedwordpress. In less then a few minutes, my blog was full of news snippets…

Very interesting in essence but it is not because the technology to aggregate in order to propagate exists that it must be used.

Aldo so much power is always very impressive.
Finally, I deleted all the feeds and desactivated the scripts.

At site redesign, the question does arise for the content provider of an already exisiting site?

A simple answer would be : “Fresh content is good, especially when it is good content”. But Old Content is part of your history in SE index; it acts as some sort of foundation. Build on it. Add some new on top of the old. Augment!
In conclusion, keeping the old content in place and adding new one on a regular basis would leverage legacy and freshness with both your visitors and the search engines.

According to a recent Shop.org study, the average conversion rate is declining in major retail sites since 2002.

IF with

• recent site redesigns,
• better ecommerce technology,
• almost real-time web analytics and
• broadband access now common for most users,

the capacity to convert is not gaining traction.

THEN it is NOT a question of technology.

Engage early each of your site visitors with a relational initiative to gain mind share and possibly a conversion or risk loosing him to the category killer whom cannot be beaten on price.

SEO fever is gaining online versions of newpapers and magazines eager to get their daily trafic. Without a constant stream of visitors both new and returning, subscriptions and advertisers may go elsewhere.

Read the New York Times article.

Analysis of a user session at a search engine suggest that is short in time and very superficial in its depth.

Usually, most web searches are initiated with up to three keywords. No more than three queries are performed by one user during the same search session. During those queries, only one term is modified either by remplacement, substraction or addtion

Only the two first results pages (at 10 sites per page) are viewed by web users with the most clicked hyperlinks being located in the top five results of the first results page.

Today search behavior analysis shows 3 growing trends:

• shorter session time (fewer minutes spent searching),
• minimal query modification (by one term within same search session)
• surface skimming in regard to consultation of search results (fewer results pages viewed).

This decrease in interactivity signifies that web visibility is narrowing. Increased efforts will be needed as the limited number of top positions are under greater stress from competition with fewer web users willing to venture past the first page of results.

In editorial copy.
The fundamental building blocks of information are words. Alone, they encode meaning and weaved together, they transmit ideas. But all words are not made equal.

Stop Words (of, as, by, …) are extremely common words that are automatically excluded by the search engine during a query unless otherwise included by using boolean operators.

Keywords, on the contrary, count more toward comprehension in communication. As they are relatively in smaller number than others words, keywords concentrate concepts and henceforth, carry traffic.
Search engines are looking for them in editorial content, anchor links and titles to aggregate websites into tighly focused categories.

In search results
After being visited by the search engines and based on context retrieved from its editorial content, a website is assigned a relevancy value given in comparaison to already known websites on the same topic.
This perceived pertinence translates into a rank in the search engines database.

Note: Modifiers as verbs, adjectives, numbers, etc. tend to deteriorate the quality of search results by adding too much variables in the query. Instead, aggregating more than 2 keywords together and using Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT, +, -, …) results in better targeted searches.