Comments on: SEO is not about the engines, it’s about the people using the engines

By: elena

elena — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:13:57 +0000

Thank you for a refreshing post. In the end of the day, websites – and the web – are created BY people FOR people.

One of my favourite books on user-experience is “Don’t make me think: common sense appraoch to web usability’ by Steve Krug. This book and your post connect somehow.

By: Frank O'Leary

Frank O'Leary — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 04:00:02 +0000

I learned more about SEO, accidentally, from Clayton Makepeace and his colleagues, than I have from the alleged gurus.

That’s why my New Year’s resolution is to unsubscribe from all the e-newsletter subscriptions I’d signed up for. They waste far too much of my time, and most just try to pitch me something. So I’ll be scrapping about fifteen newsletters. (My InBox will thank me!)

There’s one exception. I will NOT give up my subscription to Clayton Makepeace’s The Total Package. It’s invaluable — the one internet sales and marketing newsletter I actually look forward to receiving, and read as soon as it arrives.

My New Year’s gift / tip to the readers of this blog is to follow suit … scrap the junk you’re not reading anyway, and check out Makepeace’s Total Package.

It’s always well written, with meat-and-potatoes content – no fluff. I always learn something I can use … or at the very least, something very interesting. And there are about 600 back-issues / articles archived at the site, all freely accessible and searchable.

http://www.makepeacetotalpackage.com/bonus/holiday-referral-signup.html

Print out all the content on his site and you’re looking at close to 3,000 pages. If you had to buy it all, you couldn’t afford it. But Makepeace gives it all away, for nothing. The man is crazy. (Like a fox.)

Besides Makepeace himself, the site features the occasional contributions of several (24, in fact) other experts. They bring fresh perspectives and experiences to the wealth of information Clayton provides personally.

There’s a Canadian connection, too, in that 3 of Clayton’s contributing columnists — Daniel Levis, Troy White and Michel Fortin — operate from north of the 49th … Alberta, Ontario and Quebec, respectively.

WELL worth your time. Take 10, visit makepeacetotalpackage.com , and test a trial subscription. It’ll make your 2009.

By: David Leonhardt

David Leonhardt — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:57:46 +0000

Agree. Agree. Agree. Tamera, you will love my new eBook that I’m almost ready to release. I expect that even more than before, SEO of the future will be about the users. Even more…

By: tamera

tamera — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:47:37 +0000

@Marc – So true. The content is the driver, the architecture by necessity supports it. Work at what matters and the rest should flow vs. trying to take ‘the easy way out’ which is never easy in the long run.

@Jack – No arguments from me re: having to tweak for it! My main point is to put the user experience first and do all you can to make *that* experience relevant and valuable. If you need to work-around a few things to adjust to the imperfect algos, then do so, but don’t sacrifice what is driving people to your site to begin with – your product/ content.

By: marc meyer

marc meyer — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:42:46 +0000

Tamera, the funny thing is, it’s always been about content from day one, problem is, people have tried to game the algo. I always say, if people would just do it right and work hard, instead of working hard to game it-they’d be better off.

By: Jack Leblond

Jack Leblond — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:36:35 +0000

I (mostly) agree. Sites should be built with the reader in mind, in an ideal world that would be enough. However, until the algo is able to accurately replicate the human brain we’ll have to tweak for it as well.