Monday February 2nd Roundup

Quite a week for me in the blog world. Three articles talking about major points of interest for me, including Huo Mah on what marketing can teach SEO, Nettuts on web optimization, talk about how users dont read, and a call for persuasive design. Good stuff.

• Yes, once again leading our SEO section is an article from Huo Mah, this time guest written by Ben McKay. Just when I thought maybe I would have a week where I didn’t use Huo Mah, out they come with an article about one of my favorite rant topics: Why do SEOs forget about REAL marketing? In his post he discusses how SEO’s can use market penetration, market development, product development, and diversification to lead a link attraction campaign.While you’re at it go read Bens blog post on the subject, as it goes into more detail on the “7 P’s”.
• Another old hat on our Monday roundup, ClickEquations discusses match type organization. They encourage the buying of the same keyword more than once, with different match types, and explores how one can make the same keyword appear more than once in the same ad group. I can see this ending up like the Olympic committee in Vancouver, who bought all of the add space for 2010…
• Our last SEO link is about virtual theming, a type of internal linking. Very much a how to, and a neat idea, so check it out.

• Nettuts last week discussed a favorite topic of the round-up:what You Need to Know About jQuery 1.3. In the post they go over some of the nice new features of 1.3, including the ‘sizzle’ CSS selector engine, and the new API browser.
• Our second dev link of the week is also Nettuts, this time on code optimization. Yes, its a list, sorry about that. However it really lists some great stuff, including some graphic optimization no-how that I, despite being rather proud of my web graphic no-how, did not know. This ones actually going into my bookmark folder, something I dont do too often.

• This week I ran acrossMyCustomer.com, which had a nice article on online behavior and analytics. My only gripe would be their call for increased user identification, which I am never comfortable with. Over all though, a really idea heavy piece with some nice advice for people planning new analytics campaigns.
• Not quite SEO, not quite analytics, Zeta interactive last week hit on another big point of mine, that Google loves to read and users don’t. We write copy specifically for search engines, copy that most users are not going to look at. In their example this lead to a decrease in conversions, though it increased traffic. Fantastic food for thought.

• UXMatters last week wrote about the post-usability web. What a concept, though I’m not sure we will arrive there. Their premise is pretty good, that we need to start designing for persuasion, emotion, and trust (P.E.T., get it? Me neither.) instead of just for usability (usability should just be common sense at this point). I like their idea, though I am not sure of the novelty of it. I’ve seen this happening a lot on major websites (Apple is a nice example), and we our selves do similar work with analytics and website optimization. Still, I think their PET acronym is a great tool for organizing thought.
• Erova last week hit on a topic I hear about a lot (and have dealt with briefly before): anti-patterns. For those of you who haven’t heard this term, it comes from Bill Scott, and is a design mannerism that seems to help but actually causes more problems. People who have any communication and/or linguistic background may notice that the word ‘anti-pattern’ is an anti-pattern. All kidding aside, I still am not sure I fully buy some of these. I’ve stated before that I believe that ‘click here’ has function within certain circumstances, and is better than improper grammar designed so that you can implement a sensible hyperlink. That said, a lot of these are very true, and their final advice—that the solution to these is to understand the purpose of each component and design for that—is right on.The lesson to be learned is basically “don’t be Phillip Stark“.

• It also looks like Google is playing with moving to Ajax. I’ve tried this and I’m still getting the old html based query. I wonder how this will affect my SEO tools?