Recent Updates:
AdSense Revenue Up 3.5%, Just by Adding Links to Updated Articles

Consumerism Commentary is a long-running and well-reputed blog largely about personal finance. I’ve been analyzing their traffic and making recommendations, and at the beginning of September 2009, I suggested adding more links from outdated articles to their updated counterparts.

For example, this article about a $100 bonus for opening a Chase checking account was from January 2008, but was still attracting many visits. From June 2009 through August 2009, it was 3.3% of the landing pages, which is pretty high for an outdated article from a year and a half ago. Not surprisingly, the bounce rate was around 50%.

What if People are Misspelling Your Keywords?

While reviewing the keywords that bring people to the Coverville Web site, I noticed two entries for the name of the host: Brian Ibbott. Unfortunately, the misspelling of his name—Brian Ibbot, with one t—was more popular in September 2009 than the correct spelling.

ibbot-or-ibbott

My knee-jerk reaction was to think, “Uh oh. People are misspelling his name. Are we accounting for that? Should we put the more popular misspelling in the meta keywords? Are people finding the wrong Brian Ibbott?”

Google Webmaster Q&A: How can I optimize my SEO on a small budget?

Scouring through the Google Webmaster Help channel on YouTube, and I found some good advice on how to improve the SEO in an overwhelmed market, for example, real estate.

Nokia Accessories

Situation
The detailed information for mobile phone accessories appeared as a sort of “data dump”. The information was all there, but it wasn’t being structured in a useful manner. We ran several groups of usability tests with potential customers and found specific issues with the navigation:

Payment Request Action Screen (Wireframe)

A payment processing system, which had been mostly command-line for many years was being re-engineered to make use of a GUI. After analyzing dozens of use cases, I created wire frames to illustrate each unique situation.

The Psychology of Completing a Visit

When you ask the right questions, and then compare answers from seemingly unrelated questions, you can learn some very interesting things. While it’s common sense that people will be unsatisfied with a site that operates slowly, I was surprised to learn that people who completed their visit actually viewed the site as responding faster than [...]