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I have been saying this for years: Amazon can get away with certain usability techniques that do not work well for smaller e-commerce sites. Jakob Nielsen agrees in his article “Amazon No Longer the Role Model for E-Commerce.

One of the things that Amazon has that smaller sites do not is they have a trust built with the general populace. In terms of the Internet, it is an old, trusted brand name.

I remember I was talking to an e-commerce site about the fact that they force people to log in to see the contents of their shopping cart. When I asked why they did this, they replied “Because Amazon does it.” In fact, they refused to do any usability testing to see if this could be why their conversion rates were so low. Because ‘Amazon did it’ they saw no reason to do their own tests to see what was best for their site.Because people know Amazon, they do not fear putting in an email address or other personal information to “get something” such as see the contents of their cart.

The thing is, usability testing doesn’t have to be a pain in the rear or time consuming. Sometimes, all it takes is making a change on the web site and watching the metrics numbers for a week or two. Or, with wireless coffee shops in many cities, it is easy to buy someone a cup of coffee to watch them use your web site.

This is a very interesting thread about placement of images and adsense ads.

The concept is simple: place adsense ads directly underneath images, as though the image were part of the ad. People claim clickthroughs as high as 50%. Give it a shot and see if it works for you.

There is a post at SearchEngineWatch.com titled Visitor Numbers Impact Algorithm, SERPs. Basically, there is a theory that google takes into consideration the number of visitors to a site and how long they stay as part of their ranking algorithm.

I’ve had this theory for years. But why I had the theory had nothing to do with a white paper, it had to do with a photograph that was taken during a tour of the Googleplex. (I’m digging for this photograph, all of the description comes from memory.) (more…)

Good landing pages don’t just happen. A lot of times, I find it does take a lot of work to make a really good one, and even more often, I find that it takes time, testing and tweaking to make a great one.

A landing page is a page, for those of you who don’t know, is a page you create for a certain campaign, such as an adwords buy or a newsletter. It is a page where you want a visitor to actually do one particular thing. (more…)

I witnessed the most beautiful thing today. A huge group of people around the world worked together to help someone they barely knew.

Ian Turner, a member of the search engine marketing community was missing for 4 days after attending the WebmasterWorld search conference held in New Orleans. After one huge post on Threadwatch.org people began banding together to try to help Ian’s wife Ali — who lives in the UK — to find her missing husband.

Posts of Ian’s description went up on many different bulletin boards including SearchEngineWatch.com, Google’s blog, Yahoo’s blog, WebmasterWorld, and numerous blogs and different sites all over the internet. Chat rooms were alive with theories, and people all wondered what they could do to help. Many used their contacts with media companies to run the story on different local news stations. People in New Orleans who barely knew Ian called hospitals and hotels asking people to post his picture. Even a Pay per click campaign was started on Google and Overture on the keyterm “Ian Turner” to help authorities quickly find the gathered information. And, in one day nearly $7,000 was raised to hire a private investigator to look into the matter.

When the word went out Ian was found, alive and well in Atlanta online chat rooms and bulletin boards were on fire spreading the happy news. It was one huge sigh of relief.

I have never in my life seen such a beautiful act of kindness. It was a world wide collaberation. Ian, you are one fortunate man.