Julie Brown

Bad Usability On My Site!

I'm aware of the fact that my site contains some really horrific usability.

Typepad is a wonderful blogging tool for html-challenged people (such as myself, or rather, html-hating people since most everyone reading this knows I know it but refuses to write with it), but I'm not very keen on the dependency of the BACK button on my own site. This is poorly designed UI.

If you go to one of my photo albums or my resume, it's technically another blog. The only way you can get back to where you initially came from is to click on the back button on your browser. Worse still, if you click all my pictures for say, the trip to France, you have to keep clicking the back button for however many pictures there are until you get to the original page. Who designed this template???!

I've repeatedly asked Typepad to fix this problem with breadcrumb trails or an easy way to create a global nav, but alas, it's in the "works" which probably means 2010.

I'm attempting to figure out how I can slightly alter the ugly templates TypePad gives you with some of my own design/UI considering I'm in the business, but let's put it this way: if I can barely find the time to update this when all I have to do is type into a little box and click "save," I'm in big trouble if I need to upload files and write in html.

Online Editorial

Online Editorial.

Content strategy, online writing, online editing, online editorial strategy, editorial management, editorial director, Editor in Chief.

It's fun to post blogs like this, but I promise it's only temporary. I lost my SEO rank because I ignored my site while moving from San Francisco to NYC. It's only been a month, but the Google spider is not very forgiving. I also stopped my ongoing search to link to other people (critical), and stopped posting on Craigslist every day for all the items I was selling during my move. Believe me, a link from Craigslist will halp anyone's strategy--but Craig wouldn't be too appreciative of that. We actually had an affiliate at StubHub, who shall remain nameless, who posted links to his site every day on CL for selling tickets. Great move for his linking strategy, but rather unfair to Craig.

At Quinstreet, a company I'm convinced is the mother of all spam tactics, we built base pages and an overall outline based on keyword terms, got spidered, and then flushed out the pages with real copywriting. I'll admit I was part of that--it's all editorial strategy, or online editing strategy, or the overall content strategy. ;)

To be honest, I don't believe in manipulating the googlebot. I simply believe in ranking high on terms where I provide a service. I keep seeing all these other people who claim to have seo experience, and I say, show me the money.

At QS we increased conversions by 60% for some sites with an SEO strategy. At StubHub, we were forecasted to earn at least 40million a year through SEO alone. Seo makes money if that's your goal. If your goal is page views and traffic, SEO accomplishes this as well.

And more than half of your SEO strategy is based on content, so it's important to have an intelligent content strategy before embarking on SEM.

SEO Copywriting

SEO Copywriting and the importance of keyword density.

Yep, I know I'm spamming. I'm conducting a little experiment based on some StubHub results. I want to see how fast the spider will pick up on my spamming words like:

• Seo copywriting
• Search engine optimization copy
• Seo and keyword density
• keywords and copy online for seo
• sem and copy
• keyword phrases for search engine marketing (sem)

If I can get any free time to myself this weekend (so far with the move and some contracts it's been a challenge), I'll actually flush out these spam pages and create real content.

Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing.

Editorial Strategy

Editorial strategy, content strategy, and information architecture.

Seo, SEM, PPC

Sorry I'm just actually posting to keep my site ranked decently on these terms:

• Search engine optimization
• SEO
• SEM
• PPC
• Search engine marketing

After I finally get settled in from my move I'll actually post "real" articles again.

Tricks of the trade. ;) Next I'll just link from all over Craigslist...that seems to help too.