Usability Testing for SEO

Posted on | February 20, 2008 |

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I keep trying to like SecondLife. If you’re not familiar with it, go and check it out over at secondlife.com. A lot of marketers were touting this as the next big thing but I was never convinced. Corporate was getting involved, buying up property, hosting concerts, discussions. In any event, I tried it out again last night and again, couldn’t get into it. Maybe it was the time it took to do anything. Maybe I didn’t really know what to do. So I’m not really thinking that this would be my Second Life.

It did get me thinking about my other second life….the one online. I keep forgetting that I have this whole different set of friends and colleagues, all online. Many I have never seen (except on video), many I have never met. I talk about these people to my “first life” friends and they have no idea, even supposedly famous ones. Am I hanging around the wrong crowd?

Actually I think I’m hanging around the right crowd. These are folks I can tap into when framing out a potential online marketing plan. Many of these are our target audience, the regular Joe’s and Jane’s who I want to get my client’s product in front of. These are the occassional user. Those who do emails, spend some time on YouTube, don’t really have favorite blogs, most importantly they do a lot of searching (mostly Google BTW). I use them and abuse them (they don’t mind, it’s not that cruel) especially when planning a website design but also part of planning for keyword strategy. You can get keyword data from a variety of sources, I think including a small group of everyday users should be part of your strategy.