In 2007, the Washington Post published an article about an experiment to see what would happen when world-renowned violinist, Joshua Bell, would play in the Washington DC metro system. Would people stop and listen? How much money would he make? Bell failed miserably. In 45 minutes, he made a pittance of $32 and few passers-by [...]
CRO Inspiration: Wright on Designing Buildings
This is a quote, widely known in the UX community, from Frank Lloyd Wright, the American architect. I will not pretend to know a lot about him, so will cite Wikipedia, which describes him as follows: Wright believed in designing structures which were in harmony with humanity and its environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture. Source: [...]
CRO Inspiration: Cooper on Designing for Likeability
Alan Cooper describes software design as being analogous with human interactions. The same could be said about websites when thinking about usability for conversion optimization purposes. The quote comes from Cooper’s book, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. Follow Alan Cooper on [...]
CRO Inspiration: The Eisenbergs on Persuasion
In their book, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?, the Eisenbergs lay down the foundation of their system, called Persuasion Architecture. This quote comes from Chapter 8: Maintaining Persuasive Momentum. Update: After I posted this, the Eisenbergs kindly retweeted this! Persuasion occurs when people perceive they are on their way to getting what they want [...]
CRO Inspiration: Ken Roman on Bad Writing
In his book, Writing that Works, Ken Roman makes a case for keeping writing simple. The same applies to web content writing. I finally realized what it is that I want to write about on my website: inspirational quotes that relate to conversion optimization. This is the first post, in what I hope to make [...]
Conversion Optimization vs Website Design
Stop redesigning your website. Stop making wholesale site-wide changes before you know what the effects of those changes will be. Stop leaving business decisions in the hands of designers, no matter how talented they may be. Instead, tweak your website. It will save you money, time, and you’ll actually learn something about your visitors. Here [...]
8 Meaningless SEO pitches
As most SEO’s do, you probably stumble across a ton of website professing to do SEO with some interesting arguments to back up why they are the ones to go with. Some of what I find may sell well, but only to those client unfortunate enough to not consider some of what really goes into [...]
How to be an SEO noob
At my company, we have interviewed quite a few candidates to become part of our SEO team and, in the past, a few professed to be “senior guys” with “years of experience” under their belts. But what some of them said in those interviews and what they showed us in their “SEO portfolio” made them [...]
10 Ways to Piss of an SEO
These are various ways in which your average web designer/developer can cause havoc to the mental health of your average SEO. Here it goes, in no particular order: Forget to place a robots.txt file on the dev server. It’s great that Google is already picking up pages and that our dev server is ranking for [...]
Public Enemy likes Linkscape
This is me and a member of Public Enemy at Big Apple Con this weekend. I happened to be wearing an SEOMoz Linkscape t-shirt that day. I am 90% sure it’s James Bomb in this photo, as answers to my question on Yahoo! seem to point to.
I’m Alhan
I've been an inbound marketer since 2008. This is where I share ideas on conversion optimization.