Journal: News & Comment

More about search, articles, and usefulness

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Not long ago I wrote about why the best way to bring search traffic to your website is simply to build a good site in the first place. That was a followup to my earlier article on what a website is for (summary: the people who visit it).

Web usability guy Jakob Nielsen reinforces the point from another direction today, by writing that one of the best ways to sell a product online (if that's what you do) is to write useful articles about it. Just don't forget to tell people that you sell it too, and to cross-reference to and from any other appropriate places your visitors might look for information.

Here's something even neater. Dean Eckles at Stanford University suggests that:

Since Google is so incredibly popular [...] the system that Google has chosen, or that is Google, has influenced many decisions about how to use language on the web [while] global language use online—and Google's choices about what to draw from that use—can affect how we use language in the rest of our lives...

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