I’ve been working with Jo at Track Surveys lately helping them with what I’m starting to call user-centred SEO (but then I do seem to think up crazy names for things).

By user-centred SEO I mean that optimising pages and link-building is all well and good but it’s dull work. A much more exciting approach is to get inside your customers’ heads and create content that matches their mental models. So Jo and I have been creating Personas, Mental Models and looking at log files to inform our Content Plan.

This approach takes time, effort and considerable skill (on the part of my clients), it’s often a completely new take on marketing for my clients, but it really does work from a Long Tail perspective (which can at times be quite difficult to properly measure).

The main point, I think is, that SEO is much more effective when there’s a whole heap of usability-related thinking thrown in.

Jo’s blog (Track 360 Degree Feedback Surveys) was my first trail with the Blueprint CSS framework in Wordpress. It’s a Beta blog and was intended to just be a first base design whilst Jo gets into the swing of blogging. I was amazed at how Blueprint makes it easy to overshadow CSS stuff, almost like CSS object orientation done right.

I have started using Blueprint on all sorts of sites, slowly adding the necessary divs to templates so that I can standardize on one CSS way to do things.