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Kim’s long background in web design, search engine optimization and usability includes software application functional and user interface testing, accessibility, and persuasive design. She brings to Internet Marketing Ninjas her expertise and passion for Human Factors and Usability and how it blends with Search Engine Optimization.
Kim started out in web design in 1995 and is known as an early pioneer in search engine optimization and usability web design.
Her website, Cre8pc.com, was launched in 1996 and became a popular resource for learning search engine optimization. Two years later, she launched the Cre8pc Web Site Club, which was upgraded and re-launched as Cre8asiteforums in 1998.
Six hours after being laid off from a famous web development company, Kim was sub-contracted to work on a global online application. From that day in 2002, she was a consultant. In the years to follow, Kim has been a speaker for SES Conferences, SMX, and Pubcon. Her articles and columns have been placed in nearly every industry publication, most notably, Search Engine Land, Web Site Magazine, and Search Marketing Standard.
Kim is the tutor for the Web Site Usability course at Search Engine College, and member of several societies and institutes for usability, human factors and information architecture. Her curiosity is never ending. She’s an avid reader of sci-fi, sciences, history, culture, social issues and religious teachings. Kim is married, has two kids in college and one in high school, two dogs and two cats. She has fond memories of being a hippie and band groupie and loves to tell tall tales of the days of rock and roll.
Speaker: Kim Krause Berg • Location: Salon C
I can't tell you how impressed I am with the subtlety and attention to your craft. You've exceeded my highest expectations for what a professional can do.
Rand Fishkin, SEOMoz.org
Your ability to channel the user and get into their heads is scary (in the really good way of course)
Ben Pfeiffer, RankSmart.com
Kim is a real dynamo and the Forums she owns have a special position in the minds of all who participate in them.
Barry Welford, SMM Internet Marketing Consultants
Kim has been interviewed by Jim Hedger, Eric Enge, Ruud Hein, Aaron Wall, Liana Evans, Barry Schwartz, Wildfire Marketing and more.
In person, we judge people by what they look like. Online, we decide what we think about someone by what they write. Both can be deceiving. Last week I wrote that I don’t think social communities are really “social” and nobody disagreed with me. I’m sure many readers do but for whatever reasons did not leave comments. Maybe they didn’t want to use the comment form. Maybe they are lurkers….
In the old days we didn’t call it “social communities”. We didn’t use our real names either. This is how I know men like to refer to themselves as “Stallion”. When I first cranked up my 9600 baud modem wired to the kitchen phone line, I chatted it up on AOL groups as “Dancing Thunder”. No matter how many mistakes I made or how newbie I sounded, I wasn’t about…
Your web site design presents two options after marketing it. Invite, browse, and leave. Or, invite and guide to revenue oriented tasks. Most web sites do the first one. The investment goes into promoting, not the user experience. Commonly Heard Feedback Selling user experience and usability services such as audits and user testing is the equivalent of making kids eat their vegetables. You tell them they are good for you…
If user experience is important to a company’s online sales, why do they continue to not invest in it? When did human-computer experience stop being an asset in product and services design? According to a recent study by Econsultancy, called User Experience Survey Report, “Almost three-quarters (74%) of businesses believe that the user experience is important for improving sales and conversions”. Believing is not the same thing as doing. The…
What happens when you’re contacted to remove a link from your web site because it has cooties according to Google? It happened to me last week. I suspected the person from the SEO Company who contacted was fairly new to search engine marketing. I could have let the email go and trashed it. But lately it seems as though shady SEO practices are escalating again and I can’t bear to…
The buzz from SXSW regarding updates from Google’s algorithms created a stir among SEO’s but barely a stir from the usability industry. Now, more than ever before, reputation counts. You can have the best keyword rank possible, or purchase the top spot in search results, and yet what happens after the click into a web page remains the deciding factor on whether the time and investment to get there were…
The recent news out of SXSW is that Google wants to “protect” searchers from clicking on sites from “low quality experience merchants”. How they’ll do that is up for speculation. Danny Sullivan reported from a panel he moderated at the Austin conference, called “How to Rank Better in Google & Bing”. Matt Cutts, Google’s mouth-piece to the search marketing industry, took a question from an online merchant complaining that bad…
For Marketers: Explaining the Importance of Usability to Site Owners – Part Four The way to capture the attention of someone browsing on the web is not by hitting the exact keyword phrase. Even search engines know this and offer variations of search phrases to help direct us to the best results. And that’s when all the nice and friendly assistance stops. After you click into a promising web page…
Every web site should have a plan. Even something as simple as making your own personal blog means figuring out what it is for and how it should look. Free and fee-based templates likely don’t do everything you want so they need to be adapted to fit. Planning a web site is much harder than it may seem. Not only that, the more expertise you have on hand, the more…
For Marketers: Explaining the Importance of Usability to Site Owners – Part Three Online marketing companies typically don’t offer web site usability testing for their clients because how we use web sites isn’t a priority for marketing. Search engine rank is. To their credit, some search engine marketing companies got the message from Google and Bing that user experience signals reach them. What you do online is of serious interest…
For Marketers: Explaining the Importance of Usability to Site Owners – Part Two Last week I launched this series on selling usability to site owners by offering some of my favorite eye opening pitches to prospective clients. Visual proof is always easy to do. But, it’s not enough. When a prospective client approaches a search engine marketing company for marketing help, most, if not all, of the proposed strategy is…
