As the director of an online lead generation company, I’m well aware of how many hours one can spend on the internet every day.

Much of my online time is spent on these two basic tasks :

• Things that will deliver more leads for our clients.
• Things that will generate more clients.

I do, however, spend some time reading blogs, websites, checking on the football scores, downloading software that I’ll never actually use and obscure music that I’ll never actually listen to.

I expect most of us are like that to a greater or lesser extent.

However, in the time I spend reading blogs, etc. I’ve come across what I consider to be a slightly strange phenomenon. That is: ‘the expert’.

The expert is someone (usually an online marketer, an SEO or one of those types) who, no matter where you find yourself on the web, always has a presence there.

All the major internet marketing forums : check - there he is.

Facebook - yup, he’s there. MySpace - he’s there.

LinkedIn - yup.

Twitter - all over it with important messages about riding his bicycle to the office and how, like, really cool it is to be able to mini-blog.

Blog ? Did someone say blog? This particular type of expert has several : his personal blog, his corporate blog, his blog for his dog and maybe a couple more.

In between all this, our expert is Digg-ing stuff on Digg, adding bookmarks to his del.icio.us page and generally making a nuisance of himself on some social networking website you and I have never heard of.

My point is this : if these individuals (if you want names, I’ll supply them) are such major players in the internet marketing space, then surely, honestly, they can’t possibly have the time to be so active at all the social networking and media sites ?

My increasing suspicion is that many of these types are..shock, um, horror…not really the experts they claim to be. If they were, they’d be far too busy to be posting on Twitter, sending MySpace bulletins, adding del.icio.us bookmarks, commenting on Digg, etc…ad nauseam.

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Sometimes, I’m annoyed by the simplest things. Like using the on-site search at a particular website and not finding a product I know they have. That irritates me beyond all reason.

So, typing ‘fruited tea cakes’ into Tesco.com’s own search engine and getting results for tea bags has inspired this blog post.

You see, I know Tesco sells tea cakes with bits of fruit in them. I buy them often. What I didn’t expect was that I would have to match the exact spelling Tesco themselves use (which turns out to be ‘fruit teacakes’) in order to find the product. Surely, they have a web team that looks at how people use their on-site search engine and adapt it accordingly? No? I guess not.

Poorly designed on-site search engines have been a bugbear of mine for years. It is up to the website themselves to understand the language real people might use to search for their products. That way, if I search for ‘fruited tea cakes’ and get no results, I’m not going to go to one of their competitors for my teacake related needs.

Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg over at GrokDotCom have long suggested that, if you can’t get your on-site search to function in accordance with the needs of your visitors, you would be better off scrapping it altogether. I can see their point, but done right, it is a useful tool for visitors.

However, website owners must be able to get access to a list of the queries users are typing in and must be able to adapt the results to shown to take into account the language their visitors actually use. Otherwise, frankly, what’s the point?

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The last twelve months seem to have been the time that so-called ‘usability experts’ have risen like the mythical Kraken to tell us lesser mortals how to make our websites, um, usable.

Part evangelists, part snake oil salesmen; these so-called ‘expert consultants’ preach the gospel according to Nielsen until they are blue in the face and yet…..well, they have no product. No real value to add to your business.

Nevertheless, it seems that every third person I meet these days claims to be a ‘web usability expert’ of some kind.

Let me be very clear. I’m not saying that ‘usability’ is not an important factor in web design and in converting visitors into leads. It is.

But it’s such a simple thing. There really isn’t that much to understand. If you’re visitor knows where (s)he is on your website, recognises what is a link and understands what to do or to click to find the information he or she is looking for; then that’s it. That’s usability.

It doesn’t take an overpaid ‘consultant’ to tell you that if you make your links blue and underlined, then your visitors will recognise them as a link, does it?

It doesn’t require outside expertise to tell you that if you want to make your website better, watch a few people using it and then make changes to make it easier to use.

The whole notion of ‘web usability consultants’ angers me. Probably more than it should, admittedly, but then again I’ve never claimed to be Mr Calm and Considered.

Part of the problem is that many usability ‘gurus’ are evangelicals, whose interest is not so much in the conversion process of the website but in advancing an agenda that would keep all websites looking like they were designed (badly) in 1996.

Personal opinion and subjectivity of this kind has no place in 21st online business processes.

As I’ve already stated, usability in it’s most worthwhile form is so simple, there is no need for any so-called consultants to assist with it. Furthermore, despite what usability evangelicals might tell, it is - to use So-Cal teen speak - not all that.

If it was, MySpace.com would never have been successful and no one would ever wear a thong.

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